There are so many thing that I wish I had known before having kids. I cannot say that it would have prevented me from having them, but maybe I could have prepared better. Unlikely, I know. But it’s just plain rude to find out something someone could have shared with you after you have committed. Sometimes I think our few friends who had kids before we did actively withheld information to encourage us to get pregnant. Like easy marks, we were conned only to read the fine print after we signed, and of course in this there are no returns, no exchanges, no warranties, no guarantees, no instruction manuals, and no customer support.
Among the things I went into pregnancy and parenthood clueless about was the impact it had on sleep. You probably just slapped your head and mumbled to yourself, “Uh, lady how could you not know about the sleep deprivation?!? They make t-shirts about it.”
I’m not an idiot, I knew that sleep would be withheld and altered by my infant. But that’s all I had committed to in my head: infancy: like a year or two. First, I was unprepared for was how little sleep you get when you’re pregnant. Between the pee urgency, the physical discomfort, and the trampolining little creature, my average daily sleep went from 8hrs solid sleep/day to 6hrs interrupted sleep a day. 6 hours doesn’t cut it when you are still working through your 8th or 9th month. So many days I was proud of myself for not falling asleep while I was teaching or working, and even more pround for not strangling persons who cavalierly advised, “Get your sleep now before the baby is born!” There’s a name for those folks that sounds a lot like other tuckers.
Sadly, of course, as you probably know, these other tuckers were annoyingly right. If you get a good sleeper, you’re still only going to manage a couple hours of sleep at a time for the first couple of months. If you get a bad sleeper, then you probably won’t have a night free of tiny, but surprisingly loud shrieks for the entire infancy. Did I mention that’s like a year or two? You can guess which one we got the first time. No warranties. No guarantees.
Still, theoretically I had been informed and prepared for routinely sleeping 4-5 interrupted hours of sleep a night for at least the second half of two plus years. Kicking myself in the ass in bit, but fair game.
What I call foul on is that no one told me I would never sleep a deep, uninterrupted night without an arsenal of aids ever again in my whole freaking life. I went from being a star sleeper – sure I had some nightmares occasionally and crawled out of bed with a hangover from a short night after the occasional bender – but those were exceptions to the rule. But now, post kids, apparently the rules of the game had changed because I turned into a pitiful, junior-varsity, delicate flower of a sleeper.
For 11 years , I have tended, fostered, and fertilized my frail sleep. I follow most of the standard sleep hygiene rules. I avoid work or any non-sleep activities in my bed. (I said mostly, we simply do not have another comfortable surface to indulge that act). I don’t take a screen to bed. I avoid caffeine beyond the morning. I go to sleep before my husband comes to bed so I am not tempted to nag at him or grunt or growl every time he moves and sometimes when he breathes. Mostly, though I’ve adopted a cornucopia of sleep aids: ear plugs, sleep mask, 1-2mg melatonin, children’s benadryl, oh, and the most absurd, I have an iPod docked playing lullabies all night long. Yes, you got that right, lullabies. Not white noise, sounds of the sea, piano concertos, soft jazz or any other suitably adult soundtrack. No. Not my brain. I have an excuse: when Eliot was an infant I created a looping playlist of lullabies to play all night long. I spent many, many nights in his room holding him until we both drifted off. So now about 3-4 times out of 10 that playlist induces almost instant narcolepsy. Those are good odds as a backup when an earplug falls out. Until a few months ago, that special recipe of sleep aids would get me seven to eight hours with a middle of the night pee break. It was frangible but also reliable to be fulfilling. I still retained the right to grumble about no one warning me.
But then, this funk set in, and I started taking 375mg of Wellbutrin up from 300m. The game changed. All of my pre-game rituals failed to win me sleep. Furthermore, 375mg wasn’t really helping that much. Even months into the new dosage I felt immersed in this misery. But the prospect of changing to a serotonin specific re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) or some other anti-depressant scares the hell out of me. My experiences with Prozac and Paxil (SSRIs) back in 1998 were horrifying – both of them screwed with me, especially my sleep, not keeping me awake, but the opposite. I could barely keep my eyes open for the work day on Paxil (during which time I apparently did nothing but eat while I was working). Prozac induced less drowsiness than Paxil, but enough and terrifyingly made sleep significantly less useful by producing the most vivid nightmares of my life. I often woke crying or screaming. My roommate loved that drug experiment. Just to make it a AAA experience, it, too, sent me to the store for more food and bigger clothes. I am extremely reluctant to take a drug other than Wellbutrin.
So, last Thursday I saw the psychiatrist about my medication. I asked to increase my does to 450mg, but told her that I had to do something about its impact on my already poor sleep. We talked about increasing my melatonin and benadryl, which I dismissed because of the benadryl hangover. She offered sleep medications like Ambian and others in the valium-like family, but warned that they were addictive. I struck those immediately. Remember, family full of alcoholics, right? Non-addictive a must. So, she convinced me to try Trazadone, which is often prescribed for sleep problems, especially in depressed patients, because it too is an anti-depressant. An older one that preceded the current SSRIs. Guess what it does? It’s a serotonin antagonist and re-uptake inhibitor. Joy. But, I decided to give it a go.
I started the 450mg of Wellbutrin Friday morning and started Trazadone Friday night. Giving up my Benadryl, but taking 2mg of melatonin. The results so far have been mixed: the first two days my sleep was not great: I woke prematurely around 3-4am and couldn’t get back to sleep . Then for two nights (Sun and Mon) it improved, and my mood seemed fairly stable, but those two things could also be attributed to the 10K I ran Sunday. Last night, or this morning, I woke to something Sandy said in his sleep at around 3:30, and dozed fitfully afterwards for another hour. But I am supposed to give it a few more weeks to have enough data to make a decision.
In my dreams (the few that I am asleep long enough to have) it all comes together. I retire my ear plugs and sleep mask, and stomp the crap out of my old iPod (or at least delete the playlist), I snuggle with my snoring husband and drift off for hours at a time. If all of that happens, then I might just apologize to all of the con artists who failed to warn me.
Regardless, I still want to create a warning label to smack on any pre-pregnancy product: WARNING: children may be hazardous to your sleep patterns beyond the discussed time frame. Continuing this path may forever ruin your life sleep.