my life´s mission

For a while I had made it my life´s mission to teach him to sleep. In a gentle way. So I read a lot of books and I was doing my best to apply them. I got obsessed by it. The results where marginal. Meanwhile, my frustration was manifesting in the daytime in fights with my partner. He was, namely, uninterested and unmotivated to participate in my life´s mission. I could not accept that.

The more I was a "good" mother in the night, the less I was a "good" mother in the day. After months of not sleeping, the day meant going through the motions of taking care for the baby and trying to keep the house afloat. The joy of motherhood was largely gone.

Meanwhile, the night became worse, because I could not feed him half asleep, like I used to do. I had to be alert for cues and apply the strategy, like the books were saying. I was wide awake for most fo the night.

This meant that during the day checking emails, looking for a job, keeping in touch with friends, doing some work for school were impossible tasks. The more impossible it was to do these absolutely normal sane activities, the more I was staying awake at night to do them. That meant even less sleep.

At some point I was hardly sleeping at all. And then collapsing in the weekend when I knew I could rely on my partner. But that sleep was not good. Was a bad mood sleep, a cranky sleep, a punishment, a wanting to run away from home sleep. Without the adrenaline that was keeping me awake during the week, the weekends were my depression.