A messy, imperfect, challenging experience of a child that wakes up at 5am
If you have an early riser, and you find it hard, I feel you. I see you. You are not alone.
I have 3 children, one of whom has never needed much sleep and always wakes up early.
N.B. I'm not a sleep expert. I am a mum with a kid who only needs 9 hours sleep a night. I want to share my messy, imperfect challenging experiences to help normalise real motherhood not the mythical bollocks we all get lured into accepting as normal. There is no doubt that sleep is really important.
If your child doesn’t fit into the expected norms you can end up feeling like you’ve failed somehow, and that is what stays with us as mums.
It’s all pretty tangly…this is one story about being a mum of a child who needs less sleep.
Hands up if you’ve ever heard these...
They’ll sleep when they start school
You need to get the bedtime routine worked out
They’re to stimulated
They’re under-stimulated
It’s they’re personality, they’re just grumpy or sensitive
They’re hungry
Don’t feed them before bed
You need blackout blinds
You need a grow clock
You’re too nice
Just tell him
Don’t accept it
You need to wear him out
They NEED 12 hours sleep or you’re not doing it right.
Have you tried a sleep consultant? (yes I have)
Have you tried another one? (yes I have)
How about another one? (no)
It’s separation anxiety
All of these are valid in some way and have their place. And may have helped you. When they don’t, it can be a very lonely, dark place (specially at 4:30am)
Sleep is a big deal. We know that it’s super important. And the thing that was confusing is that my child was happy. It was me that was struggling.
People expect babies to have sleep issues, as a new mum you are ‘allowed’ to be sleep deprived. In fact it’s almost a badge of honour some how. Not so much with older children. No one talks about it in the same way. It can be easy to blame yourself for not coping. This subtle undertone that the responsibility is on the mum, or that somethings gone wrong, gets internalised.
Thoughts like, why me? What have I done to deserve this? Why did I get this child? What is wrong with them? What is wrong with me? What have I done wrong? Why did I have kids?
If this is you, I see you. I have been there. These are just thoughts.
If you have persistent dark thoughts, seek some help. The ones that come at those pinch moments are normal. I believe they are so much more normal than we know.
None of them make you a bad person or a bad mum.
Hitting Rock bottom
This was my 2nd child. I now know that each time you have a child you are a new mum. To a whole new human. I couldn’t see this then. Why wasn’t he doing what his sibling did? Why weren’t the same things working?
I spent years focusing on how I could change my child, what I could do to make him fit in better with how I wanted our lives to be, how the world expected us to be.
I tried everything. I’d hit rock bottom and I knew I had to find a way back up. I had no idea how, and in yet another frantic google search I stumbled across a blog and it changed everything. (I wish I could remember who it was to credit them, that person sharing helped me so much and i’m so grateful).
The blog was about the a child that needed less sleep and that meant you needed to change your life style.
When I first read this it pissed me off.
Why should I? How? I persevered with trying to be my ‘normal self’. Getting tangled up in the crazy web of expectations that felt like goals I HAD to achieve in order to ‘get this right’, to be a ‘good mum’, to not f%&k up my children. To be happy.
But the idea lingered. What it really spoke to was that I needed to focus on my reality. My child didn’t need more sleep, I wanted him to sleep more. I’d been focusing on the image I had of the ideal mum, and the ideal child, the ideal life. I'd been looking externally for the ‘answer’ or the ‘cure’. So that I could get to the bit where I was a great mum who loved her life and felt complete and fulfilled.
It helped me feel less alone and less mad as I constantly bumped up against advice that didn’t work for me. They didn’t ‘work’ because I was trying to fix a different problem.
I could see that the belief I held was …If my child sleeps for the allotted 12 hours then i’m somehow a better mum, i’m closer to the ideal version of a mum that we all subconsciously try to match.
What I had to face was hard and complex. There were uncomfortable feelings like shame and guilt to navigate. It all went much deeper than sleep.
It was about:
The massive gap between the ideology of motherhood and the lived real experience of mothering little humans.
Control. I’d been trying to control and manage everything, like a job, rather than recognising that mothering is about a relationship between 2 humans
Feeling scared to look inwards and at what was right in front of me.
Admitting I didn't really know who I was or what I wanted. Or even more scary that…I wanted more than this.
My own childhood experiences and relationships.
My relationship with myself.
I could see that my child was happy and got enough sleep, but I was not. It was all about unlearning. Untangling myself from this ideal mother. She is a myth. And she lives in us all. Oh the paradox!
Great, so now I was dismantling motherhood, digging into my own experiences of being parented, and learning about what I really wanted…still with little sleep and 3 other humans to keep alive and love!
Strangely this helped. It was real. It was where I was really at. I could stop pretending that everything was okay, I could stop holding on so tightly and breathe a little more. Phew.
Unlearning and what happened next.
As I met myself where I was, things started to make more sense and feel better. I was able to be slightly kinder to myself, which was a relief. It’s not that everything magically got better, but I felt a small shift, a whiff of self belief. I felt a little less stuck.
That space allowed me a new perspective, I could act on things that had previously made intellectual sense but impossible to actually do. I recognised how badly I was looking after myself and I started (initially in very small ways) to address that. Like going to bed a little earlier. I was also able to see things that I hadn’t seen before. For example I found myself telling a woman at the check out about my son getting up early.
I realised I was obsessed. It was all I could think about and focus on. Now I believe what I focus on will expand. I was surprised that i hadn’t noticed how much i focused on it!
So I consciously made the effort to move my attention. Which was harder than I had imagined. It took time. I had to really work at not talking about it. This is not denial. I wasn't pretending it wasn’t happening. I was simply not making it the focus of my every thought and conversation.
I got therapy to start working through my own stuff from childhood and to work on my relationship with myself and my children. Once I'd accepted that I didn’t all come naturally, I didn’t have to know it all, and have all the answers, just because I was a mum. I got some support with parenting.
I got some coaching to help me focus, feel supported and have space held for me that wasn’t interrupted every second with a call for ‘MUM’.
Fast forward to now. My child still wakes very early. I still have to adapt and check in with my lifestyle and everyone else in our family to adjust and course correct. That’s the work.
(Here’s an ironic side note. The only time he has ever slept in was on a camping trip where he didn’t get up until 10:30am!)
You don’t get to choose your children .
You also don’t know how you are going to feel as a mum.
Your kids are humans, little humans who exist in their own right and they don’t follow rules and books and advice. They don’t work like your life before having them. They just be who they are.
This is the complex side of being a mum that nothing can prepare you for, because it’s so unique to each of us. Mothering is hard because it's hard. It's not because you are broken or bad.
Some children's sleep stuff can be down to the original list above. But if like me you child is happy and needs less sleep, I hope this has helped you feel less alone.
My early riser set me on a path to see my children as humans and individuals, not bunch them together. And in turn it has helped me to see myself as a human and an individual not just a mum. And it’s helped me start to re-write what motherhood means for me, and for all of us.
Do I ever wish he slept more? Yes.
Do I ever get it wrong? Yes.
Am I endlessly kind to myself? Yes.
I want you to know there is no right way, no ideal mother who you need to compare yourself to. You are doing the best that you can with what you have and that is all we can ever do.
I help mums reprogram the subconscious ideal that we all carry about what being a mum is, so that you can write your own story, mother in a way that feels good, fulfilling, aligned with you. Not some bullshit external ideal. I’ve put together 21 helpful thoughts for Mums, you can get them here.