Sleep: The 20/20 Experience

Sleep deprivation is something you’d never wish on a person, but it has a humbling, equalizing effect. People who’ve raised newborns or puppies understand the dread when a cry or bark pierces through REM sleep. They know how the body catapults into care-taking before the mind is awake. Nights grind into weeks, and new parents crave sleep like zombies crave brains. Out in the world, parents look at adults with older kids and aren’t fooled by their normal appearance. Inside, they know, they’re decaying, too.

Newborn-parent-zombies don’t excel at reading comprehension. This is a special pisser because they tend to slurp down books, ravenous for baby sleep solutions. The more complicated the books’ instructions, the more likely they are to be botched. For example, flip through Marc Weissbluth’s directive-dense Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, and it’s instantly clear he never read his own book while tending a newborn.

Then there’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg. She advocates establishing a consistent routine for infants. The idea is to engender cues for feedings and diaper changes that will lead to a predictable, diurnal schedule. She also says to narrate everything you do with your child, much like the voice-over in a Ken Burns documentary: “I’m pulling a wet wipe out of the box, and it’s getting caught on that round, plastic, shark-toothed thingy.”

The Whisperer’s ideas are all well and good, unless you have a rotting brain like I did as a new parent. I rarely had time to read more than a page in one sitting, and even then, I was nervously anticipating the next interruption. I did my best to be Whispery, to make every diaper change exactly the same. This meant at night, I’d flip on the bright nursery lights and describe the play-by-play in detail, down to every p.j. snap and ankle grab. I even got my poor husband in on the act (“Honey, would you say this hue is more Yellow Ochre, or Burnt Sienna?”) Little did I know I was stimulating our baby’s senses so much that she needed forty-five minutes to come down from our Cirque de Soleil.

It took years for me to figure out that quiet and darkness are king when it comes to nighttime infant sleep. During our second child’s late-night diaper changes, we used the tiny light on my travel alarm clock and just wiped the entire lower half of his body for good measure. To communicate with each other, my husband and I developed shadow-charades for messages like “stinky soaked onesie up-the-back blowout” and “this frigging diaper tab just pulled off, I quit!” Finally we’d cracked the Baby Whisperer’s secret code: whispering.

I’d be kidding myself to think my brain is moist and springy again. Almost ten years into parenting, it’s recovering, but there are still signs of spoilage. For instance, sometimes I see brand-new parents and feel sympathy, when really what’s coming up is a mixture of compassion for myself as a struggling new parent, and respect for how hard they’re working. I understand now that the Whisperer wanted me to be Ken Burns mostly to crowd out my thoughts of self-doubt. Do I still find it helpful to narrate everything I do all day? Maybe, especially in the car. If you see me driving and talking to no one, just go with it. Decide I’m a regular zombie parent crooning the new Justin Timberlake hit. I understand that he recently got married, and may be singing my song before long.