That elusive state of bliss
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday, October 6, 2012
Section: Opinion

Sleep deprivation is the torture of the damned. And I damn well can’t put up with it anymore.

The smallest member of the house, now two, should be sleeping like a baby. Except that she never has, save for a briefly exquisite interlude last year. Now she collapses mute into her cot at lunchtime (a Mack truck couldn’t wake her), only to spend the deepest recesses of night waking every couple of hours and crying long and loud for anything that might take one’s fancy in the middle of the night – a hot bottle, a dummy, a cuddle, a rendition of the Wiggles at 3am. It’s infuriating and I am withered by tiredness.

I hope this will come with nods and hazy recollections from anyone who has ever had a child. Mothers and fathers and grandparents who look back on the halcyon days of baby-rearing and still see the black shadows of lost sleep.

I write this for those who have ever had problems with sleeping. Blokes of a certain age whose bladders have decided to start telling the time by nudging them awake every two hours. Women whose minds race ahead of their bodies, and whose brainwaves jolt them awake at five in the morning.

We take it so for granted, this third of our lives. It’s supposed to be of fairy-tale proportions:  still and long and dewy-faced in the morning. But Sleeping Beauty can be a right harridan – she’s had it in for most of us at some time or other, and finding the magic kiss of sleep is often a brutal exercise in sheer bloody-minded frustration.

I’m sure, like me, you’ve tried all the usual trickery – no coffee, no television, a room as black as night, warm milk, a hot shower, a roll in the hay.

But if you’re held hostage by a mind that won’t relax and a body that refuses to drift, it can be the mother of all battles between id and ego.  Never mind the superego – it’s not playing by the rules either, and it has no conscience, happy to let you toss and turn mindlessly half the night.

A Harvard Medical School study documented that sleep deprivation causes the brain to become incapable of putting an emotional episode in the proper perspective. That would explain why getting on the scales makes me cry.

I hear from my mother and her friends that you need less sleep as you get older but it’s all about the quality. That is, hours – in – a -row. They complain they can’t sleep past 4.30 or 5am, and find it exasperating. Sleep deprivation at any age is the rack and thumbscrew of nightly torment, except the chambers now have electric blankets and duck down pillows.

Most of what we know about sleep has only been learned in the past twenty  five years, since MRI’s began giving us detailed images of the inside of our brains. In 2000, the biggest survey of Australian sleep habits ever conducted suggested women need  an hour more sleep a night than men, and that not getting it may be one reason women are more susceptible to depression. And that’s depressing.

I thought I’d sail through the nightly interruptions of motherhood. After all, I’d had no trouble with the 4am graveyard shifts in my early da ys in radio, the round-the-clock breaking stories and travelling to far flung time-zones only to have to hit the ground running. My camera crew and I prided ourselves on how, when it counted, we were machines, and could power our way through jetlag on next to no sleep.  And then I had a baby.

I was very good at the four hour shifts in hospital, and for the first few weeks at home, my post partum brain bathed in the euphoria of a successful birth. I think adrenalin kept me going for a couple of months because the crash was as shattering as it was unexpected.

The only thing that was asleep for most of that first year were my legs. From sitting crumpled on the floor, one arm through the wooden slats of my baby’s cot, mindlessly, endlessly patting his rear. Then came the aching back from rocking figure-of-eight’s and doing deep knee bends with a strapping 10 month old whose head was lolling with sleep, but whose mother was too scared to put him down in case he wasn’t asleep enough.

I was never going to make those mistakes with number two and three. Those babies were going to learn to sleep on their own, from day dot. No patting, no dummies, no rocking. That lasted until I got out of hospital. The tracksuit years, as we liked to call them, were not kind. Nor was witching hour. I think the term is used to describe toddlers who hit the wall at 5pm. In our house, it’s when I do. And the lovely coven of my motherly friends know it’s a bad spell that lasts a long, long time. Until the youngest of your brood learns how to do an all-nighter. And I don’t mean party.

To test your mental strength to breaking point, try managing a crying baby and a sick child. Or get sick yourself. I see the drained, hollow faces most days on the school run – mums and dads you know have been up half the night. And their children, who despite such broken sleep, are still bouncing up and down. Until they get home again – for witching hour. Perhaps it is advancing age that ruins the delusions of parenting, that we all would have been better at it in our twenties, not in our thirties and forties.

My mother-in-law had seven babies in nine years and I have lamented to her of my altered state. She listened sympathetically and then said ‘yes, mine all slept through from three months, at least I think they did – the door was shut.’

So last night I took her advice. I gave my two year old a little pep talk, a cuddle and a teddy. I turned off the baby monitor. I shut the door between her and us and I turned up the telly. Her father and I sat together on the sofa speechless. We listened to her cries and the hyperventilating that went with it, and stopped each other racing in to her to plant kisses on her wet cheeks. Eventually, after the longest twenty five minutes of my recent life, she stopped crying. Completely. The silence was truly golden and eerily quiet.

We went to bed and celebrated. And then we took turns getting up every two hours when she cried louder and harder than she ever has.