You haven’t had your baby yet, but the obsession with sleep has already begun. People will start telling you to go to bed immediately and get as much sleep as humanly possible before the baby arrives because—in case you haven’t heard—babies are not excellent at sleeping.
They say this as if sleep is currency and you can save it up like the Barefoot Investor of Slumber, hour by hour, in a little safe, and when the baby is cluster-feeding (we’ll get to that later), and you’ve had fourteen and a half minutes’ sleep in three days, you can just withdraw a few hours from the sleep bank and you’ll feel fresh as a milkmaid.
It doesn’t work that way, my friend. You could never in your life accrue the number of hours you’ll lose. It will make zero difference. And here’s another thing no one seems to acknowledge: PREGNANT PEOPLE DON’T SLEEP EITHER.
The first trimester will be gross and sore and sick, and sleeping will be all you want to do, but it never feels like enough and the need to pee every hour continues through the night as well.
The second trimester feels a bit better, and your body starts to feel less poisoned but the heartburn sets in and the baby starts to kick, and you’re not allowed to sleep on your back because of blood flow to your heart, so things are getting uncomfortable.
The third trimester feels like you’ve got a suckling pig strapped to your front and you can’t bend or roll, so sleeping means you’re sitting up with your eyes closed with 87 cushions carefully placed around you in an intricate and wondrous pattern, but you never actually sleep so really you’re just resting your eyes.
Any time you do manage to fall asleep, you’ll be assaulted with dreams so unnerving you worry for yourself because surely a normal person wouldn’t be able to conjure up things that sick and depraved.
Which actually sucks so much more than you think because you will be tired, my girl. So damn tired. You will want to nap at your desk at work. You will nap at the dinner table. You will nap while getting your hair cut. Any sort of inactivity will make you want to nap.
So good luck with that!