Most of us quickly forget the reality of early parenthood, but writing it all down was one of the best things I’ve ever done
“How old was your baby when he started sleeping through?” asked a friend recently. She is in the trenches with her newborn, who will only sleep on her – an affliction that has the potential to push parents to the brink of madness, and for which they have yet to find a cure. I recalled that it was eight weeks, if you count sleeping through as five hours or more, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her. I only remember, I think, because I was well rested enough to make decent memories.
People, readers included, took great joy in telling me that it wouldn’t last, and they were right: it didn’t. Though because of it, I can scarcely remember the winter at all. The baby was constantly unwell and we had entered the sort of co-sleeping situation that saw neither of us get much rest. For his part, he was waking for milk every hour; and for my part, I couldn’t get a sentence from Your Baby Week By Week out of my head. The line was something like: “Imagine how bad you’d feel if your baby died because you co-slept with them.” I can’t remember it word for word now, but at the time it beat its way through the membrane of my troubled slumber to form a haunting refrain that meant any rest I was getting was of even poorer quality and thus, conversely, meant I was probably more likely to have an accident during my waking hours. (I should add here that I have great respect for the book’s author Prof Caroline Fertleman and her co-writer Simone Cave, and say that I met the former when she was briefly my son’s consultant and was genuinely starstruck. Some people turn to putty when they meet pop stars; for others, it’s paediatricians.)
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
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