Somebody’s Sleeping in My Bed
by Aja Dorsey Jackson
My son didn’t sleep through the night until he was about nine months old. Before that, my husband and I spent many weary nights taking turns waking up every couple of hours to put him back to sleep. These nights produced a lot of tears (on my son’s part and mine) and often ended with him asleep in our bed, something that I once said that I would never allow. A lot changes when you are operating on about three hours of sleep every night that you’ve gotten in half hour segments.
Somewhere around the nine month mark the sleepless nights came abruptly to an end. Our son started going to bed at 8:30 every night and waking up no earlier than 7 am with very little variation. Hubby and I were relieved. We got our bed back and some of our alone time together without the baby quite literally coming between us.
Six months later and the late night crying sessions have started again. Because he is older now, I would feel a lot less guilty about just letting him cry himself back to sleep if I knew that his screams wouldn’t wake up our daughter. Since that isn’t the case, however, more and more I’m finding him back in our bed in the middle of the night, singing songs and shouting every word he knows at the top of his lungs. I was so excited when I realized that he could count to four at only fifteen months, but its really not cute at all at three o’clock in the morning.
As much as I love my children, it is times like these that I admit that the birth of our son has changed our relationship. Most of these changes have made our relationship stronger, but not all every change has been for the better. Our attempts at date nights, for instance, mostly just end with one or both of us passed out on the couch from sheer exhaustion. We both know that maintaining that connection with one another takes some effort, but it becomes hard to make that effort when you invest most of it in trying to keep your eyes open long enough to put a baby back to sleep.
For those of you that have or have had very young children, are you able to maintain the balance between parenting and your relationship with your spouse?
Aja Dorsey Jackson is a freelance writer and marketing consultant in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more about her at www.ajadorseyjackson.com.
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