Why We Don’t Go Out: My Entry for www.southoftherivermum.com’s Blog Hop

Nov 15, 2011 by admin

The lovely Millie at Southoftherivermum.com invited me to be part of her blog hop!! As I am always up for something new, I thought I would share with you my descent into being a contented homebody while aslo showcasing some fabulous work that other writers have shared, please check out the Blog Hop on Me Time

By the time my daughter came along, my husband and I had been living together for nearly 6 care-free years of mid-week take-aways, weekend dinner parties and meeting up for drinks after, at 10pm. We went to sporting events, the theatre, to the cinema, to watch improv, concerts, street fairs; we had a great life and lived up every minute of the time we were not at work.

In the first months of my daughter’s life, we tried to keep a normal life. We would bring her out to pubs, restaurants, or just out for a long walks with her in the evenings. We would hire a sitter so we could go out for a meal or drink, I could go to my weekly choir practice, or we could meet up with friends together or separately.

But my daughter is not a restful person. She needed very little sleep and kept us up night, after night, after night, after night, after night. She did not settle at 3, 4, or 5 months. We tried dream feeds, controlled crying, out and out crying, we tried militant schedules and nothing, NOTHING would make my infant sleep more than 20 – 30 minutes for naps and roughly 9 very interrupted hours at night. She was such a terrible sleeper at 8 months I woke up in the bathroom and had no idea where she was, where I had some from (bed or the sofa, her room, the chair).

I developed something I call “sleep psychosis”, until you have been up every single night for over 500 nights you really do not know sleep deprivation. Anyone can take 3 months, that’s what adrenaline is for … 6 months is pushing it, but you have not gone past the point of no return. When you are unable to be friends with people who have restful children and think 8pm is bedtime, it is a good clue that you have sleep psychosis.

Around 18 months I was forced to push aside the rage, the frustration and accept that my kid needed extra attention, that she would be up in the night and then rise, if we were lucky, at 6am ready to go to the park (usually more like 5:30). There was only one way to work through this and I was going to have to get to bed early. I slowly grew less and less interested in going out and more and more interested in getting lots of sleep.

I then became mother to a far more restful child, and now that my son is nearly 3, we can safelyget them to sleep by 8:30 and they wake around 7:00, but I am just too tired to go out in the evenings. Instead, when my husband is not at work and the kids are asleep, we share some wine or decaf tea on the sofa and enjoy how thankful we have our health and our family. I then share highlights I have read in The New Yorker and Twitter with him, he shares the day’s development in sporting news or the financial markets with me.

I have been bringing in some meagre funds writing and from my web site, but these hardly offset inflation, swim lessons, violin lessons, school uniforms, birthday parties, presents, and organic fruit we just don’t have the extra cash to pay a sitter and a meal. We tried swapping sitting with friends, but I am so tired at night I cannot be arsed to stay up late in someone else’s flat.

I hate to admit it, but I am a broken woman: the stress the lack of sleep would cause me is hardly worth the effort to go out any more.