The A-Z of losing your ZZZ’s

The A-Z of losing your ZZZ’s

There is no mom on this earth that gets through the baby and toddler stage without losing some sleep. Even if they sleep train early, there is still always the newborn stage where they don’t know night from day, teething, and transitions from a crib to a big kid bed that will disrupt the sleep flow.

When you’re sleep deprived, you may be able to function on a basic level—feed the baby, change diapers, get a few chores done— but you’re not exactly living your best life. Mistakes will be made because your life revolves around someone else now. You are currently riding the first month postpartum roller coaster. Your hormones will have you so crazy that one minute you will be basking in the heavenly smell of your newborn, and the next you will be crying into your cold coffee. When moms are extremely sleep deprived they tend to do a few bizarre things:

1. Language/perception mess-ups. In the early days of motherhood, I began switching the words in all of my sentences. I told my husband “My next car really needs Seated Heats and tonight we should have Lack of Ram for dinner.” I would try to turn on the TV while breastfeeding on the couch and become instantly frustrated that the remote control wasn’t working; because it wasn’t the remote in my hand, it was my iPhone.

2. Coffee-related mess-ups. You will pour the ground coffee beans where the water should go or make it perfectly, only to walk away without turning the coffee machine on at all. There was mornings I warmed my coffee up in the microwave so many times that I eventually forgot it was there. Seven times to heat it back up to not even take a single sip.

3. General clothing mess-ups. You may leave the house in two different shoes, with your shirt inside out or realize that you’ve made it to the grocery store in your pyjamas. And you’ll look down at your two different shoes, and you won’t care.

4. Generally forgetful mess-ups. You’ll walk upstairs multiple times to retrieve something only to completely forget why you went upstairs in the first place or be in the middle of telling your husband a story of your day only to realize in the middle that you’ve completely lost your train of thought. The words “Now what was I talking about again...” will be become quite familiar. The other day I completely forgot what my kid’s birthday was while talking to a stranger so I made one up.

6. Name mess-ups. You’ll call your husband by your kids’ names. You’ll call your kids by their siblings’ names. Or you will forget the name of the person you’re currently talking to. They call it mommy brain for a reason. It’s a thing.

7. Your sleep will be forever different. I would love to tell you that the lack of shut-eye only lasts for a few years, but then I would be lying to you, my friend.

Once you’ve had a baby, even while you’re asleep, you’ll spend the rest of your nights with one ear on alert for sudden cries or coughs, and in later years, the squeak of a window as your child tries to sneak out. This will last until your children are paying their own mortgage. Somehow your husbands will magically sleep through it all.

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