Fatigue

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Imagine starting your day to screaming. And crying. Intense screaming and crying. At 1:30am. That lasts two and a half hours. And also at 5am (and at other various times, and more than once each morning). Every day. For a year and a half. Every day. But in actual fact, it’s 3 years collectively. Because my oldest kid did the same thing. So imagine starting your day to screaming. And crying. Intense screaming and crying. At 1:30am. That lasts two and a half hours. And also at 5am (and at various times, and more than once each morning). Every day. For three years. Every day.

Not kidding.

I woke up this morning, to my youngest son screaming and crying, at 1:30am. He cried and screamed for two and a half hours. I had to go downstairs and eat cereal for a mental break. He’s one and a half. To be fair he’s sick and probably feels like shit. But he still wakes up most nights. It might be long. It might be short. But he wakes up. Which means we wake up. And every wake up means (at least) 30 minutes of wondering if he’ll wake up again before we can relax our brains. Which we often can’t. Our latest sleep consultant (more on that later) advised us to keep him in his crib/room until 6am, hell or high water. Which is somehow supposed to make him wake up later? But he still gets up between 5 and 5:30. So we have to sit there while he progressively cries and screams until 6 apparently. Why can’t a child wake up happy? Wake up singing? Or just wake up—like wake up and just be like, Hey, okay, I’m awake. I wanna go downstairs and watch TV.

I can say with gratitude that my oldest now more or less does this. He gets up, and is just awake. More or less. Finally. At three and a half. It’s great. We’ve come to expect and rely on it. But it was not that way. Not for a long time.

One thing (among many) that you can absolutely expect, absolutely know for sure, is that you will never be so tired. You have never been so tired. You will not ever be so tired. You will not get a break from being tired. You might never, ever recover or feel “rested” again. I don’t know why I put “rested” in quotes. Maybe to show how it’s not a real thing to me anymore. I used to be “rested”. I used to know what “rested” meant. I used to know what “rested” felt like. Now I don’t. I don’t know if I’ll ever be “rested” again. Ever. You will experience multiple, back to back nights, weeks, months (and in our case, years) where you get so little sleep you can’t believe people actually have kids. You will wonder how as a species we go on.

Arctic Fox babies get 3 months. Then they’re pushed out on their own. In the winter. In the Arctic. The Mother literally says fuck off, go fend for yourself. Snow Geese push their young off 200 foot cliffs and hope a couple three out of five make it down without dying. Those that do have to walk it off and go find food. Humans are a bit smarter. And can do cooler stuff. But fuck, those animals have nailed the child rearing situation down better than we have. By far.

In movies and commercials you see parents with funny dishevelled hair, bags under their eyes, a hunch-slouch posture, shuffling around the house like zombies. Those parts, are all true. But like the memes, in real life it’s not funny. It’s real. Combine this visual comedy with the reality of no sleep. Movies and commercials can’t successfully convey how it feels to not sleep. For months. For years. The kind of no sleep you can’t even convey or explain. You become a shell of a human. Life becomes about getting through the day.

There’s a laundry commercial: a rested, showered, light-in-their-eyes couple sit together and fold laundry by a window. They talk about how hard it is to keep things clean with their 3 young kids. Who as it happens are absent from the scene. Which as it happens, never happens. Maybe they’re in daycare or school or with the nanny. But no one with three kids— no one that actually looks after and is present in the lives of 3 kids—is rested. Even if they have a full time nanny. In which case, they wouldn’t do their own laundry now would they.

In another version, an “exhausted” couple stand in an ominous, darkly lit laundry room. Dad has the baby. It’s in a carrier. It’s quiet. It’s not crying. It’s not screaming. It seems rested. One, single baby. Not two. Not a baby and toddler. Not twins. Not three. Their eyes are half open with massive bags. They’re hunched. They look at their shitty competitor laundry detergent. Then look at each other. Mouths hanging open. And the narrator says “Name-Brand (whatever bullshit) ultra clean…works hard so you don’t have to”. And suddenly the couple comes alive. Light enters the room. Hope fills the scene. They’re miraculously rested. And they dance.

In reality this doesn’t happen. Only the first part. Only the darkness. The eyes. The bags. The slouch. The shuffle. The almost-dead-ness. Oh and the laundry doesn’t get done. Regardless of detergent brand.

Think too that it’s not like when you were single. Or even in a relationship without kids. If you’re tired, hungover, or sick, you can take a day and lie on the couch. You can lie on the couch and do nothing. No one bothers you. You have no one who’s life might hang in the balance if you close your eyes. You only have to feed yourself. You can sleep whenever you want. For as long as you want.

This is not the case with kids. Picture the pure fatigue and/or sickness and/or hangover mentioned above, but then add one or two or more young kids that need feeding, cleaning, entertaining, protecting, driving, playing, laundry, and attention. There is no stopping. There is no resting. There is no break. There is no couch.

Of course there is the option of getting a babysitter or nanny. But cost is a factor. Grandparents can help too but there are time, energy, strength, age, and annoyance issues. And in most cases alternate caregivers come at night, or on weekends, for a few hours. And real parenting needs the actual parents. Surrogates who help raise kids are great for giving parents a break. But kids need their actual parents to be the ones who are there, all the time. Of course different parents do this part differently. In which case, maybe you DO get sleep. In which case maybe you want to just stop here and go lie on the couch. More power to you motherfucker.

The fatigue (that WE feel) is so deep that naps don’t touch it. Rare “good” nights of sleep (i.e. from 9:30 or 10pm to 4 or 5am) don’t really dent it unless there are a few repeat good nights back to back. Which doesn’t really (ever) happen.

Currently my oldest naps from noon to 3:30pm, sometimes 4. But he’ll soon drop this nap and start staying up all day. My youngest still has two naps, morning and afternoon, and is on his way to one nap. Which means at the moment, this gives us as parents one hour of overlap where both kids are asleep (on weekends). An hour. Of course my oldest is normally in daycare, but over the holidays and when he’s sick (which is often) and over Covid (which is forever) we keep him home. Which means we’ll soon get no hours. No break.

Yesterday, my youngest didn’t nap in the morning. My oldest didn’t nap at all. And so, our glorious ONE hour of normal break didn’t happen. I know, it sounds idiotic and unimportant. But it ruined us.

And so it goes. Fatigue becomes ever present in the life of a parent. I think one of the only useful pieces of reality I heard from a parent somewhere about kid-related fatigue is that you just “get used to it”. Which is only sort of true. You don’t get used to it the way you get used to a dip in a couch. This implies it becomes “fine” and you go on about your business. You can avoid a dip. Sit somewhere else. The only way you get used to ever-present fatigue is by realizing it’s an unavoidable part of your day to day existence. Possibly forever. You also get too tired to really care or try to do anything about it. It just is. It’s just there. And there’s also the coffee.

Occasionally you get a moment or two where you feel kind of, almost, sort of like your old self. Kind of. There’s a glimmer of what it was like to have thoughts. To feel even an inkling of creativity. Or possibility. But it’s rare. And fleeting. Every year and stage of child development has its list of challenges and changes, which means, at least from what I’ve heard, the fatigue thing eventually fades. I can’t say yet whether that’s true. Better in my opinion to just accept that your life will be an exhaustion-ridden existence for the foreseeable future than to hope it will change. Dark but effective and realistic advice.