Sleepless Nights, Brought to You By Your Children

A few weeks ago, I was innocently watching the news and was smacked in the face by an ever present “fake news” story. This story – seemingly with its own agenda that was not the truth – went something like this:

“It’s no secret that a baby disrupts sleep, but a new study shows that parents of a newborn might not get a good night’s sleep for up to six years.”

Six years? What bullshit group of non-parent researchers came up with that insight? And how much money did it cost?

All they needed to do was just walk down the street of, I don’t know, any place on Planet Earth and ask a mother, “when was the last time you got a good night’s sleep?” and the answer will always be, “I don’t know? Not since my kids were born?”

A logical follow up question could be, “how old are your kids?” The answers, of course, are irrelevant. Kids of all ages – 45, 14, 6 months – keep their parents from ever sleeping soundly again. I am 48 and I have no doubt that my mother lies awake certain nights stressing about things that she knows are on my mind, wondering how she can help me or carry some of my burden.

That’s one of the secrets of being a mother that the sisterhood never shares with you – you will never sleep again like you did before you became a mother. Like literally never. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a getaway with your husband and the kids are with their grandparents. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a business trip. It doesn’t matter if your children are tax paying adults with kids of their own, their own home and their own sleepless nights. Because being a mother never ends. You always worry. You always go to bed and think of what they might need. Period.

The study went on to interview fathers who also described a loss in sleep, but not nearly as dramatic as their female parenting counterparts (aka “us”). The men said, “Fathers also reported a loss in sleep, but it was much less pronounced than mothers. Dads said they lost about 15 minutes the first three months after childbirth.” And that is all I have to say about that…

My point is not that mothers are better parents because we sleep less. I know that fathers also carry a lot of stress about raising their children. But I do believe that women carry a different kind of perpetual weight that I call “the size of my kids’ pajamas.” For me, this speaks to how mothers carry every small detail of their children’s lives in their hearts and heads all the time. Every teacher’s name. Their bus number. The friends’ names. The friends’ parents’ names. What they want for Christmas. What made them sad at school the day before. Who hurt their feelings on the playground. What they got on a math quiz. Why they are nervous about a book report. The mole on their tiny head you could see as a baby because no hair was there to cover it, but is now invisible to everyone but you because of their curls. The size of their pajamas.

Mothers know all of this by heart. We carry it every day and feel the weight of it every night. And that heaviness keeps us up.

It’s not that we don’t want the weight. We do. We want to know these things. We want to be able to notice the slightest difference in our children and what to attribute it to so that we can guide them on the path of life. It’s part of the job. An occupational hazard, if you will. We will go buy new pj’s on our lunch hour when they are needed. Because we know they’re too small.

The study finished up with this nugget – “”While having children is a major source of joy for most parents it is possible that increased demands and responsibilities associated with the role as a parent lead to shorter sleep and decreased sleep quality.” It is possible that our increased demands and responsibilities as parents lead to shorter sleep and decreased quality? Methinks yes. Science has proven what we all already know.

Now I wish research would focus on what I don’t know. Like, if you close your eyes while your kids are watching the Disney Channel, is that sleep? Does it count? If you fantasize about sleep, does that count? Can we expand the definition of “sleep” to include just being really really tired to the point that you feel almost asleep most of the time?

No matter what the answers are, we know one thing is true for all moms, everywhere. Mommy needs a nap. Stat.