New Mummy Blog: The Five Stages Of New Parent Sleep Deprivation

Henry is now eight weeks old and, as it is for all new mums, a good night’s sleep is by now a long forgotten dream.

Nature plays a cruel trick in the last month of pregnancy, making it difficult to get comfortable in bed in any position and impossible to get through a night without multiple trips to the loo, placing a decent sleep out of reach long before the baby even arrives.

And then when he does, you realise your sweet little newborn is in fact an insatiable eating machine whose only goal is to feed every hour on the hour night and day. Yes, yes, everyone warns you about the lack of sleep coming your way, but until you are living it, it’s hard to truly imagine.

Sleep becomes an obsession. You’d do anything for a full night.

What they don’t tell you, by the way, is that a ‘full night’ in babyworld is in fact five hours.

Five hours in one go and congratulations, your baby has officially slept through the night. Never mind that this is barefaced trickery as it’s at least three hours short of a full night’s sleep.

You’re so desperate for sleep you’ll take it whenever you can get it. You start believing Ryan Reynolds had a point and start thinking of blinking as a series of tiny little naps you can take all day.

It’s like the stages of a break up.

Denial
At first there’s denial when, in the first 24 hours your baby sleeps for 20 of them. ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ you ask yourself, secretly pleased you’ve clearly given birth to an exceptional sleeper.

Shock
Then comes the shock, when the initial sleepiness wears off and the baby realises he rather likes to feed. In fact, he likes it so much he wants to do it all the time. Especially at night. The first night you find yourself up and down every 90, 60, 45 minutes is like an impossible game you don’t know the rules of.

Despair
And then, when you realise that this was not just a terrible blip and in fact your smug belief in your newborn’s sleep abilities was wildly misplaced, in seeps despair.

False Hope
But just when you begin to question how much longer you can function like this, you enter the cruellest stage of all: false hope. Because, all of a sudden, your baby sleeps for five, six, or even seven hours one night.

You still wake every hour though, terrified that the reason he hasn’t woken is because he’s stopped breathing and you have to get out of bed anyway to go and check. But morning comes and he’s fine, if ravenous, so you know he can do it.

You then spend the next three months trying to recreate the conditions of that night so perfectly that he repeats it. He doesn’t.

Resignation
And that’s where the resignation sets in. you learn to accept a new normal in which you’re half awake half zombie, stumbling through your days without really knowing what’s going on. Strange things start happening.

You spend 20 minutes looking for your mobile to eventually find that you put it in the fridge and the milk in your handbag. You make a fish pie but forget to put any fish in it. You get the baby dressed and then realise you’ve forgotten to put his nappy on when he wees through his babygro.

Mystery packages start turning up in the post, of which you have no memory. But then you check your email and see that while online at 3am in a desperate attempt to stay awake during a feed, you decided it would be a very good idea to order a patio heater in January (well, it was 60 per cent off).

But despite all this, you don’t mind. Not really. For these moments are fleeting and when the day comes that you’re not needed any more you’ll miss them.

And after all, you can sleep when you’re dead.

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