Tired is the New Black
The only time in your life that you will ever want to cry about how tired you are is when you become a parent. Everyone always asks you how’s she sleeping? Or the infamous, is she sleeping through the night? In my short lived parenting career, I have only ever met one parent whose under one year old sleeps through the night and after learning of this, I quickly ended our association. Babies don’t sleep through the night. After becoming a parent you will never, ever, sleep the same again. Even when they are teenagers, I imagine there will be a sleepless night or two when they are at their first concert or “sleep-over” which we all know is just code for a party. You will live in a perpetual state of tiredness and you will learn to live with it.
It drives me crazy whenever my husband tells me how tired he is and surprisingly it isn’t even because me and my boobs are the ones that get up with her every night. It is because this is like saying, “parenting is hard” or “labor hurts”, let’s just recognize these as facts and stop overstating the obvious. I tell him that we will be tired for the next 18 years and then some because we will probably start this train all over again in the near future with baby #2. Tired is the new black, my love.
Sleep deprivation is actually a form of torture used by the CIA. I am not sure the ins and outs of it all because when I googled sleep deprivation torture, some very twisted things appeared and I am too much of a weenie to read up on it. Plus, I never wanted to be one of those parents that always had to “research” (and by this I mean google) everything about parenting and if I put more time into my blogging research than my parenting research, I would probably feel a little guilty. I already have enough guilt; I was raised Catholic. There is no way to poetically describe what it feels like when your baby wakes you from your REM cycle on three separate occasions all within the first hour that you decide to try and fall asleep. You inwardly kick yourself since you should have gone to sleep when she went down at 7, but you wanted to attempt to maintain some level of normalcy by watching one episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County, and you know that the only reason they all have 5 children is because they also have night nurses and don’t have to put up with this shit. The frustration and the rage are palpable. And when you do answer their tiny wails and come to find out it isn’t because they are hungry or have pooped their pants, no they are crying because they are exhausted and want to go back to sleep. I would normally laugh and point out the blatant irony of the situation, but I am simply too tired.
I have this same picture of myself and Charlotte, but my mouth is open and it's not cute.