The woman behind "Confessions of a Scary Mommy" returns to expose more mommy myths in "Motherhood Comes Naturally (And Other Vicious Lies)." Here's an excerpt.
Lie #9: You'll Get More Sleep When They Are Older
In the shopping center today, I nearly dropped my six-year-old off at the lost-children sign and pretended he wasn’t mine. I know how bad that sounds, but his attitude was THAT BAD. And I am THAT TIRED. —Scary Mommy Confession #250762
Ask any mother of a newborn what the hardest part of having a baby is, and I bet she’ll tell you it’s the sleep deprivation. Sure, it’s true that babies do little more than sleep, eat, and poop. The problem, though, is that they do those things in two-hour increments. It’s as if they can’t tell time or something.
I remember hearing over and over again that I should “sleep while the baby sleeps,” which, frankly, is a lot better in theory than in practice. In fact, it may very well be the least useful piece of advice in the history of useless pieces of advice. If all mothers slept while their babies slept, the world would come to screeching halt. Laundry wouldn’t get done. Email would go unanswered. People would starve! I learned early on with my first newborn that sleep is simply one of the first in a long list of sacrifices you make for your children.
And I didn’t mind, because I was assured that I would get more sleep once my kids got older. Now, I should have known better than to believe this lie, since it was coming from the same people who told me that parenting strengthens a marriage and that I’d be back to my old self in no time. But here I am with three kids, ages five, seven, and nine, and I think I get less sleep today than I did when they were babies.
There are many things for which I have little patience where my children are concerned. The fact that I have to bribe them with dessert in order to get them to eat protein and vegetables, for instance. Or the way they carry on as if they were the Linda Blair character in The Exorcist when I want them to take medicine that will make them feel a thousand times better. Or that they can build towers with perfect precision, yet are incapable of aiming into the toilet.
But what drives me the most insane is their refusal to sleep. Putting my children to bed is a two-hour ordeal that I start dreading from the moment I awake in the morning. If stalling at bedtime were an Olympic sport, my kids would be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. One would think they were forced to sleep on wooden slats in the freezing rain rather than on plush mattresses with high-thread-count sheets in their very own rooms, based on the way they carry on. They whine and bargain and beg for a few more minutes of playtime while I roll my eyes and question their sanity. Don’t they know that I would kill to be tucked in with a story and a kiss by 8:30 p.m.? If I were a cold bitch I would tell them that life doesn’t get any better than this and that they should get a good night’s rest while they can.
Once they finally fall asleep—usually around 9:30 or 10:00 in our house—I have the opportunity to grab about three hours of sleep myself. Most nights, though, I have too much to do, and this is my first bit of me time all day. So more often than not, I head back downstairs and cuddle with my laptop instead of my husband for a few hours.
Like clockwork, just as I am ready to call it a day and head to bed, one of my kids will reappear. If it’s Evan, he’s probably wet himself. So that means a quick shower, which by the way he forces me to take with him. So it’s midnight and I’m washing my hair. Might as well shave my legs while I’m in there, right? By the time we dry off and I get Evan into clean pajamas, Ben stumbles into my room. “I had a bad dream,” he whines, as he climbs into my bed. Somehow, Jeff remains asleep during all of this commotion, happily snoring my sanity away.
Finally, I’m in bed. The good news is I don’t have to wash my hair in the morning. The bad news is Evan and Ben think it’s already morning. They beg to watch a television show. They ask if they can have cereal. Evan begins to ask questions about my belly fat, and Ben, who is lying there with his head on my shoulder, closely inspecting my face, wonders why my nostrils are so big.
After about forty-five minutes, the questions stop and the boys fall back asleep. And just as I doze off to fantasies of Ryan Gosling’s abs, Lily comes barreling down from her room in a mad dash for the bathroom. She flips on all the lights, slams the toilet seat down, and, if I’m lucky, finds her way into our bedroom as well. Of course, she needs to nudge and kick her brothers on her way into the bed, setting off a forty-five-minute session of extreme whining.
“Lily has more room than me.”
“Ben won’t stop kicking me!”
“Evan, did you just wet yourself . . . again?”
It’s two in the morning before I finally fall asleep for good, usually in some kind of awkward position that will require the services of a chiropractor. And then just as Ryan Gosling is getting ready to lift me in the air Dirty Dancing–style, Jeff’s alarm goes off and our day begins.
So, no, in my experience neither children nor mothers sleep better as kids age. I would argue it gets worse. I’m hoping that I’ll finally get some rest when my kids leave for college. Although I hear that when menopause hits it wreaks havoc on your sleeping all over again.
Of course it does.
Excerpt copyright © 2013 by Jill Smokler. Published by Gallery Books, a division ofSimon & Schuster. All rights reserved.