I'm So Tired I Feel Insane

Parental sleep deprivation will catch up to you, and when it does:

Somebody– I can’t remember who, now, for reasons that will be clear shortly– told me after I gave birth to beware “new parent fatigue” that sets in during the newborn phase. Sleep loss is cumulative, they said, and if you go without sleep for too long, it will catch up to you.

I got past the newborn phase without feeling like anything caught up to me but: Reader, it has caught up to me. I thought I’d gotten away scot-free, but five months-plus in, it’s caught up to me. I give it a 0/10 rating; would not recommend.

I am neither asleep nor am I awake. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I am forgetting things. I am retelling stories less than 24 hours apart. I am watching 20 minutes of shows I’ve already watched before I remember that I’ve seen it. I’m rereading pages. I’m using the wrong words– this morning I told my husband to eat one of the tomatoes I bought on Sunday before it got “floppy”-- I meant “overripe.” I’m trailing off mid-sentence– a bad look for a podcaster. My brain is doing that thing it does when I’m so far beyond tired that it starts playing short snippets of songs over and over again in an intrusive manner. This week it was the fanfare that plays during the Looney Tunes credits. A little on the nose, but I’m not exactly operating at full capacity.

Coffee doesn’t work anymore.

If I were a phone, I'd be at 1%.

I think a lot about how the experience of being alive is 90% lost to the limitations of language and memory (surprising considering that I haven’t touched any marijuana products in almost a year and a half). But it’s impossible to compare intense experiences that occur months or years apart, because our brains do this thing where they flatten everything in a way that makes it impossible to hold something that was up against something that is, or two things that separately were. I can’t measure, say, how much it hurt to fall down the stairs at the Broadway-Lafayette B train station in 2015 against how much it hurt to fall down and hit my head on the school ice rink in 1994. We have too many words for some things, not enough words for others, and sometime in the last 10 years, we all decided that we didn’t even have to live in a shared reality, and so there’s a sort of futility in attempting to even articulate our own experiences in a world where we can’t agree what words mean or why anything is important at all.

But I’m pretty sure this is the most tired I’ve ever been. It’s the most tired I can remember being. It’s been five months-plus of never getting more than four hours of sleep in a row and usually getting less than that, and that’s never happened to me before, so I must be more tired than I’ve ever been in my life.

At least every four hours, it’s something. It’s the baby waking up and needing something. It’s the cat jumping on the bed and needing something. It’s me having a nightmare that I’m trying to save five kittens but can only hold four of them and have to leave one kitten behind and hyperventilating as quietly as I can until I can calm back down and go to sleep. It’s the dog snoring. It’s no discernible reason at all, just waking up and lying there and waiting until I can sleep again.

I cannot be helped. My husband handles almost all of the night diaper changes, but feeding is still up to me, because nature’s design for infant nourishment is incompatible with capitalist expectations of “productivity,” and so I either wake and feed her or wake up and sit slumped over a breast pump, which takes longer than feeding her and is way more depressing. Plus, a lot of my night waking has nothing to do with the baby bothering me. Somehow I am now broken-brained.

No, she’s not sleeping through the night.

No, she’s not a “good sleeper.” She’s average, which means there’s nothing wrong with her, but we didn’t luck out like some parents. I have well-rested parent friends who have shared that their babies slept through the night at three, four, five months. Cool, love that for you.

No, we haven’t done any of the hard core sleep training methods some of my friends swear worked wonders. We don’t think she’s ready for that yet and I don’t want to get into a fight about it.

No, we’re not transitioning to formula quite yet. I want to make it to the six-month mark, 24 days from now. It’s on the calendar like a gleaming beacon of hope and I am very much looking forward to not being a human food source, but we aren’t there yet.

Maybe I’ll get a full night's sleep in 24 days.

Until then, I should not operate a bulldozer.

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