When the Very Small Boy really was still Very Small, to say that he "wasn't a very good sleeper" was putting it mildly. As a newborn, suffering from colic and reflux, he would wake to feed every two hours through the night, and was never at any stage able to nap during the day for more than 45 minutes in one stretch. I used to think that if only I could get four hours of uninterrupted sleep, I would be able to function. And (as I think we all do when we have a small baby), I obsessed relentlessly about his sleep, and was completely fixated on that eternal question: When Will He Sleep Through The Night?
It pains me to say it, but as of yet, my question remains unanswered: the Very Small Boy rarely sleeps through the night, and when he does, the price we pay is incredibly early waking. At three years and three months of age, my child remains a terrible sleeper and DH and I remain chronically sleep deprived; and although my daydream of enjoying a four-hour stretch of night-time sleep was realised a long time ago, it was way too little, and far too late.
On the rare occasions when the Very Small Boy "sleeps through", he will wake the following morning at some time between five and six. The early waking is more bearable during summer, when it is often light at that time of day; every winter for the last three years, I have been regularly woken suddenly from deep sleep around 5.30am and been forced to endure the ceaseless wailings of a Small Angry Person for up to three hours and in semi-darkness. It's not a particularly cheerful start to the day. It is, in fact, akin to the kind of torture that hardened terrorists are expected to crack under.
I consider anything beyond 6.00am to be a lie-in, but this is usually preceded by the kind of night where I am woken suddenly, randomly and without reason or warning anything up to to five times. As one can imagine, nature of this kind of night waking prevents DH and I from being able to relax when the Very Small Boy actually is asleep; the threat of being woken hanging over us like a grand piano above a couple of unwitting cartoon characters.
Admitting to the world that your child has a sleep problem is rather like outing yourself with some kind of embarrassing affliction. Most people (mercifully for them) haven't experienced the level of chronic awfulness that having a child who won't sleep brings, and are unable to understand or empathise with the level of insanity that ongoing sleep-deprivation causes. All of us, in the first few months of a baby's life, are prepared for night waking: a tiny baby needs to wake regularly to feed and we understand that we can get through this challenging time because it is both necessary and short-term. So understandably, those of us still dealing with night-waking at three years and beyond feel horribly cheated, and quite often unaccountably ashamed of our situations (and of the resentment we feel towards our sleep-challenged child).
The shame we feel is often compounded by well-meaning friends who offer up solutions which, by implication, make us feel responsible. "Put him to bed later"; "let him sleep in your room"; "tire him out during the day"; "be tougher on him" are all comments I hear often. But unfortunately it is oversimplifying the problem to suggest that I am to blame for being over-indulgent, or not nurturing enough. After all, I have two children, both of whom have the same routine and are loved in the same way and one of whom is a fantastic sleeper.
My personal take on it all? He got into some very bad sleep habits from birth onwards, due to the excessive discomfort of reflux and colic. He's intelligent and sensitive; he fears bad dreams and dislikes being alone in the dark in his bed. But beyond taking the middle ground of being loving but firm, a solution is beyond me. I am condemned, for now, to live in the shadowy, surreal half-world between day and night, sleeping and waking: the permanent abode of the chronically sleep-deprived.
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