You Might Be a Tired New Mom If...

I admit it: I've had it easy.

When it comes to dealing with lack of sleep during this newborn phase of Moriah's life, it honestly hasn't been that bad.  Typically, sleep deprivation is one of the things - if not THE thing - I dread the most about the adjustment to having a new baby in the family.  In the past, I have often gotten to the point of feeling absolutely desperate for sleep; and that's not a pleasant feeling at all.

But this time - oh, this time!  It has been so much easier than I expected.  For one thing, it didn't take Moriah long to settle into a routine of waking up once in the night to eat and then going back to sleep right after that. That is not a bad schedule at all for a newborn.  For another thing, Jeff's mom was here for four full weeks to help out; and because of that, I could often go back to sleep in the mornings after Moriah's breakfast, knowing that Grandma Fisher was on duty to help the boys.  Mornings were sleepy times for Moriah; and because of my mother-in-law's help, they could be for me, too!  :)  Yet another factor is that now that I'm on my fifth child, I'm benefiting from the perspective that comes with experience - namely, the realization that these days and weeks and months really do go by so very quickly.  Rather than lamenting Moriah's night wakings, I actually (well, most of the time) enjoyed and treasured them, knowing that before long, they would only be a memory.

And now they are.  Moriah started sleeping through the night at two months of age; and even though she had a week or two of adjustment and did not sleep through every night during that time, by the time she was two and a half months, it was RARE that she awoke in the night.  We followed a very loose, flexible Babywise approach with her, and now we're reaping the benefits.  I don't take these nights of good sleep for granted, especially when I remember the sleep challenges we faced with Shav.  I don't know what the future holds in terms of Moriah's sleep; but for now, I thank God for her ease in going to sleep and her length of sleep.  I am grateful.

Having said that, however, I will admit to being tired - VERY tired - at some points during the first couple months of Moriah's life.  I will also admit to my brain not working as well as it normally does, resulting in some (now that I'm looking back) hilarious episodes of brain fog and other sleepy behavior.  I jotted down some of these as they occurred, so here is a list: Signs that You Might Be a Tired New Mom.  Or, in other words, Signs that I Was a Tired New Mom, because all of these really happened to me!  :)  (I did a similar list after Tobin was born, found here.)

1. One night when I had been awakened by Moriah needing to nurse, I was trying to figure out the date.  I could not, however, remember what month it was...or, much worse, even what season it was.  I had to stop and ask myself questions ("are there colorful leaves on the trees? no? it can't be fall! what about snow? any of that on the ground? no? must not be winter!") before I could remember that it was actually spring, and then from there I finally determined that it must be April.

2. This was to be expected, since having a daughter after having had four sons was definitely breaking the mold for us; but sometimes, in my lack of mental clarity, it was so hard to remember to say "she" and not "he" when referring to Moriah.

3. Brushing one's teeth before bed takes all of...I don't know...a minute and a half; but some nights I was literally so tired that I felt like I could not even stay up for the short amount of time it would have taken to brush my teeth.  Fortunately, there weren't too many nights when I skipped tooth-brushing.  ;-)  But I realized how prized a commodity sleep was when I thought, in my extreme fatigue, that a few minutes were better spent pursuing sleep rather than brushing my teeth.

4. There were times when I would nurse Moriah on one breast, hold her up to my shoulder to burp her, and then not be able to remember which breast I had just nursed her on.  Was it the right?  Maybe the left?  I didn't want to put her to nurse on an empty breast, so I needed to figure it out.  But it was SO HARD to remember what I had done 10 seconds previously!

5. During another of my middle-of-the-night wake times, I was thinking about Josiah and a particular violin piece he needed to learn ("The Two Grenadiers," to be exact).  He was having some trouble with it and had gotten discouraged.  In my grogginess, I thought, "WHY does he have to learn that piece?  WHY are they making him do that?  It's so hard for him.  WHY are they demanding that he learn something that is so difficult?  WHY aren't they nicer to him?"  :)

6. Countless times, I fell asleep while nursing Moriah.  I would get her out of her crib, sit down with her in my glider rocker, put her to breast, and then (no exaggeration) immediately fall asleep.  I remember doing that with the boys a few times, but I wasn't as good at sleeping sitting up as I am now.  With Moriah, I became a pro at that.

7. Sometimes in the night, I felt an irrational sense of worry about Moriah spitting up on her clothes.  I'd be standing at the changing table, putting a new outfit on her because she had gotten the other one wet; and then I'd envision her spitting up on the new outfit, and me needing to change her again, and then her spitting up again, me changing her, and on and on.  I thought, "What am I going to do if she spits up so much that I use up all her sleepers?  What is she going to wear then?"  It was a real source of concern for me.  ;-)  Funny, it never happened; and she had plenty of clothes to wear, all night long.

8. One day at the beginning of afternoon quiet time, David was in his room and had asked me for a certain CD to listen to.  I told him I would get it for him, so I went down to the kitchen; but instead of getting out the big black case of CDs from the cupboard, I opened the refrigerator and got out the milk.  That wasn't exactly what David was asking for.  ;-)

9.  I knew this would happen, but I was rather...ahem...extra-emotional during the postpartum period after Moriah's birth.  I wasn't exactly surprised at the disproportionate emotional responses coming forth from me, but I did kind of have to shake my head at myself as I felt such strong surges of emotion when I knew the situation clearly didn't call for it.  I'll give three examples.

First, there was the day I found a dead baby bird.  Now let me say that I grew up in the country, my grandparents were farmers, and from an early age I was aware that death is a part of the circle of life.  I get that.  I know that baby birds die; and as sad as that might be to think about, I usually don't shed a tear over them.  But on that particular day (which happened to be Memorial Day, as I recall), I found a dead baby bird in a tree stump in our backyard, and I cried - sobbed, to be more exact.  This wasn't any baby bird.  This was a bird that Jeff had tenderly rescued and placed in that stump.  This was a bird that my boys had picked bugs from potato plants and brought to the bird to drop into its throat to feed it.  This was a bird that my boys had dripped little drops of water into its open beak.  This was a bird that they were trying so hard to save, and it died.  I felt like my heart had broken, and I cried hard for that poor little thing.  All the while, I knew my reaction was way out of proportion to what had happened; after all, baby birds die all the time.  But I could not stop crying until I had cried myself out and was spent emotionally.

The second incident occurred when I tried to get Josiah and David into swimming lessons this summer.  I did everything I could to make it happen: marking on my calendar so I wouldn't forget to call, calling early in the day on the first day that registration was open to county residents, not giving up even when no one answered at the pool, calling again and again, even considering loading all the kids up in the Big White Van and driving to the pool to stand in line and/or pester someone into letting us register.  When I did finally get through on the phone and was told that there were no more available spots, I finished the phone call politely, then hung up the phone and bawled my eyes out.  I thought Josiah and David would be SO disappointed, and I felt like, despite my best efforts, I had failed them.  It felt like SUCH A BIG DEAL to me at that point in time.  Later, when I had regained some control and was able to break the news to the boys, they didn't bat an eyelash.  "We'll plan to have you take lessons in the fall," I consoled them.  "OK," they said and returned to playing, probably with LEGOs.  They actually didn't need any consolation, but I did.  Silly me.

The last example I'll share happened when Jeff went up to our pasture and found a nest of baby rats.  We had been having a rat problem under and around the water trough in the pasture and the chicken coop, so it wasn't a shock to find baby rats.  Jeff gathered them up in a bucket and brought them into the house to show me before he "got rid of them."  When he came near to where I sat in the rocking chair in the living room, shelling peas, I put up my hand to stop him and tried to choke back the tears.  "Don't!" I said.  "I can't stand to look!  I know they're rats, and I know they need to be killed, but I can't handle looking at them before you do it!"  I was afraid I'd get a tiny bit (or a lot) attached to them, just like with the baby bird, and not be able to handle it when Jeff killed them.  And I didn't want a repeat of the sobbing-because-of-a-bird incident; I knew I wasn't strong enough for that!  :)  As it turned out, when Jeff saw the tender heart of his firstborn son and how sad Josiah was about the baby rats being killed, Jeff ended up not killing them.  Instead, he relocated them to a spot along a nearby creek; and even though we all knew that they probably wouldn't survive, it was better than Jeff being the one to actually kill them.  In all of these incidents, I realized that the situations did not warrant such strong feelings from me!  But I felt powerless to stop the emotions, so I just ended up crying and letting my tears release the feelings.

While I'm on the subject of postpartum fatigue, I'll confess to having another thought during the first weeks after Moriah was born.  It was this:  "I'm the only one who can be tired."  For example, one day someone commented on Jeff looking tired, and he responded to them by saying something about not getting a lot of sleep with a newborn in the house.  In my head popped the ugly thought of "What do you know about not getting enough sleep?  I'm the one who always gets up with Moriah."  I really had to guard my attitude so that I didn't adopt an air of "woe is me, I'm so tired, I'm such a sacrificial mom because I give up so much sleep, everyone should be extra nice to me because I'm suffering so much."  I was reminded that fatigue is like sadness: there's no finite measure of it.  When someone else gets tired, that doesn't make me less tired.  Other people's levels of fatigue don't add to or subtract from my own level.  It was entirely possible that Jeff was tired, but I didn't need to feel threatened by that.  (And by the way, if you don't know this already, Jeff is a VERY involved, hands-on dad who does a terrific job of stepping up after a new baby is born and filling in the gaps of caring for the other children.  I have no complaints - just heaps of gratitude for how helpful he is!)

One more thing before this tired mom (but not as tired as I was two months ago!) posts this and then hops into bed.  Several friends had recommended a blog post, Counting the Hours, to me in those early days, and I read it and was impacted - literally changed - by it.  I think it should be required reading for all new moms.  :)  I was so inspired by what the author wrote that I did what she said:  I stopped counting the hours of sleep I (and Moriah) got.  When I saw what a healthier perspective I had when I paid less attention to the clock, I was reminded of how, during labor, I choose to NOT focus on the contractions and I never time them.  My mind and body do so much better when I'm not concentrating on the progression of labor.  Likewise, I found out that I'm much more relaxed, grateful, and at peace when I'm not thinking about how much - or how little - sleep I'm getting.  Psalm 127:2 tells us that God grants sleep to those He loves; and one thing I learned more deeply after Moriah was born is that He does a good job being in charge of our sleep, if we let Him.  He really will provide.  He'll make sure we have enough sleep; and when we think we haven't gotten enough, He'll be the source of strength for us.

What a comfort for tired new moms!!