Dear Tired Mum, there's something I have to tell you....

Dear Tired Mum,

Photo by Nathan Dumlao 

I realised recently that there was something different about my husband. Was it his eyebrows? A new fragrance? His culinary charm? And then it came to me: he wasn’t asleep on the floor anymore. 

For the last two years Zane has coped with torture-style sleep deprivation VERY well but with the unavoidable consequence of just nodding off whenever he stops moving.  This had become really normal; the kids use him as soft play when he falls asleep face down on the rug.  

I’m happy to say that our dark days of extreme exhaustion are, for the most part, over and I’m writing to you Dear Tired Mum to comfort you with the details of how we arrived at this enviable destination.

Firstly, I need you to understand how awful/terrible/torturous Ezra’s night-time sleep has been. I thought Elias (my first) was a bad sleeper.  He did the classic up five times a night thing but at about ten months, with a bit of encouragement (yes - sleep training - please don’t judge), he slept much better. 

Ezra was nocturnal for the first six weeks of his life and nothing could shift this. In desperation, I tried giving him baths every couple of hours in the day to force him to wake up but he was a baby owl. The nights were traumatic: he would cry and I would cry too and I 

watched those lonely hours between midnight and four pass by feeling like the whole world was sleeping except me.  In the early months we often had ‘five-nappy-nights’; nights where Ezra had woken, fed and been changed five times between ‘bed-time’ and ‘morning’. I distinctly remember asking the midwife if it was possible to die from tiredness.

In between moving to Vienna (when Ezra was six months) and us clawing at the door of the Baby and Child Psychiatric Unit twenty months later, Ezra went through patches where he slept more ‘normally’ but in general he was a terror. He would cry for as long as he could manage at bedtime, wake every two or three hours throughout the night and then be up for good between 4.30 and 5.15 am. 

We tried various forms of sleep training because we were desperate but he was no Elias and he didn’t respond well. He roared in his cot-cage for hours.  When we tried to comfort him, it made it worse. I spoke to a ‘sleep expert’ I found on Facebook one night who told me that going in to Ezra when he was crying was like ‘poking a lion with a stick’.  It certainly felt like violence towards a caged animal. And to little effect. He might have lulled one night and only cried for twenty minutes at bedtime but the next night he’d revert to crying for an hour or more.  

And when your kids don’t sleep well you carry two loads of exhaustion. The load that comes from existing on five or six broken hours a night and the load that comes from all the guilt. I’d argue that it’s this guilt-weight which is heaviest. I guilted myself that we were the reason Ezra was so disturbed at night.  We obviously weren’t being firm enough with our expectations and had failed to properly puppy train him (or whatever it is you’re supposed to do) and I guilted myself for not being more of a baby-wearing, child-centred mum. What was I thinking going to work full time? What sort of a monster was I?

When we eventually got through the hospital system to see the right person, the psychiatrist looked through our sleep diary (where we documented the four or five times Ezra woke each night) and acknowledged it was a problem.  That was nice. I knew it was a problem but it was really nice to have a professional say this. 

She said that sleep this bad is usually due to one or more of three things:

1. A non-existent or haphazard routine where the child doesn’t know whether they are coming or going (not us)
2. An iron deficiency
3. A child developing a negative association with sleeping in their cot

Now Ezra is just as stubborn about food as he is about sleep, so I could have guessed he was deficient in everything except peanut butter and snot.  The finger-prick test confirmed this and now he’s on a regular dose of iron supplements until he gets over himself and realises that he needs to branch out from his own nose-pickings. I’d read so many sleep guides and I’m not sure if I missed this note about iron or if it just isn’t written about.  The shop bought vitamins we were giving him didn’t cut it. Children with low iron need prescription supplements. 

Our psychiatrist felt low iron was probably a secondary-issue for Ezra.  She believed he was afraid of his cot (cue the barrage of mum guilt ). It was true that he had no problem dropping off in the buggy or sleeping at kindergarten, so this hypothesis seemed firm. Her instructions for how to break the negative associations Ezra had formed would have made Gina Ford and The Baby Whisperer wretch. She wanted us to let Ezra do whatever he wanted at night time for two weeks.  She said the ideal situation was to have him in our bed for this time and if he wanted to get up at 2am we were to let him get up. We had to keep a record and figure out what his ‘natural’ rhythm was.

Bloody hell. 

We found a way through this which worked (sort of). We decided that we would sit next to the cot until he was fully asleep every night - usually about an hour and a half.  We would pat his back and shush him and sacrifice any concept of an evening. Our ultimate aim was that we were to always be doing everything we could possibly be doing to stop Ezra crying in his cot.  And he still cried some, but after about four weeks he started sleeping through. Just like that.  

And now, two months on, he’s starting to let us say goodnight before he’s totally asleep.  He’s done this twice now. In the mornings he’s happy to ‘wait for the sun’ on his Gro clock™ as long as someone sits next to the cot holding his hand from 5.30 or whenever it is that he wakes up. For us, this is a complete lie in; we had months and months where more often than not we were up before 5.

I’m writing this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s free therapy for me to write it out (thanks for reading) but, more importantly, there were two things I really want to say to you Dear Tired Mum. 

Firstly, I had two different children - for one, sleep training was helpful and it certainly didn’t do any damage.  For the other, it was all we could do to try but it didn’t help. He needed ‘babying’ for a little longer and that was what the hospital here in Vienna actually pointed us to do.  There ISN’T one way to do this. And I don’t mean that in the way many books do where they say there are many different ways to help children sleep but what they actually mean is - you can sleep on the left or the right of your child while they occupy the centre of your bed.  No, I’m talking big, overarching philosophies of parenting and how to encourage sleep - different ways.  

Secondly, Dear Tired Mum, you are in a fog.  Tiredness is a lense which colours everything you do and feel. I don’t think I realised this when I was in the trenches of sleep deprivation. I pretty much expected myself to get on with life as normal.  And I did. I worked full time, I tried to go out (as in ‘out-out’) and we often hosted groups of friends in the evenings and at the weekends. I even felt guilty about not organising more holidays for my non-sleeping family. I was sure that this was my life forever so I had to just try to get on with it. Maybe there’s truth in this way of thinking but, at the very least, I could have been kinder to myself.  

In short Dear Tired Mum, however apt you have become at managing your sleep deprivation, the things in your life which are hard and which you are unhappy about may not be quite as hard or dark or problematic as they seem.

And, as an addition to this,  you're better looking than you think you are. I barely looked in mirrors for two years so horrified was I with the aged visage staring back at me. I’m prettier again now. Just a bit….

So go easy on yourself comrade; you’re in a fog and life is really tough when you’re tired. 

Yours faithfully,

Holly