MMM: sleepless nights in the Notes app on my phone.

We're all basically crying it out. Except... not really...

Saturday, night 1: I’m writing this one from my child’s nursery.

It’s 9:42 PM and we are playing the guessing game.

Is it gas? Is a tooth popping through? Is that cold he had last week actually gone for good?

My own feet were under my covers at 9 PM to get ahead of this whole daylight saving time thing. But by 9:15, small cries turned into wails, which then quickly turned to screams. I like to say this child doesn’t cry, he scream summons. Extremely niche reference, maybe? But we are watching How I Met Your Mother again from the beginning. Right now, I picture Teddy as my own personal Marshall’s boss at Goliath National Bank.

If you read one of my posts from last week, you know we have had a tough couple weeks of sleep around here. But this past week really took a turn for the better. He rolled onto his tummy a couple times overnight which really soothed and settled him. He slept great for most of the week. But this weekend rolled around and just two hours after bedtime, we were back in the game. it’s double overtime and the penalty kicks feel so far away.

But it’s sometimes when I’m sitting in his beautiful white glider with him, my weighted blanket holding me from the base of my stomach to the chin… that I lose myself in the memory of what he was before he was. As he starts to settle, resting his little head with his full head of straight hair (that smells and feels beyond luxurious, by the way) I think about how much I worried about him as he was growing inside me. How I imagined who he was and who he could be. How little we knew about what his genetics diagnosis really meant. I remember sitting at my desk at work, scouring research that was so full of jargon it left me feeling even more confused and terrified. Pregnancy — no matter your circumstances or complications — is just an absolute mind-you-know-what. But once you add in an unknown, like what we have dealt with so far in with his late-onset Pompe disease diagnosis, there is no telling where your brain will go.

I hesitate to write any of this down, knowing that I will likely share this on my Substack and there are going to be some people who might think, “ugh, she’s talking about how difficult sleep is again.” To which I will play the advocate on my own shoulder. Yes, yes I am. Because as a new parent, the question of sleep is an all-consuming one. Are they sleeping enough? Do we have naptimes going in the right direction? If he takes more than one car nap, am I setting us up for a night of seeming failure? Will I ever sleep again?

Sunday, night 2: I’ll never sleep again.

I’m reading a book right now that I probably shouldn’t be reading.

It’s titled “God of the Woods,” by Liz Moore. I won’t go too far down into the plot, but suffice it to say there’s a part of this book when a mother whose son has gone missing begins to hallucinate and hear the words “Mamma” coming from his room.

Stories like these evoke a visceral reaction in my body now as a new Mom. I cannot unfeel it. I’ve always been someone with a big visual imagination. It’s why as a kid I could never watch horror movies or anything remotely scary. I’m pretty sure I was wrecked for 3 solid weeks after watching the Exorcism of Emily Rose. Even writing that down gives me the heebie jeebies.

In the book, this mother (her name is Alice) is a type of prisoner in her own home. Against her wishes, her husband hires a night and a day nurse to care for their first child, a boy. When he cries out for her in the night at one point, she races down the hallway to hold her son. She describes the outstretched arms, the look on his face when she walks into his room and the novelty of seeing the person he wants most in this world — his mother — walk in to comfort him. The child is quickly taken from her and her husband tells her to go back to bed.

I read this piece right before falling asleep.

Now, before any of you go looking at Daddy Huff, let me reassure you that Logan could not be a more supportive parent when it comes to how I want to tackle overnights. But it has become a talking point in our household these last few weeks.

“Do we just let him cry it out?” Logan asks me one night, as Teddy wails in the other room.

“It feels neglectful and cruel to me,” I say honestly and without judgment for his question. Or at least, that’s how I hope he receives it.

We let him cry for another few minutes to try it on for size. Five minutes, ten. It’s unbearable for me.

“How does this feel to you?” I ask Logan.

“I mean, not good,” Logan replies.

I go in. I pick him up and I comfort him.

I do not have any answers right now. I’m recounting this and jotting this down as I’m sitting up with my child, for a second night in a row. He’s likely teething, and I know that. But it doesn’t lessen the feeling of deprivation I feel in my body. The ache I feel for sleep. The way I cannot differentiate the sound of my child’s scream and what it might feel like to be chased by a lion.

We’ve moved from his room to the living room so I can at least put my feet up. He cannot get comfortable. I feed him. I know logically I do NOT want to be feeding him overnight and 98% of the time, I don’t. But at this point I’m desperate and I don’t know what else to do. I allow him to nurse and he seems to settle.

I’ve tried to put him down again twice. Each time he wakes up and screams. He’s clearly uncomfortable, and Logan has tried to come in and help me. But each time, we are met with a similar new obstacle: this child is now permanent velcro. The first signs of separation anxiety are sprouting and even from his Dad to me.

I tried to go back to bed. Logan held him screaming, closing our bedroom door and trying to get as far away from me as possible so I could settle and get some rest myself. I maybe fell asleep for one hour before this pattern began.

But as I tried to lie in our bed, I could hear him screaming in the other room. Sometimes it was real, sometimes… like poor Alice… the phantom screams haunted me. I felt disillusioned. Awake but in a different realm.

So I am up again, holding my baby. Allowing him to recognize he is safe and neither of us are being chased by a lion. Is this right? I don’t know. Is it wrong? I know it’s not. While it may not be the “correct” method, I know in my bones that what I’m doing in this moment isn’t going against my innate parenting instinct, in which case… I can never be wrong. To hold him and to comfort him is to love him. And if I have to show up that way again and again and again, I will.

Monday morning:

I’m going to be honest.

I woke up this morning not wanting to share this at all. I considered posting a “no MMM this week, let’s try again next week” note on my page.

But it’s a promise I’ve made to you and a promise I’ve made to myself to show up here as much as I can. As consistently as I can. It’s just reality that THIS is my reality right now.

I have all these ideas and essays and drafts sitting, waiting… untouched on this page. I cannot wait to really be able to give them more of my energy. I feel that creative energy bubbling under the surface.

But I also have to be honest with myself that right now, I can only do so much. I can only be so many things to so many people. And right now, my #1 priority is transitioning into an entirely different life phase. Becoming “Mamma.” Becoming the flexible spouse and the full-time momager. So, I’m going to continue to write about that.

I’ll also add that on a personal level, we spent the weekend house hunting. Some of you may know that we lived in South Boston for the first 2.5 years of our time here in Boston. We love it so much. Our condo there was our happy place. The place where we truly fell in love with being here in New England and the place we dreamed about all our life could be here.

We are now gearing up to sell that condo. And in the meantime, we have been living in a beautiful rental that we feel so lucky to have experienced. Which means — we are going to be moving…. AGAIN.

As a family, this will be our 5th move together. For some added hilarity, Logan and I have been married for almost 6 years. That means we have — on average — moved almost once a year. A couple short stints (like our first 6 months Southie lease) and one longer one (our 2.5 years at our first married Columbia, SC home) and that brings us to now. Teddy will be able to say he had 3 different places to live all in his first year of life. More on this another time.

So why even come on here and share my imperfect, ragged and sleep-deprived little journal entries?

Because:

I needed to remind myself — and to remind you — that we can only be so many things at once.

ALL OF THAT TO SAY: choose your battles this week. Take on less. Rest more. Don’t worry about the way it will look to the masses, but how it will feel to you.

I want to grow this readership and I want to appeal to this audience, but I also know that I want this audience to want to hear about what I’m writing about. And as they say: you have to write about what you know.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go make myself another cup of coffee.

XO -

SB