This is us most nights.
After we’ve cleaned up and eaten dinner we sit down in the hopes of watching something together, usually it sits on pause at about 7 minutes in, and there it stays.
The first cries start, we don’t even look at each other anymore, we just get on with it.
One usually sets the other off so we txt between dark rooms as to how we’re getting on.
Too hot?
Too cold?
Enough white noise?
Too loud?
Something she ate?
Is he teething again?
Must be a regression maybe?
Lately it’s been every hour to every 2 hours and one night I just couldn’t see through my exhaustion, I had tried everything to help her go down. I don’t let her cry alone but I even let her grizzle for a while out of desperation which woke the other. So out of bed I was again, 5th time before 1am.
I looked at my husband, tears in my eyes this time. It was in that moment of helplessness I felt broken from lack of sleep.
So he said, “I’ll try get her down, get some sleep”.
.
I woke the next morning to neither of them in the bed and I walked out into the lounge to find him barricaded on the couch with a fort of cushions around him, with her sleeping on his chest, his eyes open and red.
I asked him if he had gotten any sleep and he said, not really, because he was too aware of her.
Once she woke I sent him to bed and asked him if it was his worst night yet and he said, “I'm absolutely wrecked, but no, watching her fall asleep on me, it was really special”.
In that moment I was so grateful, for him, but also for the realisation.
That this is why we do it.
It’s so easy to want to crawl into a little ball and disappear in the middle of the night.
But these beautiful moments are hidden in the early hours of sleep deprivation and exhaustion. Disguised in zombie walking down the hallway and rocking and shushing.
The moments where only our warmth and touch is all they truly need.
It’s so hard to see the beauty through the exhaustion.
So so hard.
Even when we feel like we have nothing left to give, they still need us.
I hope in some small way they remember, we were there.