It took catching Covid to get my children out of my bed, but I can finally sleep again
It began, as so many things do, as a result of sheer laziness. From the ages of zero to walking age, my children went to sleep in their cots and stayed there for most of the night. I had read about the physical dangers of co-sleeping, and about the emotional dangers of not training your baby to “self-soothe”, and if I couldn’t quite carry off cry-it-out as a policy, I could hold the line for the front end of the night.
Then they learned to walk. Each night, at different times, they migrated from their beds to mine, which left everyone feeling tired in the morning. For the short period it took them to grow out of this phase, I thought, it made sense to put them to sleep in my bed. Nothing about this could possibly go wrong.
That was six years ago. Until last week, except for the handful of nights I’ve spent travelling without them, my children haven’t slept a single night in their own beds. Instead, they have slept in the only configuration that works when you have twins bellowing, “Hold me!” as they’re going to sleep: one either side of me, with my arms crossed over my chest so I can reach them simultaneously. I sometimes visualise this scene from above: I must look like a woman in the centre panel of a medieval triptych – a martyr, or a very cross saint. We only have a queen bed. If it was a tight fit when they were four, at seven, my lanky children have between them approximately 17 knees, 47 elbows and enough hair to stuff a mattress. This situation has developed, in part, because I’m a single parent who hasn’t had to accommodate another adult’s needs. It’s also, inadvertently, an expression of what I gather is called child-led parenting, itself an outpost of attachment parenting, which is the one where you end up breastfeeding your 12-year-old and being featured on the cover of Newsweek. When my children were born, I had no strong feelings about parenting style beyond the conviction that my instinct to keep them close was the right one. Animals don’t put their young under a hedge several fields away, I reasoned. Why do we? Dimly, I understood that sleeping next to your child was one of those experiences that, even during the worst periods of disruption, one would look back on with a desperate nostalgia.
Of course, there are lots of counters to this, many of them backed up by studies angrily quoted on parenting sites. During infancy, the arguments against co-sleeping are the potential for rolling over and suffocating the baby, and the similar risk posed by pillows and duvets. There are also circumstances where bed sharing is never safe, such as being under the influence of drugs or alcohol. As children get older, it’s to do with independence. There are downsides for parents, too. If you have a partner, I guess you might very occasionally want to have sex with them after your babies are born. If you’re single and dating, you’re not doing any sleepovers in this setup – although, take it from me, if you feel so inclined you can ask your date to call in at 9am after school drop-off, and be out again by 11.
Anyway, all of that is secondary to the fact that sleeping next to your kids is just nice. When my babies were little, all I wanted was to have them within easy reach; to feel their puffs of breath on my face. I felt sorry for women with needy husbands who had to kick the baby, or the toddler, or the – OK, getting a bit weird now, five-year-old – into another room at night. (Women with needy wives exist, too, of course, as do men with needy husbands, but the dynamic in these families often seems to be different; heaven knows lesbians are high maintenance, but when there’s a baby in the mix, my god do we centre it.) Still, with two children who have just finished year three, things were getting ridiculous. I was permanently exhausted, to the extent of wondering if I had a chronic condition. I kept falling asleep at 9pm when I lay down to settle the kids, and waking up at 2am having sailed past the evening. Every single parent I knew was still co-sleeping – my cousin kept it going until her daughter was 11 – but none of them had twins. Beyond a certain point, three in a bed just doesn’t work, especially if you’re in the middle.
Last week, I tested positive for Covid. All of a sudden, my limply delivered phrase, “You have to sleep in your own beds”, gained unimpeachable force. “Ew,” my children said as I coughed, and trooped off to their beds unbidden. They both got Covid anyway, but the pattern was broken. We are on night 11 of separate sleeping and so far it’s amazing. For the first time in six years, I have my room back. I read. I scroll. I stay awake until 11pm. And then I sleep so deeply it’s like I have an armful of propofol. Honestly, buy a bed that’s too small and keep your kids in it longer than the studies recommend, just for this moment of feeling reborn.