Sleep is for the Weak

In my opinion, the first year of motherhood should be called "The Zombie Era". When I was in college I stayed up all night once studying for an anatomy final (yes, that's how we party at an SDA college) and I remember standing in the slightly disgusting dorm shower the next morning thinking to myself "Wow, I am so exhausted right now, there is no way I could be any more tired an I am now.".....WRONG!!!!!! You suck it up College Whitney and get back to class (also, stop wearing those cliche graphic t-shirts, you look like an idiot).

The fact is, you really don't know what being tired is until you have a baby. People try to warn you. "Make sure you sleep when the baby sleeps!" is the most common pearl thrown your way. The main problem is that the exhaustion sneaks up on you. When you are at the hospital after pushing out the tiny human (or in my case, having them extracted), you are on this high of "holy cow, I have a freaking baby!" and are too busy staring at them like a crazy person to feel the full extent of your fatigue. It also helps that the nurses keep popping in to bring you things and feed you cookies (for real, my hospital did a 4pm warm cookies and milk, it was 59% of the reason we chose that hospital) and keep you on a steady stream of happy drugs. So you leave the hospital thinking "I got this, this is going to be so easy!"

Then that first night home. If you are anything like me and Jonny, you took all the baby classes where they tell you how to keep your baby alive. In these classes, you learn everything about SIDS and positional suffocation and by the time your baby gets there you have this bizarre belief that if you close your eyes while your baby is asleep, they will immediately stop breathing. How can I sleep knowing that my selfish need for rest is probably, most like, 100% going to kill my child? So you lay there in the bed and stare at them....for hours. I watched a lot of Netflix those first few nights. Mostly Psych because it was funny and lighthearted and because the theme song kept me awake. Jonny and I took shifts so one could pretend to sleep while the other contemplated tapping their eyelids open. I kept telling myself that everything was awesome and that I would just never sleep again. Sleep was for the weak and I was a supermom. If Snookie could keep her baby alive, so could I.

This fantasy didn't last very long. After what I can only describe as a nervous breakdown after 3 days of no sleep, I realized that sleep is in fact quite important to the human existence. I was having anxiety attacks, hearing baby cries when she was asleep, and being a general pain in everyone's butt. I would have crying fits and feel like I was literally going crazy. It was a low that I hadn't felt since the day we found out Mira had Dandy Walker when I was 20 weeks pregnant. That feeling of total loss of control, of seeing the world moving around you and having no way or reaching out to stop it. It sucks man. It was decided that we should probably formulate a new plan, one that involved not being completely insane. So we started trying to sleep. We eventually got a sleep monitor (which I HIGHLY recommend to all new moms: http://mylevana.com/product/Oma_Powered_by_Snuza.eng-55.html) and began getting some solid 4 hour blocks in. It was amazing, I didn't know what to do with myself.

At about 3 months, things started to fall into place. I'm not saying that suddenly things went back to normal and I was waking up like a Disney princess with birds fluttering around my head, but something strange did happen. My body accepted the exhaustion. I started functioning at an acceptable capacity and felt like maybe, just maybe, I could survive it all.

Now the tiredness is a regular part of life. Yeah sometimes I put the chips in the fridge and every once in a while I stand staring at a room for 5 minutes trying desperately to remember why I walked in there. This one time I walked around Home Depot for an hour, talking to people, looking around, reading signs, and still thought I was at Lowe's the whole time up until I tried to pay with my Lowe's gift card at the register and the cashier stifled a laugh (I almost punched him the face, he's lucky he's still alive). But we are making it.

I wish I could go back in time and tell "Losing it Whitney" that things are going to be ok. That she was going to make it and that the impending doom could be defeating by something as simple as a cat nap. That the feeling of utter exhaustion that she despised would soon become that annoying friend that is always hanging around but you don't mind anymore because hey, that's just crazy Jim, don't worry about him.

So to any brand new mom's our there that are feeling that scary pull of insanity creeping in, it does get better. It takes a while, it's hard, but once it clicks the euphoria of it is so sweet it that you actually start to forget the not so great parts. You look at your baby while she is sleeping not because you are afraid, but because she is just so freaking adorable you might explode. And while you may feel like a zombie walking around a lot of the time, you are more like the zombies at the end of Shaun of the Dead. Still zombies, but nice zombies that are part of society and play video games and stuff.