United in Motherhood

I had always known I wanted children; possibly three, probably two, definitely not one only. I just wasn’t in any rush to have them. I filled my twenties with all the other standard achievements and experiences that belong to that age group; buying a house, marrying my high school sweetheart and progressing my career. We managed a bit of travel too. It was a great time in my life, with more ups than downs and I was quite content with my childless life. But then as my thirtieth birthday loomed, I could almost feel my ovaries shrivelling, and there was a sudden urgency to start a family. 

I gave birth a few months before I ticked over to the big 3-0 and breathed a sigh of relief; I had met my own fertility deadline. I fell in love with my firstborn during those hazy newborn days. He had become the centre of my universe, much like the experience of most new parents, I imagine. I was happy in a blur of nappies, cuddles and sleepless nights. The breastfeeding journey was smooth, it was one of my favourite parts of motherhood, in fact, and our son was filling out his onesies in record time. I felt good.  

As time progressed, the well-meaning support group surrounding our small family reassured me that sleep would improve after the ‘fourth trimester’; the night feeds would gradually drop and the longer stretches would allow better rest for everyone. At first, I believed them. At just twelve weeks of age, my son magically slept through the night. I was so proud, thinking this was due to something I had done. The ambient temperature? The bedding surface? The incline? He never slept that well again, until he was two and a half. Sleep got bad. Really bad. Waking every twenty minutes bad. Suddenly, all I could think about was sleep, or lack thereof. Everyone around me was asking me how I was doing it, as if I had a choice. Apart from leaving him to cry, we tried everything. After a while, I stopped reading the sleep articles and I disengaged from conversations about sleep in my mums’ group. Hearing about other babies sleeping through the night made my throat tighten and my shoulders stiffen. The people around me were sending out clear messages that my son’s sleep was not ‘normal’. Half the time I felt like a failure and the other half I felt like my child was broken when it came to sleep.

Fast forward eighteen months and we desperately sought the advice of a sleep physician. After a traumatic sleep study, connected to a tangle of wires and recorded on film in an old hospital room, a bunch of strangers analysed our son’s sleep. We were given a diagnosis of silent reflux caused by chronic constipation. Under the direction of a specialist, the treatment worked almost immediately. All of a sudden, our son was waking only two to three times a night. It might not have sounded great to any other parent of a toddler, but for me, it was life-changing. We could watch a movie uninterrupted, I could have a shower in peace, I could get some actual sleep. The options were endless. The improvement in sleep, for me, was also validating. I felt justified in not having done any drastic sleep-training. My son’s unresolved medical issues could not have been fully addressed with a behavioural approach. 

Reflecting on the experience with my firstborn, I wish I had not stressed as much as I did about what my child should have been doing. According to the textbooks. According to the mummy blogs. According to the sleep ‘experts’. According to my mother-in-law. The combination of sleep deprivation for me and worry over my son really took a toll on my mental health. I would snap at my husband and cry over little things I would have shrugged off previously. But it’s easy to think in hindsight, about how I should have responded. 

After my second son was born, I vowed that things would be different. My eldest son had only just started sleeping through the night at the time of his brother’s birth. I was determined to get some solid sleep this time around. I tried my hardest to nurture a ‘good’ sleeper and I ended up in pretty much the same situation as the first time. This time around, though, there was no diagnosis of any medical conditions and I just had to accept things as they were. At the very worst, at around twelve months of age, my second son was waking every twenty minutes at night. Just like the first.

I found myself caught up in all the same feelings of frustration, desperation and helplessness. With two kids in the mix, I couldn’t just have a nap during the day anymore, because of course my eldest son had dropped his day nap at a ridiculously young age too. The behaviours and meltdowns that come with two young children were that much harder to deal with when operating on next to no sleep. And the fact that I could never leave my youngest son to sleep on his own meant that I was neglecting myself; showers were cut short, ‘date nights’ at home stopped short, half-read books were left abandoned.

I’m pleased to report that the situation is slowly improving, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I can now appreciate some of those little things again, like calling a friend without the worry of being interrupted by a crying baby or enjoying a glass of wine in the evening with my husband. But the experience has made me decide that two children is enough for me. I love both of my sons with a fiery passion but no more. I cannot bear to think of the sleepless nights again. For whatever reason, we make non-sleepers and I have had to accept that.

I believe that every mother has her own struggles, even if we cannot see them from the outside. For some, it may be fertility issues or newborn feeding difficulties, for others it may be their physical recovery post-birth. So, I do feel extremely lucky that I was able to breastfeed both boys into toddlerhood and that both boys developed well and grew healthily, for the most part. I relish the cuddles and kisses. I beam proudly when I see my children act kindly to others or achieve a new skill they have been working towards. Becoming a mother had been relatively easy for me, and I was grateful for that, but being a mother has been the hardest job in the world. If I can gain anything from my sleep deprivation experience, it is knowing that we each have our own struggles in motherhood, however I’d like to think we can all find things we are grateful for, no matter how small they seem. And during the tough times, these thoughts can guide us safely to the other side. Our experiences are more similar than different, uniting us in motherhood.