It’s a truth universally acknowledged by all: new parents don’t get a lot of sleep. This is not news, and such common knowledge that I almost feel silly spelling it out. Still, it’s probably important that we clarify, just in case anyone reading this currently has a newborn at home, in which case I totally don’t expect you to remember anything aside from how to get from your bed to the crib and back again. Along with the sleep deprivation and confusion comes a number of things all new moms think about sleep, but don’t say out loud. It’s not that we don’t want to say them out loud, it’s just that we are too tired to articulate our thoughts and we are too tired to even make plans with our loved ones to whom we would communicate these thoughts to and we're too tired to remember what in the hell we were even talking about.
Seriously, life with a new baby can turn your world upside down, and will most surely mess with your sleep schedule in intense, grueling, glorious* ways. Still, perhaps there’s solace in knowing other moms have been there, too. We can come together in solidarity and mourn the sleep-filled nights we're convinced we'll never experience again. Then, when sleep does return as a somewhat normal staple in our life, we can wax nostalgic about how cute our non-sleeping newborns were, and even contemplate having another child because we're masochists and time is a cruel mistress that tricks us into having children because we forget how tired we were.
Time hasn't done that to me, though. Well, not yet. My son is two years old, and two years isn't enough to erase the thoughts I had about sleep; the thoughts I was too tired to articulate; the thoughts that, I suspect, every new mother has but can't bring herself to say out loud.
*probably not at all glorious, actually, but at least we can hold hope in our hearts, right?