Esther Walker - The Bad Mother

So what follows is just what I discovered from my own children and also talking to other women (because what you do an awful lot of after you have kids is talk to other women). Having children for me hasn’t been a ‘journey’ especially, so this book doesn’t begin with a pregnancy test and end with them going to school.

It begins with the most critical subject, the one that is on every parent’s mind, at all times (sleep), and then tackles other subjects as they occurred to me. At the time of writing my second child is not even eighteen months old, so I am right in the dark vortex of doom, right in the eye of the storm. If you are too, or if you have been, I hope that this book makes you laugh and makes you feel better, or relieved, or smug – or just not so alone.

Parents of young children are almost always thinking about sleep. They might be walking around and talking about other things, but what they are thinking about is sleep. Sometimes they are actually having semi-sexual fantasies about sleep. When they are going to do it next, what they will be wearing, exactly how they are going to drift off. I’ll just lie down and put my head there and tuck myself in … like that … and then … and then …

In fact I would go as far as to say that the only hard thing – really hard thing – about having kids is the sleep thing. Even if your kids sleep well, there never seems to be enough sleep in the world for the parent of small children. And if your children sleep badly, well, fuck. You will simply go insane with exhaustion.

You can tell how much sleep matters because as soon as the youngest child in any family is no longer waking up in the night needing instant attention, and/or can also be left safely downstairs alone in the morning with its sibling(s)/telly, you see the shoulders of the parents visibly slacken.

Their faces lighten, they move around more slowly, the edge goes from their voices. Their children might still be annoying little ratbags but there’s nothing that can’t be coped with now because there is more sleep to go around. They are no longer regularly jerked awake in the small hours by inexplicable wailing, they are no longer required to play horsies at 7am, and no longer need to beg their spouse at 3pm on a Sunday to be allowed to go upstairs and ‘just’ shut their eyes for ten minutes.

And so, inevitably, after the congratulatory stuff about your first pregnancy subsides, out comes the shit about sleep. ‘You’ll never really sleep again,’ you get told, on and on. ‘Just get loads of sleep now because when junior’s out …’

I knew, though. I knew better than anyone that babies don’t fucking sleep. Or they sleep at the wrong times, or they’ll only sleep in 45-minute bursts. The threats about sleep fell on smug, prepared ears.

‘I’m getting a night nanny,’ I would say, rudely, to anyone who dared suggest that after having a baby I wouldn’t still be lazing about in bed for ten hours a night. ‘For six weeks. She will teach the baby to sleep. The baby will sleep. So will we.’

My husband didn’t understand the need for a night nanny. He thought we should have the baby in bed with us; he thought it would be cosy.

‘If you have a baby in bed with you,’ I would snap, ‘that’s how it learns to go to sleep. Then it can’t fall asleep on its own. I’m not having a three-year-old in bed with me.’

My husband paled at the cost. I told him that I would happily go without a summer holiday that year if money was the issue. He said that it was more than a summer holiday. I suggested that we sell the car and my engagement ring, which I’ve never liked anyway. I offered to stack shelves. He relented.

What is a night nanny? It is a person, usually a woman, who is expert with newborns. They arrive, usually at about 7pm, and take the baby for twelve hours until 7am the next day. If you are breastfeeding they will bring you the baby (or you go to the baby’s room) for a feed, then take it away, change it, burp it and settle it back in its cot. If you are not breastfeeding at night, they feed it formula milk from a bottle and do all the changing and settling, and you sleep right through.

A night nanny seems extreme to most people. But I didn’t know how else to do it. My mother’s approach to small babies was to breastfeed exclusively, which she found easy, and to have the baby in bed with her. Permanently. Forget the sanctity of the marital bed. As far as she was concerned, her house was a cave and she was some sort of proto-human living in this cave – and in caves the whole family slept tucked up next to each other.

Well, no thanks. I slept in my parents’ bed until I was seven and it has left me with all sorts of bad sleep associations. I couldn’t go on sleepovers when I was little, I didn’t have my own bedroom, which took some explaining to visitors.

My mother probably tells people that aged seven I simply moved into my own bedroom and slept there and that was that. This is not quite true. I moved in to share a bedroom with my sisters, which was just about bearable, but when I actually moved into a room by myself the transition was hellish. I couldn’t get to sleep. I was lonely and terrified. I still fall asleep more easily and sleep better if there is someone else there with me. This is fine if you are a child sharing a room with your sisters or if you are married, but if you are a single adult it is really quite problematic.

No child of mine was going to live like that. It was going to sleep alone in its own bed, from the start, and that was that. But I knew myself. I knew that at the faintest moment of exhaustion I would have the baby in bed with me like a shot and my dreams of an ordered house would be over.

So I hired a magnificent woman, originally from St Lucia, who came six nights a week for six weeks and trained Kitty to sleep through the night, in her own bed.

And she did. After carrying on with a feed at 11pm for a few weeks, Kitty slept through the night, going to bed at 7pm and waking up at 7am the next day when she was ten weeks old. And that was as much as I could ever have dreamed or hoped for.

A lot of people think this is wrong and that when a baby wakes up in the night it wants to see its mummy, that you fail to bond with your child, that this is neglectful and bad. I don’t find this. I found the whole thing magical. The clean and ordered bath time, the slumbersome bottle taken in a cosy, dim nursery. The certainty of it all! The night nanny left me with an A4 sheet with Kitty’s new routine carefully written out. A bottle of this much at that time, naptime then and then, bath time then and goodnight! Cheerio, see you in the morning!

So it came as a nasty surprise that even though Kitty slept, I was still tired all the time. When 7am rolled around, even though I had just had the previous twelve hours to do whatever I wanted with, I still felt tired and crushed when it was time to get up. During the day as we crept towards her naptimes I would feel my eyelids drooping, my shoulders sagging. I was sleeping at night but I was still in a fug of exhaustion all day. And, worse, I felt unentitled to it because Kitty slept so well at night and I had long given up breastfeeding as an impossible, unreasonable, terrible task.

Why was I so tired? Why, why? I ought to be rushing about, achieving things! I ought to be on top of absolutely everything, banging out novels, cooking enticing meals, looking terrific. But I found that I was only just marginally more together than other mothers I knew who were doing the whole thing alone. I was an absolute failure.