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A panic attack at 3am on my bathmat was a sign that things couldn’t continue as they were.
My baby woke as I transferred her into the cot, with more precision than Tom Cruise dangling from the ceiling in Mission Impossible. It was the fourth time she’d woken that night, and it had taken over an hour to get her to sleep.
When her eyes fluttered open, like some possessed doll in a horror movie, I felt I couldn’t breathe. I flung her into the arms of my equally-knackered husband, ran to the bathroom, and collapsed to the floor, gagging and gulping, as my baby howled. I hadn’t had a panic attack in over a decade, but the next morning, as I tearfully rang the GP to ask for beta-blockers, it was decided.
'We have to get a sleep consultant,' I said. 'I know they cost a fortune, but we can’t go on like this.'
We’d tried everything else* at this point. The expense was eye-watering, but as I scrolled a holistic sleep consultancy’s website - reading their five-star reviews, all from delighted parents who now had babies sleeping through the night - we decided it must be worth it.
The initial meeting was incredible. Our consultant spent two hours taking a detailed history of our baby’s sleep - or lack of. At this point, our baby would only nap while fully attached to my breast, so I’d sit in a dark room four times a day trying to send work emails with one hand. At night, again, she would only feed to sleep, then would wake roughly every 90 minutes, and regularly reanimated whenever we transferred her to the cot.
My husband and I were going to bed at 8pm to chase as much sleep as we could. We had no life, no sleep, almost no sanity. The consultant reassured us that all our issues seemed ‘normal’ and ‘totally fixable’. We’d have a week of learning how to ‘maximise the wake windows’ before ‘teaching the baby how to self-settle’.
'What if it doesn’t work?' I asked, not daring to hope. She smiled and laughed kindly. 'Everyone’s always scared they’ll be the one client it doesn’t work for,' she said. 'But that’s not going to be you.'
I felt sick on the first day of self-settling school. We’d chosen a ‘no-cry’ approach, and we boomeranged in and out of my baby’s room for two hours in order for her to take a 15-minute nap. The next nap was slightly easier. The final nap, she sucked her thumb happily and went down for longer. That night, as I put her into her cot, fully awake, I watched in astonishment as the impossible happened. She put herself to sleep, and then proceeded to sleep right through until morning.
When I woke at 4am, I actually thought she might be dead, and watched in stunned awe as she slept until 6.30.
That day, I was practically tap-dancing. I’d felt like I’d been to a spa after a six-hour chunk of sleep. I texted the good news to our consultant. 'This is brilliant!' she replied. 'Do you mind if we use this as a case study for our website?'
The next night, however, the baby 'only' slept through until 4am. 'She’s still getting the hang of it,' the consultant said. 'Give it a few nights to hone this new skill.'
Our baby has never slept through since.
We know she can sleep for 12 hours straight but, for whatever reason, she’s simply choosing not to. Our consultant, bless her, regularly helped us outside of her paid-for hours, and tried her best to reassure us. There was always a reason 'not to worry'. Our baby was learning to roll and that disrupts their sleep. Then, she caught a cold. Then, she was due her three-to-two nap transition and that 'throws things off'. We agreed to take a break over December, and, through the holidays, the sleep got progressively worse again.
After Christmas, out of desperation, we added a bolt-on service and paid for more help. Now, the owner of the sleep consultancy decided to take on our case. She was confident and calming on the phone. 'This is such a clear issue with a quick fix,' she said. 'Your baby is just chronically overtired. Give me two days and we can sort it.'
What followed were the lowest two days of my mothering life. I dutifully did everything the consultant told me but none of it worked on my baby. Trying to 'extend her naptime' and 'help her link her sleep cycles' meant she kept screaming in the cot. Trying to 'reduce her wake windows' to 'cap her cortisol levels' meant she kept screaming in the cot. By the end of the second day, my baby had such a negative association with the cot, that she screamed if she even caught a glimpse of her sleeping bag.
I was sobbing. The baby was sobbing. The sleep consultant was totally bamboozled.
'It doesn’t make sense,' she said, suggesting we break for the weekend. 'She can self-settle, she can suck her thumb, she is clearly tired… why won’t she sleep?'
On Monday morning, she left us a voice message: 'I’ve been thinking about your baby all weekend and I’m still baffled.'
Listening in dismay, I said: 'We broke the sleep trainer.'
She refunded us the money, and thinks our current issues are caused by the baby trying to crawl. We’ve been told we can always get back in touch, preferably after she’s mastered crawling.
I keep re-reading the website’s five-star reviews and feeling sick with jealousy. Why did this work for other people but not us? If we’ve baffled an ‘expert’ does that mean something’s wrong with our baby?
I now feel totally helpless when my baby wakes at 8pm, and midnight, and 4am, and 5am. Her naps are so reliably short - precisely 30 minutes - that she’s practically a Swiss watch. I’ve never poured so much time and energy, research and attention into something that so categorically doesn’t pay off (other than that refund).
Everyone warns you about sleeplessness before you have a baby, but there’s a giant chasm between knowing that intellectually, and experiencing the relentless exhaustion yourself. Both my husband and I are back at work now, expected to function and flourish, after night after night of stressful torture. It’s almost like having a secret identity.
I have no idea where to go from here. This week, I jokingly tweeted about 'breaking the sleep consultant’ and it’s gone viral. I’ve been bombarded with well-meaning advice from all over the world. Maybe my baby has autism? Maybe they’re a genius? Maybe they have silent reflux? Giant adenoids? A dairy allergy? Hyperlexia? Have we tried Gina Ford? Considered co-sleeping until they are teenagers? 'My baby didn't sleep through the night until they were 105 years old, and only then because they died of old age.' Other sleep consultants have gotten in touch, offering to take a crack, see if they can ‘fix’ it.
Does my baby’s sleep need fixing? Is there a simple solution? A timing issue I can tweak to solve it? However, when we (rarely) get a perfect day of naps, it makes absolutely no difference to her night sleep. And the list of potential sleep interferences seems endless. She’s currently in a wonder week ‘leap’; she’s about to start crawling; or learning how to pull herself up; she’s due to cut teeth soon; she keeps catching viruses…. Do I just surrender to my baby not sleeping? To this bleary half-life? Accept that some babies simply aren’t good sleepers? Live a little, rather than sacrificing my sanity and social life on the alter of a ‘good routine’ that doesn’t work anyway? Or, is there something we’ve not tried? Someone who can help? Dare I hope?
Until I figure this out, at least there’s coffee.
*Things we’ve tried:
Cranial osteopathy
Giving up dairy and soy
White/pink/brown/turquoise noise
A bamboo sleeping bag
Co-sleeping
Lavender pillow spray
A bedtime routine
Borrowing a friend’s Snoo
Prayers to God, promising that I’ll totally start taking the baby to church if they sleep through
Orthopaedic dummies
Every downloadable sleep schedule on the internet
Early bedtimes
Later bedtimes
Holly Bourne is the author of Girl Friends - available to buy here
