TW: suicidal ideation
1986
“She was so stubborn she would scream in her crib for 90 minutes straight!” my parents laughed uproariously. My infant inability to follow harsh sleep training methods was a joke, a funny parenting story, proof that I was a manipulative child.
1990
I was firmly convinced that I never slept because the only thing I remembered in the morning was being wide awake in the middle of the night with insomnia and playing with my toys in bed.
1997
Five siblings were crowded into a small bedroom. My bunk bed stood right next to the baby’s crib and I tried desperately to sleep as the baby screamed below me.
1998
The baby—a new one—was crying. I finally picked him up out of his crib and carried him downstairs, trying to rock him to sleep. I stayed awake for hours.
2004
I lay in my bunk bed in the college dorm room that I shared with my roommate. It was 10:00 pm but the lights were on and my roommate and her friends were chattering below me. “Is she sleeping?” one girl incredulously asked. I didn’t respond. I just wanted to be asleep. “Shhhhh,” my roommate answered. “Let’s go outside.”
2008
Back in my parents’ house for grad school, I was the one who heard my little sister wake up in the night with the stomach flu. Half asleep, I stumbled to the kitchen to grab a stainless steel mixing bowl to catch the vomit. I discovered too late that I had grabbed a colander instead.
2012
My heart was racing and my body was covered in sweat. I thought something was wrong with my heart—why was it pounding so fast? I went to the doctor and left with a heart rate monitor to monitor heart palpitations. I didn’t know—and the doctor didn’t realize—that I was experiencing panic attacks.
2013
Married one month, I lay next to my sleeping husband and chugged a capful of Zyquil. My exhausted brain wouldn’t stop thinking about the library IT director who had just suggested that I give him a blow job while I was kneeling to unlock a door.
2018
I lurched awake, choking on bile. My growing baby left no room for my stomach inside my taut abdomen. I had barely slept for the duration of this wretched pregnancy and I contemplated just ending it all.
2019
Here I was again, sleepless, with a crying baby in my arms. Except that this was my beautiful child and I would hold him for as long as he needed.
2024
I wake up in the middle of the night and feel my 5-year-old son cuddled up next to me in the bed. I roll over, snuggle him more closely, and fall back asleep.
I am so so sorry. None of what happened to you was your fault. It was the most inexcusable cruelty.
My daughter revolted against being separated from me during our first - and only - night in the hospital after birth. I hadn’t slept in 30 hours (labor) and the nurses warmly suggested I let them care for her in the hospital nursery so I could get some hard-earned rest.
It was not to be. At 2 - or perhaps 3 - I awoke with a strong desire to go to her. No need. It was only a few minutes before a nurse brought her to me. She was screaming in rage. She had, reportedly, awaken the entire nursery, and slapped at the offered pacifier so hard it went skittering across the floor.
The instant I put her on my chest, she took one deep breath, let out a sigh of relief, and fell immediately to sleep.
Sleep training would have broken her, perhaps for life. More importantly, it would have broken a fundamental trust between us: that I could reliably be trusted to care for her. I never considered it.
I find it incomprehensible that God commands us to destroy our children’s trust and sense of wellbeing in this world - and worse, do it in obedience to Him. I know this with utter certainty: either they are wrong about what God wants from us or there is no God, so they are free to imagine Him to suit their own purposes.