Sometimes there is no explanation for waking up at 4 a.m. Sometimes, like today, I have woken in a panic clawing my way through a ridiculous dream wherein my husband and I are running barefoot in our backyard. There are wolves chasing us and the wolves have glowing blue eyes, not unlike the white walkers from Game of Thrones. When I woke with my heart pounding, I discovered that I was hot as hell, jammed in between my son and my husband who were sleeping peacefully on either side of me. Slowly extracting myself from in between them, I made coffee realizing that sleep will not be found and I started my day in the wee hours of the morning. Being up in the middle of the night is not new to me but that doesn't mean I like it.
When you first get pregnant, people will happily provide unsolicited advice about all sorts of things about raising a baby. When the child is born, more opinions arrive; some solicited, mostly not. Largely, opinions abound around the idea of children sleeping: what you should do, what you shouldn't do, what never to do. Then, when you are just getting to the point where you are feeling relatively comfortable that you will not accidentally kill your baby by breathing on it wrong, you discover the truth that many parents have discovered before: you have no idea what you are doing and you are so, so very tired.
That feeling doesn't go away. For me, I am only sure about a few things with regard to parenting. For one, I have no idea what I am doing and second, I am sorry for whatever it is that I did in a past life to have children who don't sleep well. All people are unique and so too are children. What that means is that some children sleep and some, really, do not. Not all people require the same amount of sleep and all that I know for sure is that it would appear that my children are sleepless robots. There is no other explanation.
Our daughter is almost four years old and from the very beginning of her life, she has not slept well. I have even brought her in to the doctor in a blurry-eye daze to try and find solutions to her lack of deep sleep but I tend to come across as a hysterical mother so the appointments do not go well. She sleeps so lightly that if you exhale too loud she will wake screaming. It is super-fun at night at my house. My son has grown out of most of his sleep issues and (mostly) will sleep uninterrupted (except for last night - and some other nights). How it is that he doesn't hear his sister's bloodcurdling screams, I have no idea and but I am grateful when even one child sleeps. I am not sure why the kids crawl into the bed with us in the middle of the night and I am continually perplexed as to why the children walk all the way around the bed to climb in on my side and then lie down on my hair. I am not complaining, (that was a lie), I would just like people to be forewarned when I start to babble incoherently or weeping uncontrollably. I am just so very tired and I don't even remember if I used to be a morning or an evening person. I think I have become a "would use any excuse or reason to have a nap" type of person. I have heard that eventually they grow out of it and will sleep through the night. Maybe, when they are 30.
