Don’t Sleep
The days of joy have quickly turned into nights of endless tears, piercing screams and reintroductions to sitcoms of years past.
Yep. My son is a night owl.
In the first few days, it was understandable that an infant is about as adept at understanding night and day as a college student is. All he can do is eat, sleep, go to the bathroom and cry. As a bonus, he will occasionally look around and yawn, but for the most part, he’s got all of your basic human needs locked down.
And don’t get me wrong, it is precious and fulfilling to watch him do even the smallest of things. You can’t imagine the pride I feel just looking at him. But I do have to get up in the morning Monday through Friday, and my wife, while on maternity leave, is still working from home. People warned us that we would get any sleep but I was thinking a reduction from nine hours to five.
Not to two hours per night.
And once sleep deprivation sets in, I can see why new parents want to pull their hair out. It’s an endless cycle that you have to maintain while everything in your body screams sleep. You still have to feed, burp change the diaper and soothe your child before there’s any rest.
Robert Frost had many miles to go, I have many hours.
I’ve questioned if I want to do this again in the future; if I would be ready for endless nights without rest or composure, occasional snapping between my wife and I, and a biological clock so thrown off I feel like a have Swine Flu mixed with a hangover. And to be honest, I don’t know that I’ve arrived at the point where I could confidently assert “I want to have more children.” This experience truly is wearing me out.
At the same time, many of you reading these lines have done it and emerged happier and stronger for it. I pray to reach your path one day. Heaven knows it took about 30 percent of the energy I had left just to get out this post.
