Nicole Ratcliffe glanced over at the clock through the cracks between her eyelids. It was 2am and her baby had been screaming for hours.
The new mum had tried everything to stop her daughter’s piercing cries – even ringing 111, afraid she was unwell. Exhausted, she placed the new-born down, returned to her room and completely broke down.
“She just wouldn’t go to sleep,” Nicole said. “I was feeding her, rocking her and singing to her; she was screaming for two hours.
“I started banging on the bed. I felt if I didn’t let this frustration out, it would be dangerous for the baby.
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“It was that fear factor that I could end up lobbing her across the room. You can’t describe it – sleep deprivation is a form of torture; it completely messes with you. If you don’t get the right help, you can really spiral.”
Nicole, from the Sharston area of Wythenshawe, says problems with her eldest child Sofia started right from her birth. Complications meant the 41-year-old ended up needing a C-Section, far from the natural delivery she envisioned for her first-born.
The issues continued when Sofia, now aged six, struggled with breastfeeding and they both contracted infections. But life as a new mum really took a turn for the worse when Sofia wouldn’t sleep – pushing Nicole and her husband to the brink of divorce.
“They tell you new-born babies sleep but mine didn’t at all. Nothing was what I was told it would be,” Nicole continued.
“I’d always intended to have four children and I was very confident that I was going to be a great mum, being extremely maternal, having read loads of books and attended antenatal classes. The truth is, I wasn’t prepared at all for the reality of motherhood.
“As months passed with no improvement in her sleep patterns, I became even more exhausted. To others, I pretended everything was fine, but I was struggling with extreme sleep deprivation and my mental health was suffering.
“I was experiencing feelings of high anxiety and rage and my marriage was at breaking point. Everything was a challenge from day one.”
Nicole’s relationship became so strained the couple were forced to take up counselling to save their marriage. When Sofia was almost nine-months-old, the pair sought professional help from a consultant who was finally able to improve the tot’s sleep.
“By the time she was four-months-old, me and my husband tried to go out for the day and we had the most awful argument,” Nicole said. “The sleep deprivation had got to us so much, we couldn’t cope.
“We hated each other, we really did. None of us could stand each other. I kept being labelled as an anxious mum; it wasn’t fixing the problem. We weren’t sleeping.
“By the August time, we started marriage counselling. We thought it was the last thing we could do because we didn’t know what else to do. It was cheaper to do that than get a divorce.
“When Sofia was eight and a half months, someone told me about a sleep consultant. We changed her routine which helped her sleep more. I thought, ‘This so different’. She was happier, we were happier and we were able to start functioning again.”
Driven by her own exhaustion and the will to help others, Nicole began studying sleep herself, eventually going on to become an expert and setting up her own business, Baby2Sleep.
As well as being able to help other parents, she felt better able to deal with sleep issues when their second daughter Alyssia was born, three days before lockdown.
“It took eight and a half months until we finally got help with Sofia’s sleeping,” Nicole continued. “There’s no point waiting until someone is in the state I was in or worse.
“You’ve got to change everything when you’re pregnant and be told that this is potentially about to happen. Babies are real, they’re not dolls. We need to change the whole culture to say it’s really tough and that it’s OK to ask for help. There are experts out there who want to help you.”
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