When Baby Sleep Becomes A Full-Time Job

And parents get to experience an entirely new flavor of frustration

I used to work with a writer named Ellie who would refer to the anguish of being unable to wrap her head around a subject other people seemed to understand as "math tears," the most apt description for that feeling I've heard to this day. Until recently, "math tears" were my least favorite emotion.

Then I started trying to "gently" "sleep train" a human baby.

Give me math tears any day.

When babies are born, their brains have no circadian rhythm. Even after that develops, they still somehow lack an understanding that in a capitalist system, the labor of most parents is expected and exploited on a particular schedule, and in the American capitalist system, employers and the government don't have to make any accommodations for parents to take the time necessary to teach their baby to live on that schedule, or offer flexibility for parents when there are bumps in the road between "confused aquatic alien who can only see vague shapes" to "tiny quasi-assimilated human." You must figure out a way to get your baby from point A (alien) to point B (assimilated) in a timely manner that allows you to get back to firing on all cylinders at work, or else. Having a kid in the US becomes a battle for primacy between a parent's career and a baby's health, and so the parent's (especially mother's) health falls off because fuck us, right?

Even with understanding bosses and a nontraditional work structure, there comes a point when getting a baby on a regular sleep schedule and eventually having them sleep through the night becomes something that isn’t about convenience, but sanity, and, in the most dramatic cases, survival. This simply cannot go on indefinitely. I can’t be awakened every 1-3 hours every night. I can be awakened every 1-3 hours some nights (I have had a cat that has been doing this off and on for the last 15 years), but not preferably not most nights, and definitely not every night. Sleep deprivation accumulates; sleep surplus does not. (There’s a reason that long-term forced sleep deprivation of prisoners falls into the category of torture and is considered a war crime).

Sorry, it's just been a rough 72 hours. Maybe longer. Time kind of smears when you’re not getting enough sleep for long periods of time.

Josh and I have become obsessed with baby sleep in the same way that the characters in Yellowjackets were obsessed with food. We wake up in the morning and we know that she should be down for her first nap between 9:45 and 10, and if she is not down by 10:30, there goes the rest of the day. When she wakes up after either 45 minutes or 90 minutes (almost always 45), we have to put her back down to sleep two hours later at the most, or there goes the rest of the day. Repeat until about 6 pm, when we give her a bath, dress her for bed, feed her, read her a book in our best approximation of baby ASMR, turn on the white noise machine, turn off the light and, then watch as our serene little dumpling turns into a shrieking hell-banshee the moment she realizes we are zipping her into a sleep sack.

We give her a few minutes to calm herself down. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, after 5-10 minutes, somebody goes back in there and tries to soothe her. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. We give her more time to self-soothe– a skill the sleep books we read told us we must help her develop by letting her cry a little. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, we make sure she’s eaten enough and doesn’t have a dirty diaper and isn't too hot or too cold and walk around with her for about ten minutes and try again.

Last night, we attempted to have two people over for dinner– a modest, reasonable goal, we thought. Juniper thought otherwise. We cycled through trying to get her down to sleep, failing, trying to soothe her, failing, picking her up, trying to feed her, and failing twice as Josh desperately raced to finish the elaborate Italian meal he was cooking. By the second attempt, the very act of carrying her across the threshold of the bedroom sent her into hysterics.

In a desperate Hail Mary, I decided to start the entire 45-minute bedtime routine over. New bath, new pajamas, new diaper, new food, new book, new gentle lullaby version of the song from I Think You Should Leave’s “Baby of the Year” sketch. It was a miracle. I could have cried from relief.

By the time our guests arrived, an hour later than they’d originally planned due to our baby drama, I was ready for bed. It was 8 pm. After dinner, I sent Josh and our guests to a local bar so they could enjoy themselves at a reasonable volume and I could wander around cleaning up dishes and listening to an old Last Podcast on the Left episode about American serial killer Gary Ridgeway on noise-canceling headphones– you know, to relax. Juniper managed to make it five hours before she woke up–a hard-fought victory.

Last night, tricking my daughter into thinking that it was a different day was what finally got her to sleep. But she’ll catch on. She always does. As I type this, she just fell asleep for day nap number two, and I’m sitting here with my ears pricked dreading the sound of her cries, feeling a little bit like how I felt during the Great Recession when I worked at Merrill Lynch and every time my boss passed within 10 feet of my desk on a Friday afternoon, I fully expected to be laid off.

It’s an anxious dread, thick and sticky. I hear her crying when she isn’t crying. Every noise sends a jolt of fear through my body– will this be the sound that wakes her? I have noticed how hard my husband walks when he’s going to the kitchen to get a snack (do all men stomp?) and how loud it is when the cat jumps onto the top of the washing machine (is she doing it on purpose??? To mess with me???). I am a little quasar of rageful unease when I hear somebody down the block using a leaf blower. Add a lack of sleep and some days– today, to be specific– feels like living inside a horror movie. (Writing it down and seeing how silly it looks actually feels cathartic, so: if you’ve made it this far, thanks!)

I’m often asked if my baby is a “good sleeper.” No, she isn’t. Most babies aren't, although people who did have babies that slept well naturally love to tell you about it. She’s not a “bad” sleeper, but she’s not a “good” sleeper, but I don’t think, at this point, that any of it can be helped beyond picking a baby sleep method we’re comfortable with and sticking to it.

Baby sleep is one of those many, many things that is largely luck of the draw. Some babies are naturally “good” sleepers, most aren’t. Nobody can take credit or blame for either– although there’s a smugness to boomer parents who claim all of their children slept through the night at like two months using little mommy hacks like feeding their children bottles of rice cereal (which can lead to adult IBS, so: great job guys, I’m sure your adult children appreciate that from the toilet) or something wildly inappropriate like a tablespoon of whisky.

One of my friends described the experience of parenting as “humbling,” and there’s nothing more humbling than being driven nearly insane by a baby who thinks that the peak of humor is blowing spit bubbles while making direct eye contact. I’ll report back when we actually try to get her to sleep through the night.

Pray for me; I'm losing my mind.

Image via Shutterstock.