The other day, I reached out to a friend I hadn't spoken to in two years. "Where have you been, Jennifer? What have you been up to?" she asked. I thought about these questions long and hard. Physically, I had been in Colorado, and I had been working on my own business, but I couldn't tell her what I'd been doing. The truth was, the last year had been total, sleep-deprived blur.
I had tried everything to get my baby, and then my toddler, to sleep through the night.
Literally everything
The crying commenced
I anxiously folded my laundry and my husband brought me a glass of wine. I cried, perhaps as much as the baby, and after 45 minutes of angry screaming there was silence.
The next night, I sat on the couch with one eye on the stairs as my husband and I talked about work. Our son angrily complained and whined for 30 minutes, then silence. The next night, 15 minutes of whining, then silence. On the fourth night, I gave him a kiss, put him in the crib, and he smiled at me before curling up with his little stuffed mouse and going straight to sleep.
It felt like a miracle
There were a few nights where he woke up at night. It was hard to stay put, but he would go back down after ten minutes, then five, then one. Now when he wakes he may call out "MA!" and when I don't come rushing in, he just puts himself back to sleep.
Problem solved. Or so I thought.
It turned out that after he'd learned to sleep through the night, I had to sleep train as well. I didn't realize how anxious I was until I lay wide-awake at night with nothing to do. It took two weeks of not picking up my phone, meditation, melatonin, and some Valerian to finally get me back to sleep—and it felt amazing.
My dreams came back, and one by one, the neurons that had been overloaded by toxic fatigue came back online. I remembered that I was once a smart, funny vivacious creature, and now I finally had enough energy to share that part of me with my son, and, to me, that's priceless.
