A Master’s in Sleep Deprivation

I’ve just had a baby boy so I’ve spent the last four months getting a Master’s in Sleep Deprivation. In the early weeks when I was breastfeeding in the middle of the night I was so utterly exhausted and fighting the overwhelming urge to just give in and fall asleep that I was having to intentionally reverse-blink: force my eyelids open so wide that my eyeballs almost voluntarily rolled right out of their sockets. Have you ever been so tired you put hair gel on your toothbrush instead of toothpaste? Yeah, me neither…

Becoming a first time mom hasn’t been easy. My son has a severe cow's milk allergy and reflux so there were a LOT of tears and hysterics in the first six weeks of his life (and he actually cried a lot too.) Try giving the lad paracetamol and he clamps his mouth shut tighter than a frog’s butt in water, all the while shrieking, writhing wildly and just generally behaving like you’re totally trying to kill him.

And then there is teething. My son has been teething for the last two months so he drools like a Saint Bernard which has highlighted one glaring fundamental design flaw - babies should come with gutters pre-installed along their chins.

No one told me that becoming a mom would mean that I would spend an unnatural amount of time each day devoting vital mental space to pondering profound philosophical questions such as Am I being a good parent? or When am I going to get one moment to poop? or Why doesn’t Boris Johnson brush his hair? 

And nothing quite prepares you for your body suddenly becoming an all-you-can-eat buffet. You are hungry like All. The. Time. And exceedingly thirsty too. I have had to frequently breastfeed all night and 6am dawns with you feeling dryer than a popcorn’s fart; unable to even blink because you are so dehydrated that there isn’t enough moisture left in your body to sufficiently lubricate your eyelids. Then there comes a special day when your son is old enough to recognise where his milk comes from so he stops looking you in the eyes all the time and instead spends a lot of time staring directly at ‘the girls’.  

My baby is extremely active; his legs are only ever stationary when he’s asleep. He kicked me so much in the womb he actually dislocated my sternum! Put my son on a changing mat and he looks like Michael Flatley in Lord of the Dance which surprises me because I have never been what one might call ‘athletic’ - my greatest athletic achievement was falling three storeys and not dying in 1997 and, to be fair, gravity did most of the work there. Speaking of changing mats, have you ever tried changing a 4 month old’s clothes? Let me enlighten you: it’s akin to trying to put a pair of tights on a crocodile - there is a LOT of writing about and rolling over. 

When you become a parent you very quickly start enthusiastically encouraging your child;  heartily celebrating every small achievement such as not pooping all over his onesie with an overly enthusiastic ‘Good job, my love!’ There was one time early on when I was so tired, I actually took a load of his clothes out of the washing machine and as I shut the washing machine door I proceeded to tell the washing machine, ‘Good job my love!’ as though I was president of the Association For Appreciation of Household Appliances. 

There is nothing like parenting to push you beyond all you thought you were capable of enduring but it’s not all challenging and hard. When my son grabs my finger, or gives me a wide gummy smile, or squeals with delight, or does something new or adorable, my heart just explodes with more joy than I ever thought it could contain... And suddenly all the tough stuff is totally worth it - the myriad of late nights and early mornings, the endless jiggling, the inconsolable crying, the endless laundry, and more poop than any one tiny human should legally be capable of producing - it all pales in significance alongside the incredible delight of having a tiny, cute, irresistible human in your life. 

And baby bonus: you now have someone to blame all those rouge loud farts on in public.