“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.)
