Ah, motherhood!
Most women love being pregnant. Let’s face it, most women glow during their pregnancy. Your body beats in unison with your little bundle of joy growing inside you. No matter how hard you try to mentally prepare for the arrival of your little treasure, no matter how much you imagine it, you’re still far from the reality.
Pregnancy changes our bodies, no doubt about it, but no one warned me that my body would go into survival mode for so long. No, actually, my body didn’t really go into survival mode when my son joined us. He was a practically perfect baby, always happy, who was sleeping through the night by 2 months. Wow, what a lucky mom!
Maybe I bragged too much, because life had something else in store for me! After two and a half years of sleeping through the night, a child who took two nice naps a day, and so on… Life sent me a daughter. A beautiful blonde princess with blue eyes. But this princess came with an unwavering refusal to SLEEP! This wasn’t just a matter of waking up once a night! NO, NO! Right after giving birth, my daughter stayed awake with us for two hours despite a nice, full feeding. What baby does that?! But that was just a taste of what was to come. This little angel didn’t figure out how to take a nap until she was seven months old. She slept about 6 to 8 hours in a 24-hour period, all in fits and starts. She’d be awake for three to four hours right in the middle of the night. I didn’t even think it was possible to function on so little sleep. I didn’t know just how much the body could go into survival mode. I went over a year without sleeping more than three hours at a time.
My daughter was 5 months old when I went back to work full-time. Needless to say, there were mornings when I looked like a zombie walking through the office doors. The body in survival mode. Wow! That little machine is a powerhouse. If you think I’m complaining, think again! I’m just amazed at how much you can accomplish with very little.
My little girl is now 17 months old. Since then, I’ve slept about twenty full nights, because luckily, my wonderful mother-in-law has stepped in a few times. My daughter, that little sleep-depriving fairy, still doesn’t sleep through the night—much to my despair, by the way. So, for now, my body is still in survival mode and hasn’t let me down yet, but I have to
admit that it’s not always easy. To all the moms in this situation, know that I think of you often when I’m still rocking my little one in the middle of the night. The body is a strong and reliable machine. One day, our little ones will sleep—and we’ll get a little sleep too!