And then I do. Of course I do.
Nothing like the 1st of January for a little sleep regression to strike like an earthquake.
She’d been going down happily at 7pm for weeks. I had come to think this was the new order of things. A life where my baby is with me all day and then she goes to bed, and there are a few hours where I can do something that makes me feel like me. Read a book. Write a scene. Flick through films and never choose one.
But not this time. Or not anymore.
I put her down at 7pm and she wakes almost immediately and then it doesn’t stop. The crying, the screaming. She will not be soothed. Nothing works. She doesn’t want rocking. She doesn’t need milk. She isn’t too hot or too cold. She rails against the white noise machine.
She just can’t do it. She can’t go back to sleep.
I see her trying. She puts her palm to her mouth and tries to suck. It upsets her. She turns her head away and yells into the night. I pick her up. I tell her it’s okay. She falls asleep on my shoulder. She goes back down. She wakes again forty minutes later and it starts all over again.
I tap out. He tries. He does the same while I put on some laundry. Organise the recycling to go out. He comes down, the baby still crying. He takes the recycling out and I go back upstairs.
We have theories. She has the tip of a new tooth. We think it could be that. Maybe it hurts to self-soothe, now that she has her tooth, and she doesn’t like it. Maybe she is teething again. Or maybe it is because she had a cough over Christmas and her nose is still a little blocked. I see her wake with a start – is she shocked that she can’t breathe through her nose like usual? She is confused. She is upset.
She can’t tell us what’s wrong. We can only guess. An explanation makes sense for a while, and then it doesn’t anymore.
We remember this - this chaotic unrest. This was the whole of month two, maybe more. It’s a blur. Come 6pm and the crying would begin. Inconsolable, for hours. Eventually, we concluded it was over-tiredness. We discovered multiple daytime naps. Wake windows. Catching the yawns early. It worked! We fixed it! She slept through the evenings. She was happier, generally.
It wasn’t just our discoveries - she figured so much out by herself. She taught herself to self-soothe, to practice and perfect. Sucking the palm of her hand and calming herself into a slumber. I watched as she did it - a brilliant, impressive thing for a person who has only been on this planet for a number of weeks.
We had come so far. I thought we were passed this.
But suddenly, it’s back. I lie next to her through the night as every forty minutes she wakes and cannot get herself back to sleep. I sing to her. I rub her chest in little circles. I pick her up and put her back down when she’s better. I put my little finger in her mouth and she sucks on that instead of her sleeve. It seems to help. She falls asleep. I take my hand away, hoping to sleep a little myself before the next time she wakes.
I can’t do this again, I think to myself. The nights of no sleep. The havoc it wreaks on my mind. The dry throat, the heavy eyes, the weight on my sense of presence. Weeks and weeks of it, when she was new, where I almost lost myself. I can’t go back. I can’t not sleep again.
I wake at seven and her face is beaming. She managed to sleep for five hours. I am so proud, so impressed. We go about our morning, her breakfast followed by some time upright and then rocking around on the playmat, so close to rolling over, but not quite. She yawns and rubs her eyes – she is tired.
I carry her upstairs and put on the white noise machine – it is time for her morning nap. The one consistent nap that has been there from the beginning, which I have been able to bank on. Just a little verse of the lullaby and then she’ll drift off…
But she doesn’t. She can’t. She cries, and she cries. I lie next to her, peering through the mesh into where she sleeps. She realises I am there and she looks for me. ‘I can’t do it, mummy,’ she seems to be saying. ‘I’m trying, but I can’t do it.’
Last night, I thought I could not either.
But we can, little one. We can.
I feel heavy for a moment. One day, when she is grown, she will not need me for this. She’ll love someone and reach over and cling to their shoulders, when she cannot sleep. It won’t be me.
But that is not now. Now it is me that she needs. I feel weak and tired and a love so great it is almost painful. What a joy and a privilege to help her sleep.
We will learn how to nap again. We’ll keep trying different things until she can fall back to sleep by herself.
You feel like you can’t do it again. But of course, of course you can.
Of course we can.
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