The first year: Surviving without sleep

Our backpage columnist, Rofhiwa Maneta, ponders the good and sometimes hard realities that come with being a new dad

IT HAPPENED sometime around two in the morning. My son, four months old at the time, had been wrestling with sleep since early evening. The routine’s agony was only surpassed by its sheer predictability.

He’d scream his lungs out for about 30 minutes, fall asleep for another 20 and repeat. My partner and I exchanged glances under the fading light of our apartment and silently asked with our eyes: “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

There have been many nights like that one, and I’m sure many more still lie ahead for both of us.

Sleep deprivation is a staple of early parenthood.

A recent study reveals that new parents face up to six years of sleep deprivation. This is because after the very early months (years?) of interrupting sleep (theirs and yours) to feed, there are other factors that prevent shut-eye: illness, nightmares – and your own new-parent stress.

Unsurprisingly, women bear the brunt of this lack of sleep. On average, women lose 40 minutes of sleep per night in the first year of parenthood while fathers only lose 13.

On the nights when my son’s sleeping pattern first started fracturing ours, I felt a uselessness stirring deep inside me that’s still difficult to put into words.

When he’d wake up in a fit of crying, he’d immediately search for his mother’s face and the warm comfort of her body and breast.

I’d usually stand beside our bed, watching my exhausted partner trying to pat and sing our son back to sleep.

Like clockwork, the lack of sleep slowly started eating away at our relationship.

Our relationship began functioning around our son, his immediate needs and his sleeping patterns. During the day, we’d tend to him, nap when he napped and hope against hope he’d sleep uninterrupted during the night. Getting laid was last on the list of both our concerns. Nights turned into a kind of lottery.

When my son slept uninterrupted, we both did nothing but sleep. When he didn’t, a frustration lingered in the air between us, and we’d pass him back and forth, hoping the other would best know how to settle him again for a while.

There was also the matter of how to go about sleep training. I’m a fan of the crying-it-out method.

Around the time my son turned one, I started advocating we allow him to soothe himself back to sleep whenever he woke up at night. I spoke to some experienced parents who vouched for it. They said it would teach him independence while also untethering me and my partner (mostly) from having to jump out of bed every time we heard the faintest of cries.

My partner found the idea reprehensible and inhumane. It went against her maternal instinct and personal ethical code – against everything in her, basically. She saw it as a dereliction of parental duty and couldn’t imagine letting our son cry while it was within our powers to comfort him.

So, how did we turn the corner?

The answer is: we’re still figuring that out.

The intervals between my 18-month-old son’s sleepless nights are beginning to widen. He’ll still fall asleep at close to midnight or wake up at three in the morning on the odd night, but even then, these have become more manageable.

Our trick has been allowing him to tire himself out during the day. He spends the day with his cousins, jumping from one adventure to the next. When night falls, he’s out like a light.

We’re still pretty much held ransom by his sleeping patterns but, then again, which parent isn’t?

On the nights when both our minds are frayed, we’ve learnt to be a little more considerate in our interactions. If my son wakes up, I’ll make sure both him and my partner are comfortable. Sometimes that means fixing both of them something to eat, most times it means taking my son to the lounge, away from his mother, and letting him play it out.

But other times it means just quietly reminding my partner that we’re in this together and, one day, we’ll both miss the days when the most eventful part of our week was putting our son to sleep.