Will I Ever Sleep Again?

Late in Carly’s pregnancy, we completed an online course titled “Will I ever sleep again?” After watching the first few videos, I used to joke that the answer to the entire course, which spanned a few hours over several videos, could be stated simply: No. (It was not that funny of a joke.)

The course taught us—and specifically, me—a lot of information that we didn’t know—how to swaddle properly, how wake windows ruled everything, how babies, when they’re fussy, love movement and noise because it imitates their mother’s womb—but it didn’t give a satisfying answer to its central question. Because it can’t. Because the answer, like that to most questions, is much more complicated—gray when we want black and white. Will I ever sleep again? Yes. But probably not as much as you want to, or used to. Also, it depends. There are going to be nights when you feel like you won’t. And there are going to be nights when you think your child is going to be a Nobel Laureate because they slept through till morning. Finally, and importantly, you probably don’t have as much control over it as you think you do. That answer is neither satisfying nor succinct. But it’s some version of the truth.

Sleep, perhaps more than anything else, is understandably a pressing concern in the minds of most new parents (including us). It dictates your mood, your outlook, your daily schedules and routines. Want to go for a run before work in the morning? Sounds great, until you and your wife are up with your screaming 6-month-old in the dark mid-morning hours. Ready for that road trip to Florida to visit family? Wonderful, just strap your baby in the car seat and hit the highway, just like you used to—but be prepared to stop every half-hour because she won’t stop crying. Time to unwind and enjoy a movie together? Grab a blanket and cozy up on the couch; just ignore the screams from above, your baby protesting sleep upstairs. 

Accordingly, new parents spend an unhealthy amount of money on methods that promise to help—or make!—their babies sleep through the night, a practice called sleep training. There are countless books on the topic, all of which can be read during parents’ ample free time, and a cursory Google search reveals several cutely and aspirationally named online programs—Tinyhood ($100), EATSLEEPDREAM ($150), taking cara babies ($249), Little Z’s ($99)—all promising tantalizing results: getting your baby to sleep through the night in two weeks or less. If you choose to enter this tempting world, soon you will be dropping into casual conversation phrases like the Ferber Method (sounds like a Netflix original), Graduated Extinction (band name?), and the most polarizing thing on the internet since that dress that was two colors at once: Cry It Out.

(Whatever your thoughts on Cry It Out, and I realize most people probably have none, at least its name says exactly what it is: You drop your baby in their crib, close the door behind you, and don’t open it until the morning. You let them cry it out. Eventually, the thinking goes, they will discover that you will not always be there to soothe or feed them back to sleep, so they’ll learn how to put themselves to sleep any time they wake up; they will then use these skills to sleep through the night. There are studies supporting the effectiveness of this technique, and many more pieces debating whether parents should try it. This is not one of them.)

Carly and I did not try Cry It Out. We paid, too much, for a course that advocated the Ferber Method/Graduated Extinction, a less extreme version than Cry It Out, and that was hard enough. Our daughter, Mayla, was determined to make sleep training as difficult as possible. The first night she cried, at varying levels of intensity, for about 45 minutes until relenting. We attempted to make and eat dinner as she howled her displeasure; it was like trying to read on the beach during a hurricane. And that was one of her best performances. 

The following nights were truly awful. It was, I remember telling Carly, one of the most difficult things that we endured as a couple. With the benefit of hindsight, I recognize that claim is hyperbolic, but for those minutes leading into hours when your 5-month-old screams, with short breaks only to refill her lungs with deep gulps, nothing else seemed to matter. We, of course, felt like horrible human beings; Carly, during those unrelenting cry sessions, couldn’t focus, couldn’t eat, couldn’t do, basically, anything. When Mayla finally succumbed to biology and fell asleep, I remember thinking that the absolute meanest thing someone could do in that moment was come to our house and wake her up. Steal the car, punch me in the face, but don’t wake up the baby! 

The science behind sleep training is sound, and for most babies it’s effective. But I think what most of these courses underestimate and (understandably) don’t advertise is that it really, really sucks to listen to your baby cry for that long. They present the facts but often fail to account for emotion, which is equally important and shapes the entire experience. Or as Toni Morrison wrote much more eloquently (not about sleep training): “…[T]he crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.” The facts are sleep training works; the truth is that because we are humans and don’t like listening to our babies cry, sleep training is incredibly challenging.  

On night 11 of Mayla’s sleep training, three before the end of the magical two-week period that was supposed to see her become a perfect sleeper, she simply refused to go to sleep. As she lay in her crib, screaming her tiny lungs out for hours, Carly and I were understandably discouraged, perhaps even distraught; I remember actually falling to my knees in the kitchen, around 2 or 3 a.m., nearly in tears. We soon decided to pick her up out of the crib, thus ending our sleep training experiment.

Until a couple months later! Dismayed by Mayla’s lack of progress, we hired an independent sleep consultant. For a hefty fee we got an hour phone call and unlimited texts and emails for two weeks. It was marginally more successful. Near the end of the two weeks, one of my texts to the consultant read, “Really bad screaming. Some of the worst ever.” (I don’t remember if that was referring to Mayla or us.)

And then, a couple weeks later, Mayla somehow got good at sleeping. She stopped fighting so hard to fall asleep. She allowed herself to be soothed in her crib. She sometimes even lay down in her crib fully awake before falling asleep, the golden skill our sleep-training courses were designed to help her master. It seemed miraculous. 

Since then, she’s been a pretty good sleeper. She still has nights (the one before I finished writing this was one of them) when she wakes up randomly and won’t go back to sleep without Carly feeding her, but those are relatively rare. Most of the time we put her down in her crib between 8 and 9 p.m. and pick her up out of it around 8 the next morning. We feel lucky.

So how did she become a good sleeper? We don’t know, and maybe that’s the point. Her improvement eating was probably part of it, and maybe the sleep-training courses and consultations helped us establish principles that bore fruit later than expected. Or maybe had we done nothing the result would have been the exact same. Parents, like all humans, think they have autonomy over most events in their lives, when in fact a lot of it is simply random. Maybe sleep falls into that category, too. Sleep training is probably helpful, and studying babies, specifically their sleep, to learn more about them is essential. But equally important is to remember that babies are fickle creatures. Maybe Mayla became a good sleeper not because of anything we did but because of some natural process that took six months; we don’t know and never will. As Carly, after another battle with the blackout curtains to make Mayla’s room as dark as possible, this time literally duct taping them to the windows, told me recently, “I will never stop messing with those because I will never accept that I can’t control how well and long Mayla sleeps, that she’s just a baby and sometimes she just won’t sleep.” She said it with a self-aware smile. 

This was perhaps the most important lesson from all of those difficult nights: Some things, as hard as it is to accept, are simply beyond our control. And when your baby finally learns how to sleep—because they will—you will look back on those times with something close to a smile. Because one day, one night, your daughter will fall asleep in your arms, resting her head on your shoulder, and the only sounds will be the white noise from the sound machine and your soft singing as her breathing warms your chest: Find a beautiful love/look straight into their eyes/make sure they know they’re your morning light…

Will I ever sleep again? In that moment, the answer won’t matter.

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