All my love to the sleep-deprived tonight

I hate those nights with an infant when they don’t yet sleep in any kind of reasonable way. There is no measure of time, hours just roll on haphazardly and except for the clock on your wall you wouldn’t know there were twenty-four hours in a day, because one day begins before the last has ended and vice versa. There is no discernible sleep pattern or rhythm, it is just that sometimes the baby sleeps for ten minutes and other times they sleep for an hour and a half and once, for no apparent reason, they slept for three hours straight. And you want to love that three hours, the possibility of it, but it becomes menacing instead, like a threat or an accusation. Because you search for ways to repeat it and it doesn’t happen and you wonder what the hell you’re doing wrong because this baby can now sleep for three hours and really won’t. Instead, you perform endless futile experiments on yourself and the baby – swaddling them, not swaddling them, waking them to feed, leaving them to sleep, having this lamp off, not stepping on that floorboard, changing the nappy now, opening the window later, dressing the baby in an extra layer, sleeping next to them, putting them somewhere else to sleep. And I hate that feeling of finally falling into a deep sleep and then being woken by a desperate baby. I hate the sense of vulnerability you’re still carrying when you’re that deeply asleep and tired, and how you suddenly have to try to call yourself back. I hate the shock that shakes you awake with a crying baby. You enter a scene half-begun and have no idea your place in it. I hate fumbling around and dropping things and forgetting what you need and where you put it. I also hate lying there listening to contented babies and perfectly good sleep passing you by. I hate not being able to fall asleep because it seems like the baby is going to stir any minute. I hate being able to sense everyone else in the house, and up and down the street, asleep, when I am not. I hate the loneliness. I hate the night that goes on forever and the one that is abruptly announcing its end when you’ve not yet fallen asleep. I will never forget these nights as long as I live.

And that is it, that is why I offered to take one of those nights for a friend.

She’s a mother friend of mine, and she is also a foster-mother. One of her foster children at the moment is a newborn baby – fussy, of course, because if you had been through what this baby has been through you’d be pretty difficult, too. When I saw my friend this week she looked broken and more tired than I have ever seen her. She was the kind of brittle where you could break and splinter at any minute. And the kind of tired where you cannot stay still for too long or you will fall asleep on your feet. I told her I could take the baby overnight if she needed it. (I am authorised to provide respite to her and we have taken a foster child for half a day before). Yes, it was nice of me to offer this night, but you can’t compare to this woman, she’s a foster parent. She’s doing all the nights, all the time, for so many children, including her own.

She said to me, don’t say this unless you mean it, because I will take you up on it. Do it, I said, really, do this. And so last night I spent most of it awake with a tiny, little baby. An incredibly beautiful, tiny baby who lay there at one point gazing at my face and the shadows on the wall with the kind of solemn wonder that newborns have and I had to laugh quietly and whisper to the baby that this would be a delightful moment of wakefulness if it were just doing this during the day instead, little one.