I don’t sleep so much at the moment.
My son is three months old. He wakes up at night. Sometimes twice, other times many more. There are breastfeedings, small sounds and a hand to be held. And some nights he just doesn’t quite agree that the night is for sleeping.
I don’t sleep so much at the moment.
My son is three months old. He wakes up at night. Sometimes twice, other times many more. There are breastfeedings, small sounds and a hand to be held. And some nights he just doesn’t quite agree that the night is for sleeping.
I should be tired.
But I’m not really.
I can get up in the morning after a night that has been broken into small pieces and still function. I can talk to my daughter, make breakfast, answer messages and go for a walk with the pram. I can think. I can write.
Some days I almost forget how little I actually slept.
It has made me think about what a strange organism the female body really is.
Because maybe it’s not just willpower. Maybe a part of me is always awake now.
I therefore started reading about what actually happens to the body after a birth. In an article from Momkind about hormones after birth, I read about the major hormonal changes that take place in the body and how, among other things, breastfeeding affects hormones such as oxytocin and prolactin. The article also describes how hormones, lack of sleep and a nervous system in constant readiness can play together in the time after birth.
The child is born. But the body is not finished.
It continues to change and adapt to the new life.
Maybe that’s why I wake up at the slightest sound. Maybe that’s why I can sleep easily and still fall back asleep in minutes. As if the body has learned a new kind of sleep: one where a part of me is always listening for him.
I get fascinated by it.
Because I always thought that sleep was something the body kept track of.
One night too little. An hour too little. A small debt that slowly grew.
But it doesn’t feel that way right now.
The body has its own ways of keeping me going.
Maybe for a period you can live on something else.
On hormones. On alert. On love?
On the strange state where you sleep with a part of yourself awake.
Because I can feel that I am different at night now.
I wake up before he can cry. A little sound from the cradle is enough. A movement. A change in his breathing.
It is a special kind of wakefulness. Not the wakefulness you know from a deadline or a night on the town. Not the restless wakefulness where you wish for sleep.
It is an awakening that comes because another person is close.
But the vigilance in the dark is neither scary nor lonely.
It is full of presence.
And so I often sit at night with my son in my arms and think about how many women are also awake right now with a small child in their arms.
It feels like a quiet community.
