| Wakey wakey
Sleep deprivation makes you do the weirdest things. Alison Sparkes on surviving the torture of babies who don’t sleep Now look – in my defence – I was reeling from lack of sleep, had two molten melons under my chin and was still smeared in iodine from my Caesarean section. It hurt to sit up. It hurt to lie down. It hurt to feed my new baby. It hurt to be. It also hurt to put him in his cot – and he just cried all the time when I did. I’m sorry, forgive me, but the road of least resistance was the only one without cones, traffic lights and arsey BMW drivers on it. So I went down it. OK? That was three weeks after Alex was born. I knew I’d settle him into his own cot soon.… He was currently sleeping each night under my right armpit. His dad didn’t mind. Attuned only to wake when his wife joined in with the screaming, he let us both be. Newspaper articles outlining the benefits of babies sleeping with parents vindicated me. Even if he did fall out a couple of times and commune with the dust and old shoes under the bed. He never complained much. It was interesting and slightly eerie too, how I was a constant sentinel for him – even while asleep. More than once, I stirred, reached out and gathered him to me one beat before his dad slapped an arm across the bed where his son had just been. But this was really part of the problem. Being a baby sentinel doesn’t do much for your REM sleep While Alex thrived in the warm glow of his parent’s love and his mother’s armpit (his head often smelled of Right Guard), the mother in question was slowly losing her tenuous grip on sanity. It appals me to tell you that at the age of one, Alex was still sleeping with me. By now, it was in a single bed in another room, because at least one of his parents had to sleep properly, and now bigger, noisier and given to giggling in the early hours, Alex wasn’t such an easy bedmate. Every night we’d rock him off to sleep and then sneak him into his cot, trying not to breathe, putting one of my unwashed jumpers in with him, praying shakily for the sleepytime gods to smile… Within an hour or two he’d be awake and screaming. Trying to ignore him, as any mother will tell you, was like trying to watch Eastenders or eat cottage pie while a surgeon removes your innards without anaesthetic. By day I was a zombie. At work I would struggle to remember people’s names, seconds after they’d told me. I had to write everything down. Things like – ‘Alex with Nana today – pick up at 4pm. Eat food. The ringing thing is a phone. Other son called Jacob…’ I wasn’t alone During this dim hazy period, I heard of others trapped in my misty, semi-coherent hinterland. I know of two families where the mother or father – sometimes both – would literally go to bed in the same room, at the same time as their baby or toddler. This, they believed, was the only way. If mum and dad were going to bed, little Lucy would go too. If mum or dad later tried to sneak from the room to watch ER or laugh out loud, Lucy would shortly wake and vocally unleash the hounds of hell… The torment finally ended, simply, and more quickly than I can believe, when Alex was 13 or 14 months old. By now flaky, grey, tinged with madness –I finally got some sleep clinic advice from the surgery health visitor. It all seems quite obvious now, what we were doing wrong Alex was being lulled to sleep on the chest of a parent, after his big (and much more biddable) brother had gone to bed, and then placed carefully in his cot. And when he next woke up, in the dark, both parents were gone and he didn’t know where the heck he was. Understandably, he started screaming.
After a while, any association he did make with his cot was one of confusion, panic and screaming. All the pastel bunnies and Sesame Street mobiles in the world couldn’t help. Plus, with no sense of order or routine, he never knew when screamy, confused cot time was coming, or if it would ever end… What he needed was a clear-cut, calm, cosy routine and a mother who could resist the pull to his side after more than five minutes of wailing. So we did the programme Alex had bath, bottle and a story at the same time as his big brother – and then went to bed, awake, as and when his brother did. Once he started crying his daddy (no milk vending machine associations) would check on him after a few minutes, tuck him in firmly, saying very little and then go again. And the next time, after a few more minutes had elapsed, the same would occur. Throughout the night, the parent who could be the dullest (in baby terms – no milk, no cuddles, no stories – just reassurance and departure) was the only one who’d show. After three nights, Alex simply dropped off out of sheer boredom. That was two years ago, and we’ve been normal(ish) people ever since… We were lucky – some parents suffer a lot more, as Jasia Beaumont can confirm. She’s a Specialist Nurse for Children’s Sleep Disorders with the Southampton Community Trust Sleep Clinic team.
This is what you do:
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