It is a cruel joke when a woman with two small babies who both wake up frequently in the night, cannot sleep.
Over the past month I have found myself in this situation more and more frequently; pitch black outside; everyone is quiet and calm and has all their needs met for a few precious hours, and, I find myself laying in bed wide awake, heart pumping and mind racing.
Insomnia is one of those early motherhood afflictions that no one talks about but most mothers experience on one level or another. You can only go so long being woken up every hour by a hungry baby until your body just starts to do it on its own. Until your body learns that it may never, ever go into a deep sleep because at any moment; your offspring, that little being that everything innate in your body says to PROTECT and KEEP ALIVE, may need you.
The anxious vigilance of early motherhood is all encompassing. It is primal and fundamental to survival. It is hardwired into every single cell of our beings. Some people may call it postpartum anxiety. But, it is also just what it took to keep us alive as species.
In my desperate, middle of the night, attempts to find someone else who has this issue, to find an article or a study, something, that says, “Yes, Clara, this is normal; you’ll be fine, you will be able to sleep 8 hours solid again some day,” I have found that it is very common to have motherhood change your quality of sleep seemingly forever.
This was not what I wanted to find.
Women generally sleep much more poorly than men, but only after a certain age and that age is right around when most people are having babies.
It seems to be another one of things that we as society just assume is “part of the deal” of motherhood, like how a family of member of mine was under the impression that she would just have to keep peeing herself every time she jumped or coughed for the rest of her life after having vaginal births and did not understand that peeing yourself may be common after childbirth these days, but it is not normal and is completely treatable with with pelvic floor physical therapy.
So, one night last week, from 8:30pm to 5am, I tended to babies as always, but there was one good 4 hour chunk and a few shorter chunks that I laid awake trapped in my exhausted mind and body, without being able to find one minute of the rest and relief of sleep.
I realized that I have not slept for more than three to four hours consecutively for more than five nights in easily 3 years, and if I’m honest with myself I was pushing myself and not sleeping well for years before that as well.
Between the pregnancy hormones which meant I was up peeing 5 times a night and having two newborns in the past two years; I have wracked up a pretty intense sleep deficit in my life.
And I felt it all culminate with this tortuous night of zero sleep.
I am a forever student of the Feminine and I know how to let a cycle take me down, and I really let myself have this one for days. I let myself go there. I watched my mind spiral into some of the darkest places you can imagine: depression, anxiety, insanity; all of it. I got physically sick. I was completely un-functional. I did absolutely nothing (this is almost impossible when you are a mother, thank god I have an amazing partner.) No distractions. Total approval of the muck.
And, you know what happens when you let yourself go all the way down? You get refreshed and full. You allow yourself the rest you were needing. You allow yourself to go through the cycle instead of just getting caught up in the decent, which some people do for years and years (this is what I believe “depression” really is, a fighting of the downward cycle).
When you allow yourself to go down; you surrender and ride the wave instead gripping and getting jumbled up in it.
I am not feeling fully refreshed and full, yet. I am shaky and a bit unmoored.
I am in the precarious place of actually allowing myself to receive the nutrition that is available to me here in the dark. I am in the spot where I get to choose to say yes to what life is offering me, or not.
First step; sleep.
