Sleep. Before I was a mama, I could sleep anywhere and anytime. I was known for falling asleep in movie theaters, on the couch, on the floor. Anywhere I was still enough for long enough, I was out of it.
I knew that after I became a parent, my relationship with sleep would change, and it absolutely did. After our oldest daughter was born, I woke up for about 8 months a few times in the night to nurse her. My sleep was definitely interrupted, but it honestly didn’t bother me.
There was still enough sleep to go around. Give me 5+ hours and I am good to go!
Things totally changed whenever we had our second baby.
I had a pretty severe hemorrhage after birth and because of that I was super weak. Our newest daughter also had a lot of feeding issues and couldn’t latch on to feed for many months (you can read all about our experience with that here and here!)
Her first night at home was pretty traumatizing. She could not be laid down to sleep at all. She would just scream and scream. She wasn’t hungry, she wasn’t wet. She was in pain from her reflux, and this is where my insomnia issues started to begin.
Since giving birth, a week later I had slept maybe 6 hours in total. We could not get our newborn baby settled in the day or in the night. No swing, chair, carseat, crib, dock a tot, swaddle or paci would help. The only place she could sleep was straight up and down in the Solly wrap on me.
I’m all for newborn snuggles, and totally wear my babies a lot by choice, but this was intense.
I was incredibly weak from the trauma of her birth, I had no appetite, she would put up a fight every time it was time to eat, she couldn’t latch onto a bottle or a pacifier and she didn’t sleep. If you were able to get her to sleep, it was usually about 10 minutes before she would wake up in intense pain screaming. I felt trapped.
I loved my new baby SO much, but I didn’t know what to do, or how much more I could handle.
After about 6 weeks of things not getting any better. She still wasn’t sleeping during the day or night unless she was in the Solly wrap. Things started to get rough for me.
I feel like as moms, there is a time period where you can just run on pure adrenaline. You have no sleep, or rest but you just keep going. Usually, things get better by about 2 weeks, or 4, or 6. That just wasn’t happening with our sweet baby. In fact, things were getting a little bit worse.
Feeding was associated with the pain that came afterwards for her, so she started fighting nursing (bottle feeding wasn’t an option because she couldn’t latch on due to tongue and lip ties). Full feedings were basically impossible because it took me about 30 minutes or coaxing her to latch in a pitch black room and then she had a super weak suck so while she would nurse for a long period of time, she wasn’t emptying the breast.
Because of this, she was hungry all of the time, and night time would start this perpetual torture.
I would lay her down for the night and usually within 30 or 40 minutes she would be crying again.
Where my first baby, nursing in the night just involved her feeding sleepily for about 15 minutes and then contentedly going back to sleep, feeding Lucy was really difficult.
It would take about 30 minutes to get her to latch, and then about an hour for her to get anything (this was not a supply issue, I had SO much milk). Then I would be fully awake and try to go back to sleep only to be awoken within about 45 minutes again. This would repeat all night.
We tried figuring out when she would be most likely to take her longest stretch of sleep and I only went to bed then. She had nothing predictable in her night for that to work. You name it, we tried it (aside from renting an RV and putting it outside for me to sleep! But we seriously considered it. Really.)
After this happened for about 5 months, I was in a really rough place. I knew I needed to rest, but I was starting to fear going to sleep because I was woken up by a screaming baby minutes later every time.
When she was 7 months old, my husband got me a hotel room for the night. Finally! I thought. I’ll sleep all night.
Nope.
I got to the hotel and I didn’t go to sleep. All night long.
Not only that, but whenever I found myself unable to fall to sleep I had my first panic attack.
I wasn’t worried about my babies, I knew that they were safe at home with my husband. I was purely worried about not being able to sleep. It felt like it would never end and I would never get the rest my body so badly needed.
If you’ve never experienced sleep deprivation on this level (and I hope you never do!) there’s no way for you to understand what it feels like to not be able to sleep. I have a couple of friends who have gone through this exact same thing and they’re some of the only people who really get it.
At about 8 months, my baby started sleeping through the night and taking better naps.
This is precisely when I stopped being able to sleep at all.
I remember being told in the thick of it, that I should be laying down to sleep anytime the girls were sleeping in the day. That would make me so angry because it just told me that those people didn’t understand what was going on. Every time I failed to go to sleep (nap or night) that was making my inability to sleep worse.
Trying to take a nap and failing would only decrease my chances of being able to go to sleep that night because it would make me more anxious about it.
Around this time, I started staying up for 2 or 3 days at a time. Then I would manage to get a night of about 4 or 5 hours and do it all over again. It was ridiculous and I honestly don’t know how I was staying upright most of the time.
Panic attacks were a normal occurrence during this season. My body hurt all of the time. I thought things would never get better. I had tried everything it had seemed and no one would help me.
People I did share my struggle with weren’t understanding and would say things like “oh yeah, babies don’t sleep!” or “all babies are hard!” It was incredibly isolating and lonely. I wasn’t in any shape to be a friend to anyone but I desperately needed someone to step in and care about me.
At about 10 months postpartum, I finally tried a different OB-GYN to get some help.
Up to this point I had been told to try lavender, melatonin and benadryl or unisom (which can make anxiety much worse and isn’t effective after a few doses). This doctor immediately prescribed me a sleeping medication and that night I took half of a dose and…
I slept all night long. For the first time since my baby had been born almost a year prior.
After about a week of sleeping I felt like a new person. I could concentrate on things that weren’t right in front of me. I cared about things that I hadn’t had the capacity to care about in a year. My brain fog lifted. My anxiety about sleep went down.
I knew that sleeping pills was not a long term solution, so as quickly as I had enough rest to function, I tried to stop using them.
I started just taking it whenever I had sleep onset failure. Then slowly over the next 4 months I used it less and less.
At first I would just have one night of sleep without “help” before I would need them again. Then slowly it would turn into a week of good sleep before I had to take anything. Suddenly I was sleeping 2 weeks before I would have to take some.
It has been an incredibly long and hard road.
Postpartum insomnia was something I had never even heard of until I experienced it. It was so hard and dark and lonely. But here we are. I’m not completely better. A stressful situation can still quickly bring me back to my old ways.
But I have made it through. If you’re going through this right now I’m so sorry. You’ll get through it too. One day, you will. But don’t be afraid to ask (yell if you have to) for help from your doctors, counselors, family and friends. You can’t do it alone.