Sleep, I came to understand this year, is everything. Without sleep, action, change and momentum all feel impossible. Without sleep, you are living half a life, an existence that is less about living and more about getting through. My husband and I entered 2023 in a state of complete exhaustion. Our baby had been hospitalised several times and through a combination of terror, survival and necessity, he and I had entered a co-sleeping arrangement that saw him waking every hour for milk.
My husband was working full time and I was trying to juggle being essentially a stay-at-home mother with writing my column and promoting a book. The only reason I was still sane was because my husband consistently shared feeding and nights from the beginning, and at the worst times would often take the baby until the early hours so I could get a block of sleep from, say, 8pm until 2am. If I had had a less supportive husband or a baby that didn’t take a bottle from him, or if my lovely mother hadn’t stepped in when things got really tough, I suspect I would have lost my mind.
We didn’t sleep train – we hadn’t needed to. We were those people whose baby slept through from eight weeks, blissful on his back in a starfish position – the ones who stay quiet when other parents despair of the frequent night wakings and strategise solutions with each other. We never talked about it unless we were directly asked, “How is he sleeping?” Just wait for the four-month sleep regression, people said, darkly. But that never came. How smug we were, how self-satisfied at our infant’s ability to self-settle, the fact that he instinctively seemed to know how to tank up before bed.
What fools.
It was illness that did for our baby’s sleep. He came to rely on the comfort and reassurance of milk and touch, and we refused to deprive him of it, despite it being repeatedly suggested that we sleep train. I have never judged those who do; a mum who has let a baby cry it out is better than a dead mum (and I have friends who were so exhausted that they started to wish themselves away). But it wasn’t for me. I knew I would crack. His sobs cut through me like a knife.
Which is how I came to hear of Brenda Hart. “You should get Nanny Brenda,” another mother said to me in the playground, her voice slightly lowered as if to acknowledge that her suggestion crossed a Rubicon. I live in Islington, surrounded by rich people who can afford to throw money at their problems, so this was not the first time I had heard the name of the elite sleep trainer. I’d even read about her in the New Yorker, where Sam Knight described her as “a matron of the old school”. Her method is simple: you shut the door and let the baby cry it out.
Despite my previous resolve not to do this, I started fantasising about hiring Brenda, not caring by this point how much it cost. I went back and forth endlessly in a way that she would probably roll her eyes at. I observed the sleep training wars of Mumsnet, internalising all the worst messages: leaving him to cry even for a minute would damage him irrevocably. A chastising paragraph from Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, which paid no heed at all to maternal mental health in its discussion of sleep training, haunted me. I believed on some level that sleep training would make me a bad mother. Yet I desperately needed rest. All I could think about and talk about was sleep.
You’re probably wondering, “Where’s the hope?” Did it lie with Nanny Brenda? Though Hart’s success is undeniable, we didn’t hire her in the end.
Several things happened to change our lives. A perinatal psychologist recommended a book called Through the Night: Helping Parents and Sleepless Infants, by Dilys Daws, which is based on the idea that one should listen to the “cries” of the family as a whole. She says that when our baby cries, we hear ourselves crying as a baby, and our thoughts and feelings about how to respond are shaped by our own early experiences. That book, as well as my therapist, helped me understand that I feared separation would make my child anxious later in life, when in fact by failing to separate I could unwittingly be giving him the message that the world was unsafe without me there. Turning my fear on its head this way was truly transformative.
Also, the baby started nursery, and was more tuckered out and had a more structured nap routine. But most importantly, I emailed Sam Knight at the New Yorker, who suggested that before hiring Brenda, we give his own, gentler method a try. “Keep going!” he signed off. “This too will pass.” Hope!
I read Sam’s emails to my husband and we devised a plan for him to night wean the baby (it has to be the man that does it, because the baby can smell its mother’s milk). My husband took a week off work, and each night he picked the baby up every time he cried, cuddled him until he was calm, and put him down. The first night he must have done this 30 times. The second, 10. The third, three. On the fourth night, my son slept through. Life was transformed, and largely thanks to two dads: Sam Knight and my lovely husband, who pushed himself to the limit for our family. (Perhaps they should go into business, charging £500 a pop). I am beyond thankful to them both.
I’m not saying that sleep is ever perfect, but I’m writing this to pass on the hope. To those parents who are reading this in a similarly dark place, keep going: sleep can be yours again.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
