When you’re a new parent, everyone wants to know if and when the baby stops waking up all night long. “Are you getting any rest? Is the baby sleeping through the night yet?” everyone, even complete strangers, will ask. And, as a first time mom, you learn to look forward to this mythical day when the baby will sleep through the night and you’ll finally, once again and forevermore, be well-rested.
Bad news: It’s total crap.
Sure, your kids will eventually be physically capable of sleeping all night long, but that doesn't mean they’ll do it. At least not every night. My kids are five and two and a half now, and I’m still pretty sleep-deprived most of the time. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that you might be too.
Your kids will wake up because they need to use the potty, or because they no longer need to use the potty, as they've already wet the bed.
There will be bad dreams and requests for water and socks lost in the bed sheets. When they get sick, they’ll wake up coughing from colds, or worse — much, much worse — they’ll wake up vomiting. They will wake up at 4:30 a.m., and despite your best efforts to convince them that it is definitely not morning yet, they will insist that they're ready for breakfast and say, “Can you please make pancakes?”
They will suddenly appear by the side of your bed in the middle of the night, startling you out of a sound sleep and begging to sleep next to you "for just a little while," which will lead to you being kicked in the ribs for the remainder of the night. (Somehow, perfectly normal children turn into thrashing wild animals when sleeping in bed with their parents).
And this is all assuming that they ever even fall asleep in the first place.
For what seemed like years but was probably only months, my toddler son would get out of bed and come out of his bedroom every five minutes for up to two hours after bedtime before finally exhausting himself enough that he fell asleep.
We tried everything that we could think of to get him to stay in bed – punishments, sticker charts, a baby gate across his bedroom door frame (parenting tip: toddlers are excellent climbers), and physically sitting in his doorway to prevent him from exiting his room.
It wasn’t until we stopped having him take naps during the day that he finally started staying in his bed at night, which of course meant that we no longer got an afternoon break, and he was extra tired and cranky every evening before bedtime.
If you’re anything like me, you may find that even on the nights where nobody gets out of bed 87 times in a row and nobody is sick or wet or perpetually thirsty, you get too little sleep anyway because you stay up ridiculously late.
After a day full of chasing kids around and cleaning up messes I didn’t make, I just want some “me time.” This sometimes means doing something productive, but more often means staying up until 1 a.m. binge-watching a show on Netflix and then regretting my choices when my kids wake me up at 6:30 a.m. the next morning.
Perhaps there’s a sweet spot of sleeping well for six months or so when your kids are in middle school. I haven’t reached that point in my parenting yet, so I can’t say for sure. But from what I remember of my parents during my own teenage years, it doesn’t last.
I can still picture my mom in her nightgown, sitting in a chair in the living room, waiting for me and my siblings to come home, or walking half asleep into my bedroom at 1 a.m., where I was still wide awake and talking on the phone, to ask me, “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
It’s been years since my parents have had any of their children living with them. No one ever wakes them up in the middle of the night anymore, and since my mom is retired and my dad is a university professor, they could literally sleep in until noon every day, all summer long if they wanted to. Naturally, their own bodies wake them up at 6:30 a.m. most mornings.
I am seriously hoping that motherhood doesn’t mean the end of good sleep forever, but only time will tell.
In the meantime, I’ll be over here sipping my third cup of cold coffee and counting down the minutes until bedtime – I found a new show on Netflix yesterday, and it’s not going to watch itself.
For more from Bethany Neumeyer visit I Was Promised More Naps, Facebook and Instagram.
