Alone - Originally uploaded by joleenieweenie.

I should have just kept my mouth shut. In that parent participation class we’re taking we’re supposed to talk about a “highlight” of parenting and a “challenge.” Failing to think of anything else quickly, I mentioned that sleep is still a challenge with us. That’s really the understatement of the year–but anyway, I explained that one of the girls is a terrible sleeper and wakes up pretty much every other night. The disruptions can be anywhere from one to three times a night (if it is only one kid doing it…if the other one gets into the act then it can be more), and the duration of trying to get her settled back down can be five minutes or thirty. Or longer. It just depends. Monday Saige woke up at 1:30am and we couldn’t calm her down for anything, and finally at 3am we gave up and gave her some cold medicine. I wish I could say I was gentle and patient throughout the whole thing, but I wasn’t. Saige was already hysterical so I simply joined her. Bruce has repeatedly pointed out since then that screaming at an upset toddler in the middle of the night is pointless and counterproductive–a fact that I am aware of–but all of the sleep deprivation I had already gone through that weekend caught up with me and I just fell apart.

Saige has never been a very good sleeper, and it just seems to get worse as she gets older. She’s exactly like me in this regard (and many other ways), and things really went to hell ever since we ditched the cribs back in the spring. Darcy couldn’t have cared less about ditching her crib, but Saige really seemed to like the security of hers. Unfortunately, she was climbing out of it, so it had to go before she broke her neck.

On nights that I failed to go to sleep early myself I am often functioning on four hours or less the next day. If they start up at 4 or 5am, then that’s usually it for me; I won’t be able to fall back asleep even if they can. On the nights they actually sleep okay, I often do not: I’ll be staring at the ceiling for hours, white-knuckled and braced for another night of tears and sleeplessness. You would think the good days make up for the bad ones, but even when I do get one good night’s sleep I never feel very recovered.

Obviously with twins you can’t expect any sleep in the beginning. I knew that. The round-the-clock night feedings of two babies were one thing, but I could make up for it with those four-hour naps infants take. As soon as teething set in at four-and-a-half months, things got really interesting. It was pretty much a 24-hour screamfest–that is until I finally got a clue and headed off trouble with nightly doses of Motrin when they were in the middle of it, which sadly was almost all the time. After that it was separation anxiety. Then the molar teething. And then finally more sleep problems when they were freed from their cribs. So, hmmmm…I guess you could say I really haven’t slept for almost three years.

I wanted to cry. What I wanted to tell the class is all the things that I can’t even get Bruce to really understand, that all this sleep loss is making me crazy, that it actually hurts. It aggravates my hypoglycemia, it makes me depressed, and it gives me an extremely short fuse, which in turn makes me feel like a bad parent and then even more depressed. I even feel a little angry thinking about all the moms I know with just one kid, kids with no sleep issues at all. (Yes, I know this is displaced). It must be so nice to feel normal during the day.

Some days it’s got to be an act of divine intervention that gets me out of bed. There are days I am so tired I am afraid to drive, but I do anyway because the girls want to go to the park, and if I try to stay home they will fight and destroy the house, which I am too tired to deal with, either.

I wish I was one of these people that could feel fine on five or six hours of sleep. Occasionally I run into these amazing beings, and they are mystified what is so terrible about it. Eight is just the standard—nobody needs that much! Right, yeah. Nobody except me I guess. I usually try to get away from them as quickly as possible before I want to slap them. Bruce is halfway like these people; he can get by on less since he’s so much older, and he’s a deep sleeper, so he really doesn’t have a clue what happened overnight half the time (this Monday was kind of an exception).

I have been thinking about going to a shrink to get some sleeping pills. Maybe this could help me get to sleep quicker on the nights I’m not destined to get much. The husband asked why the ones in the drugstore wouldn’t do just fine, and the answer is they suck—they make you so screwed up the next day they aren’t worth taking. If the whole goal is to get some sleep so you can function, then they only achieve the first part, and not very well. And why couldn’t I just get a prescription from our GP, then? Aside from the fact that it takes months to get an appointment, usually the first thing he does is start handing me checklist sheets about depression whenever I mention these issues. Which, okay—I am depressed—but it’s the chicken and egg thing again. I believe that a lot of the depression is coming from the sleep loss.

But why couldn’t he just give you the damn pills?

“Because if depression is involved, there’s a concern that you might take the whole damn bottle, that’s why.”

So the teacher and other moms in the class spent twenty minutes offering possible causes and solutions. Milk, drugs, cry it out, separation, put her to bed early, put her to bed late, dark room, music, half-a-dozen different book methods, you fucking name it. I politely listened to them all, but honestly none were offered that I haven’t heard of and tried, or that would work when you have twins. Finally they just offered sympathy.

We left class a little early. I felt completely hopeless and tired, and the girls were a bit whiney anyway. They are often just as tired and cranky as mama.

There is a tiny bright spot in all of this sleepless hell, and that is I think I may have stumbled onto the solution to the no-napping problem. Separate rooms. Now before you slap your forehead with a loud “Doh! That’s so obvious!”…keep in mind they have always slept together, and until recently, naps weren’t a problem. There’s also a certain feeling among most twin and triplet moms that the kids should sleep together. The reasons for this are varied, but for us, one of the bigger reasons is we have a small house. (We’ve only got two bedrooms to play with for four people). Anyway, for naps Saige now sleeps in our bedroom and Darcy in their room. There are protests, but they are usually unconscious within fifteen minutes. Unfortunately this is not a solution for nighttime sleeping because a) we need to sleep in our bed, b) it’s a very bad habit, and c), it would be really unfair to Darcy. And she probably wouldn’t stand for it anyway. She barely puts up with it for naptime. At least now they are somewhat making up for the nighttime bullshit by getting good naps.

I wish I could do the same.