HARD DAY’S NIGHT

Never mind babies ... Kate’s losing sleep over teens!

Iwrite this for all the mums who are up at 2am, either breastfeeding or heating bottles, or attempting to get a grouchy baby back to sleep. Or perhaps soothing a sick child or pacing the floor with a restless one.

As you hold that tired, hungry or crotchety baby in your arms, know how lucky you are. How tiny they are, how fleeting this time is and how simply solved these grumbles are. A few cuddles, some milk, a snuggle and maybe even some PeppaPig if you have to. The upshot is, you are still getting to parent that child – you are in control of the outcome.

Fast-forward 16 or 17 years and you’ll look back fondly on those broken nights. That’s because you’ll still be having sleepless nights and you’ll still be up at 2am, but you’ll no longer be able to control the outcome. You’ll no longer be able to soothe that baby back to sleep.

That baby will not be in your arms. That baby will instead be either a) still out, with their phone dead, so you panic they’re possibly dead too, or b) staggering in the door smelling like a brewery and shouting about how they lost their cellphone after it died. The heartwarming, gentle wails of a newborn will be replaced by shouty, deep-throated wails about where they last saw their phone. The wake-up will not be a few cries from the next room – it will be the slamming of the back door.

Nobody prepares you for the day they ink up their skin (that’ll happen too, if the tattoo trend continues) and nobody prepares you for the sleepless nights at the other end of the spectrum.

You can’t cradle an 18year-old who’s towering over you (nor do you want to, depending on the state they’re in). All you can do is run the same “shoosh, shoosh” whispers that you may have run 18 years ago. Those whispers won’t work, by the way. They’re more likely to respond to your whispers with a really good unintentional impersonation of a deaf person by yelling, “What?!” at the top of their lungs, then continue shouting.

Obviously, none of their problems are solvable at this stage. You can’t magic up a lost phone, you can’t soothe them and you can’t pop them back into bed. All you can do is tell them to go to sleep before they wake the whole house.

But here’s the rub – you’re now wide awake. You’re worried about the state they’re in, the fact they lost their phone and the fact you can do nothing about it because they’re 18 now. So then you tip over into the “where did I go wrong?” angsty, pre-dawn stressful worry thought pattern to which there are no answers. You’ll wish your child was an introvert who played chess.

So my advice to new mothers is, don’t begrudge the sleepless nights you have now. Oh, and get them into chess.