If you ever scroll through the open tabs on my phone’s browser, you’ll see exactly when my son was born. Pre-baby, the tabs all lead to things like pancake recipes and Soviet-era cartoons and the Wikipedia page for the Wuppertal suspension railway. Post-baby, they’ve all coalesced into an unavoidable, rock-hard theme: sleep.
Parenthood has worn me down, and I have become obsessed with sleep. That’s all my life amounts to now; the part where I get to sleep, and the part where I stumble around, groggily hating the world because it won’t let me sleep. One of these vastly outweighs the other.
Sleep is now automatically where my mind goes when it doesn’t have anything else to do. Yesterday I caught myself thinking up reasons to go to Penzance, just because I’d get to sleep on the train. Then I found something called a sleep hotel that I wanted to visit purely because it was called a sleep hotel, even though all hotels are actually sleep hotels, you idiot. I even briefly Googled “sleep retreats” until I realised that they’re just places where you pay to let a doctor tut at you until your nervous system involuntarily shuts down.
I thought I was doing OK at this. I thought I’d pushed through the worst of the tiredness. The first couple of weeks – where we’d each take two-hour shifts with him throughout the night – genuinely hollowed me out. But then we managed to settle into a groove. Sure, we didn’t sleep a lot, but we slept enough. If we got more than four hours each night, that was a bonus. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, but at least we weren’t hallucinating that demons were eating our souls or anything.
Now, though, I’ve clattered into a wall. Two consecutive nights spent working late have thrown my equilibrium out of whack, and I’m spiralling. By the time I’ve done a day’s work and cooked dinner, I’m quite often seeing double. In every photo taken of me within the past month, I’m manically grinning through a billion-yard stare. Whenever I meet someone, I pray that I can pull off “charming non sequitur” as a primary conversational gambit. I don’t think I can. This tiredness has utterly strip-mined me.
As a result, I’m simultaneously more passive and bad-tempered than I’ve ever been. Every slight made against me, real or perceived, has started to soufflé out and become a vast injustice that I’d dedicate the rest of my life to raging against if only I had the energy. If any confidence tricksters are reading this, by the way, now is the perfect time to come and rip me off. I’ll know exactly what you’re doing, but I’ll just be too knackered to stop you.
However, one thing has been single-handedly shoving me through this rough patch, and that’s my son’s complete inability to discern tone. The poor fool doesn’t know what a bad mood looks like yet. Whenever I grumpily pick him up at the end of a long day – or at the start of an even longer day – and growl “What?” into his face, he thinks it’s a game. He’ll grin, or gurgle, or find some other way to express his full-beam delight at the world. And every time it happens, I fully recharge.
A happy baby is a ridiculous thing. It might even be the best thing. It’s certainly the only thing that can briefly make me forget how tired I am all the time. And this is how it’s going to be for ever. Or at least until he learns to be grumpy. I just hope it isn’t hereditary.
