I'm sixteen years old, and sure, some of you might think I am nowhere near experienced enough to be a good parent.
False statement.
I am a very good parent, I do what I can and I have just as much experience now being a first time mom as some woman in her 20-somethings that's just had her first child. Me and my son learned together what works for us, and now we're like a well oiled machine.
So, here we are, six months later after my son and I met for the very first time, I have come to realize how much I really miss my sleep.
I mean it's not just because he's around, crying or doing what babies do. He's kinda grown out of that crying in the middle of the night phase. I mean, I haven't gotten a decent nights sleep even before he was born. 9 months pregnant and there he is, beating me up. I spent the entire night watching my overgrown belly do the wave, worrying about every ache and pain I felt afraid I would go into labor at any given second. As you can expect, it's not easy to sleep through all of that commotion and there I was, lying awake until 7, 8, 9 o' clock AM playing Brain Age I and II, usually the Virus Buster mini-game the entire night.
And then I spent three days in labor! Three whole days of torture and exhaustion. If I hadn't gotten a damn epidural and not slept for those two hours, I think he might have well been stuck in there forever. Then that night, with nurses coming in every hour to check your this and make you do that, I mean, I got a few hours of broken sleep. And then the next night, all alone in the hospital, I couldn't sleep again. My last night there I roomed-in with my son and started working on spending the night waking up after him. I hardly slept at all, watching the clock to try and feed him every 2 hours.
And I went home, and went to bed at 10 PM.
And that was the last night of good sleep I've had in a long time. And no matter how tired I am, it seems I'm up every night well into the AM. I hope you all can understand my thinking, because it seems that even if my son is in Dreamland early and I have the perfect opportunity to rest an entire 5 hours without disturbance, sleep hardly seems worth trading in the few, fleeting hours I have to myself to watch TV, read a book, do homework, do my hair, paint my nails, and surf the web. Sure, I do some of these things while he naps during the day, but 20 minutes here and there seem hardly enough. And it also seems impossible to nap when he naps. I mean, even straight out of the hospital I rarely did that.
So now it's off to bed for me at 5 AM after my son's last middle of the night feeding and up and off for school at 8 in the morning, where I practically fall asleep in every single class. And while the struggle has me failing a few classes and considering the possibility of escaping somewhere far far away and sleeping for a month, I think that I could sleep for the rest of my life and never make up all the sleep that I've been neglecting.
So, if you enjoy your sleep and your sanity, don't have kids.
Unless giving it all up seems worth it, which in my opinion, it totally is.
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