The Sleep Deprivation is Torture

It's 8.25pm and the three year old, who has been awake since 6.32am, is standing in front of me, quietly declaring

'I'm actually not tired'

Marie has a research proposal due in two days time, I'm at work on intensive care tomorrow and the house is, once again, a complete mess. Dishes piled high in the sink, barely a centimetre of available kitchen surface and the we can't hoover because it'll wake the three month old.

I want to cry.

Gently clearing his throat, he furthers his delightful statement with a pensive and gentle

"I love you dad"

and at this point I do actually start tearing up. I kneel down and give him a big cuddle, and offer for him to come outside and water the plants with me, which he gleefully accepts with a little jump. We have a lovely ten minutes together before he finally decides he's had enough of Tuesday and potters back into his bed under his own steam.

He'll easily sleep in til 9am now. But his sister, who went to sleep at 7pm, will wake up at 6am, bright eyed and ready to go. Meanwhile the 3 month old will be up at least five times between now and then.

I'd better get started on the kitchen then

I swallow the lump in my throat and fight back tears as I hear the rain start to patter on the roof. I look out of the window and realise the washing still needs to come in, the kids' paints are all over the driveway and the car is not only open but still has the remnants of the day's snacks smeared across the rapidly deteriorating interior.

I glance at the clock again, working out how much sleep I'll get if the two year old doesn't wake up until eleven pm and is only up for forty minutes, and the three year old doesn't wet the bed after compulsively drinking water for the entire day.

We are well aware of the fact that we brought this upon ourselves. We knew our first child was intense before we'd even thought about the second, and yet we still decided to have not one but two further offspring within the space of four years, because they're delightful during the day. We know we only have ourselves to blame.

But it doesn't make it any easier.

They don't teach you at parenting school how to survive this, largely because parenting school doesn't exist. Even the SAS survival guide that I bought last week in an apocalypse-paranoid haze of fatigue didn't mention anything about this.

I have never known exhaustion like this. This all-consuming cloak of apathetic dread and a sense of distortion of reality. My bones ache and a thick fog lingers on my brow. Every tiny decision is achingly exhausting. The slightest noise sends electric fear shattering down my spine and my ears ring in panic at the slightest innocuous disturbance.

For the first time in my life, I'll willingly admit that I'm not coping

I lie in bed, adrenaline coursing through my veins as I wait for the next child to wake up, knowing it'll hurt less if I just stay awake. The clock ticks agonising wasted seconds as my heartbeat pounds in my throat.

One of them quietly turns over, the sheets gently sliding across the bed, like sandpaper across my brain.

I can see why they use sleep deprivation as a form of torture.

It's simply awful, like nothing I've ever felt before. And what almost makes it worse, is I know it's not their fault that they struggle to sleep. Their little brains whirring and churning as they make sense of the wide world around them, ferociously modelling and reshaping their understanding of their experiences and new discoveries. I don't pretend to have the solution, other than continuously, desperately reassuring myself that this too shall pass, and one day we'll look back on this blog post and reminisce:

"It wasn't that bad, was it?"

What scares me most is that Marie has it even harder than me. She's not had more than three hours of continuous sleep in three years, and yet she's still maintaining an unsustainable level of enthusiasm for the kids during the day. I genuinely have no idea how she does it, I'm certainly failing.

But once they're all finally asleep, just one look at their gorgeous sleeping faces, their occasionally flittering fingers or a flick through a few of the photos of the beautiful moments we have shared together over the last few days, and it just about fills the tank enough to start all over again.

Deep Breath.

We can do this.