Anxiety, Nightmares, and Sleep Deprivation...Oh My!

Elizabeth awakes with a start, which wakes me up.  She starts freaking out, looking at the floor next to our bed. My mind races.  She's fallen asleep during feeding and accidentally rolled Sam off of the bed and onto the floor, a drop of several feet! I fly out of the covers and hustle over to Liz's side of the bed, and I see what she sees.  There is a pile of clothes on the floor, and in those clothes somewhere must be our ailing child.  He's not crying...is he ok, or is it something much worse? We both in our semi-conscious states endure each other freaking out and swearing when one of us comes to our senses and looks in the bassinet next to our bed, where Sam sleeps.  He is lying there in the bassinet peacefully napping.  We breathe.

Ladies and gents, the sleep deprivation that we must endure is a right of passage for almost all new parents.  When the baby is awake, we are awake.  Elizabeth feeds the boy, while I change the diapers, swaddle the boy, help troubleshoot, and rock the boy to sleep, in addition to catering to the needs of Elizabeth, who is held hostage for hours on end with our ravenous little monster.  This does not tend to leave much time for sleeping.  We try to sleep when he sleeps, but his usual sleep is about 90 minutes between feedings.  Sometimes he will go 2 hours, but sometimes 1 hour will suffice...sometimes less.  If we slept for the same 90 minutes as the boy, we might get the sleep we need, but after we settle him down, we need to settle ourselves down, eat and/or drink something, use the bathroom, pump additional milk, etc.  The list goes on.  We have to choose which of our needs is most in need of being met.  Often times, the food/water/bathroom need lands higher on the scale than the sleep.  Whether or not it should is the real question, and surely there have been too many times when it has not been the priority it needs to be.

Elizabeth and I are packing up the RAV4 with all of the things we will need for an outing with Sam. We have his stroller, diaper bag, items for feedings, extra milk in case he has a feeding fiasco, and what not.  We drive to a house I do not recognize and get out of the car, beginning to meet and greet some people I do not know.  As we talk, we unpack the vehicle, and then my stomach sinks with horror...we packed up everything but the boy.  He is home, and I have no idea where I am or how to get home.

The lack of sleep that we have been living under has some serious side effects.  Anxiety that we live with throughout the day about his eating, gas, breathing, and fussiness (Is he still asleep?  Is he breathing?) do not have the chance to dissipate with a full night of sleep, but instead, manifest themselves in our dreams.  With our short sleep stints, we are waking and functioning in the deepest parts of our sleep, fighting with the circadian rhythms in our brains and occasionally thinking that our dreams are real...hallucinating or working in a semi-conscious state.

I awake to Sam's cry and fetch him from his bassinet.  After changing his wet diaper, I bring him to Elizabeth for feeding.  I begin talking to her, asking her about the strategy she is going to use in this feeding.  I am sure she understands my question, as she has been engaged in this breastfeeding competition for one feeding already and we have 2 more to go before the results are in.  She looks at me oddly and asks what I mean.  I stop and think.  Reality begins to set in.  Breastfeeding competition? Really?

My friend Brian called the other day, and I asked him if he had any weird dreams in the first month of his daughter Claire's life.  He was able to commiserate with me, as he too had gone through the sleep deprivation nightmares.  Evidently this is a thing that new parents go through, and it makes sense.  We are dealing with new stresses and anxieties that we have never had to deal with before, and in sleeping circumstances that are probably barred as torture in the Geneva convention.  Of course the brain is going to try to process these emotions, hormones and circumstances as best it knows how.

I am in a crowded room talking to a bunch of different people at the party.  I don't know where I am or who the people are, but it is pretty dark and crowded.  The conversations I am having are inconsequential at best, but it is loud, so maybe I am not hearing everything I should.  Hmmm...not hearing everything.  I haven't heard Sam cry in a while.  Wait, I don't have Sam with me.  Does Liz have him?  I see her chatting with others in the corner, but she doesn't have the baby.  I look around, wandering amongst the nameless people in the strange house, growing more frantic.  Where is he?  I can' see him.  I can't hear him.  Did somebody take him?  Who has him?  Where do I even start looking?  Where am I?

Last week, Sam had 3 nights in a row where he slept for longer periods of time.  First 4 hours, then 5, and then 6!  What a gift those nights were.  I felt refreshed for the first time in weeks.  It was the first time I had slept a stretch of more than 4 hours since before the baby was born.  Elizabeth and I were hoping for a trend, but alas, it was just a blip, as he has gone back to his 2 hour stints.  I haven't had any anxiety dreams since the 3 nights, and last night he had a 4 hour nap, hopefully beginning another trend of longer evening naps.  I don't know if there is any way to actually avoid the sleep-deprived anxiety nightmares, but I assume that sleeping more could be the answer, putting sleep higher on the needs chart than food or showering once in a while to make up for the growing defecit.  That's my recommendation to any new parent...skip a meal, a chore, or a shower and instead, take a nap.  The nightmares can really stick with you.

By the way, there are new pictures on the Photo Album page!  He is ultra cute! It is not all terrible, I swear!  But it is hard, and I don't want to downplay that.