I’m a sleep deprivation expert. I’m fully credentialed, having slept less than one hour at a time for months when my daughter was a baby. Yes, less than one hour at a time. That was when she was teething, and she seemed to be teething all of the time. Around a year and a half, she started sleeping for 1.5 to 2 hour stretches, which was bliss. Even more blissful? When those teeth all came in at two and a half, she started sleeping through the night. Lovely, lovely thing.
I would do it again. Perhaps it’s the hormones, or perhaps it’s simply that I’ve lost my mind over the past four years. I suspect it’s the latter. Anyway, I feel that I developed a good mental strategy for sleep deprivation.
It’s called acceptance.
You see, for a long time I wondered whether my daughter’s sleep was normal. I agonized over whether I should let her cry it out, and opted instead to have her bed share. I debated ways to encourage her to sleep independently. I made myself crazy in the middle of the night because I was tired and my baby would not sleep. Sometimes, when it was two am and I was making muffins in the kitchen with a baby on my back who would not sleep, I thought that I was going to lose it.
That’s where the acceptance comes in. Like mommy confidence, it takes a while to develop. It’s hard, this acceptance thing. It was so, so hard to let go of the idea that my baby should be sleeping and that I should be able to make her sleep.
I had to breathe. For me, the night waking was harder than labor. So I breathed, and I centered, and I meditated, and I sang.
Oh yes, I still got angry sometimes. However, I woke in the middle of the night, and I accepted it. I kept going. We got up and rocked, or we stayed in bed and nursed. We made muffins in the middle of the night. We sang many, many songs and waited until dawn. One of my fondest middle of the night memories is of sleeping in the back of the car with my daughter. We were on vacation with friends, and she was waking the whole cabin up, so we went outside and snuggled in the back of the car. Dawn broke over the ocean as we looked at it, and the waves were small and mostly silent. We fell asleep briefly, then awoke to the morning deer heading down to the beach.
Do you have ways to deal with sleep deprivation? What are your techniques?