Surviving Newborn Sleep & Marriage

My mother-in-law was standing in my kitchen holding a frozen cabbage leaf, telling me to just put the baby in a laundry basket in the closet if he wouldn't stop crying. My best friend, who lives in a totally different tax bracket, had just texted me a link to a four-hundred-dollar newborn sleep course that promised twelve hours of uninterrupted bliss by week two. And my doctor—bless his heart—just handed me a faded, photocopied pamphlet from 1998 and told me I should really just try to sleep when the baby sleeps. I was so exhausted my teeth hurt, and trying to pack up my Etsy shop orders on zero sleep was quickly becoming a safety hazard.

You get a lot of wild advice when you bring a human home from the hospital. Back when I was teaching first grade, I used to think I understood child development and knew exactly how I was going to handle everything from discipline to bedtime routines. Then I actually had my oldest, Hunter, and all that textbook knowledge flew right out the window the second we pulled into our driveway. We had no plan, no village, and absolutely no idea what we were doing, and I'm pretty sure I spent the first three months of his life weeping into a burp cloth while my husband and I communicated entirely through passive-aggressive sighs.

I'm just gonna be real with you, sleep deprivation makes you do and say things you'd never otherwise consider. You think you've a solid marriage until it's three in the morning and you're intensely debating whether a particular brand of pacifier is going to ruin your child's jawline while simultaneously wanting to divorce your spouse because they're breathing too loudly in the rocking chair.

The absolute shock of bringing a human home

With Hunter, my husband and I thought we could just wing the whole parenting thing. We figured we loved each other, we liked babies, how hard could it be? That was a massive mistake that is my ultimate cautionary tale for anyone who will listen. When you don't have a concrete plan for who's doing what, resentment builds up faster than dirty bottles in the sink.

At my breaking point, my doctor mentioned this workbook called Daisy's Guide. It was put together by this doctor down in Oklahoma, Dr. Drabu, who apparently runs a whole mother-baby unit at a hospital. She supposedly figured out that a massive percentage of maternal mental health issues stem from parents not being on the same page about basic survival things before the baby arrives. Her whole thing is making couples sit down and hash out their parenting philosophies while they're still pregnant, instead of waiting until the baby is screaming to decide how to handle it.

I looked into it, and from what my sleep-addled brain could comprehend, it forces you to argue about things across a bunch of different categories. It covers the basic eat-poop-sleep stuff, but it also goes into things like defining your village and figuring out boundaries with extended family. I remember reading that and thinking about how I let my husband's aunt come over and sit on my couch for four hours while I was bleeding and crying just days after giving birth, simply because we hadn't established a rule about visitors. Having a medical professional basically give you permission to lock your doors and tell people no is incredibly validating, and I'm pretty sure getting on the same page medically prevents a lot of postpartum relationship disasters, or at least that's how my brain interpreted the science behind it.

It even has a section on existential questions, which sounds completely ridiculous when you're just trying to survive until breakfast, but it actually makes sense when you realize you've never asked your partner how they plan to explain the concept of death to a toddler. Don't wait until your kid finds a squished bug on the driveway to realize you've fundamentally different religious views.

Paying someone to stay awake so you don't have to

I was so desperate for help with my second baby that I started scouring the internet for local postpartum doulas. I had heard about this amazing agency up in New York called Daisy Baby that does overnight newborn care and lactation help. Y'all, my thumbs were so clumsy at that hour that I must have typed some weird variation of a Daisy Baby sleep chat debate into the search bar, and let me tell you, if you accidentally mash the wrong letters together on Google at three in the morning, you'll end up in some extremely weird corners of the internet that have absolutely nothing to do with infant sleep. Please just stick to safe, normal search terms, because seeing a random internet forum fight about whether swaddling is a government conspiracy is the last thing a hormonal mother needs.

Anyway, the actual Daisy Baby company focuses on what they call science-backed strategies and compassionate care. I honestly don't even know what a science-backed sleep strategy looks like because my babies have always aggressively defied science, but the idea of someone coming to your house and staying awake so you can sleep is basically my definition of heaven. I looked at the prices for a night nurse and immediately closed my laptop. Hiring a professional overnight doula costs more than my mortgage, so that was definitely not happening for us out here in rural Texas.

But here's my honest advice based on that reality. If you happen to have the budget for a postpartum doula or a night nurse, spend the money without an ounce of guilt. It's an investment in your physical recovery and your sanity. If your budget is tight like ours was, you've to get creative and aggressive about asking for help. I ended up practically begging my own mom to come over and take the evening shift. I'd go to bed at eight o'clock, and she would hold the baby in the living room until midnight. Those four hours of unbroken sleep were the only reason I didn't completely lose my mind. Organize a meal train, ask your friends to come fold your laundry instead of holding the baby, and for the love of everything, let the dust bunnies multiply in the hallway.

Don't even bother trying to force a newborn onto a rigid wake-window schedule until they're at least three months old anyway.

Products that actually made a difference in my house

While I couldn't buy my way into a full eight hours of sleep with a night nurse, I did finally figure out that what you put the baby in at night really matters. With my oldest, we used whatever hand-me-down polyester pajamas we were gifted, and he would wake up sweaty, furious, and tangled in his own clothes.

I eventually bit the bullet and ordered an organic cotton swaddle from Kianao. Let me tell you, this thing was a game changer for us. It's softer than my own expensive bed sheets, and the fabric has this perfect amount of stretch. Hunter loved to try and break his arms out of his swaddles at four in the morning, but this one let him wiggle just enough to feel comfortable without letting him Hulk-smash himself in the face. I washed that swaddle on the heavy-duty hot cycle probably two hundred times because my washing machine is basically a torture chamber for clothes, and it never lost its shape or got those weird little pills on the fabric.

I also bought one of Kianao's jersey knit baby beanies because everyone in my family insisted that the baby needed a hat on at all times to prevent them from catching a cold, which my doctor rolled his eyes at. It's a really beautiful, thick knit fabric and the quality is fantastic, but my kids are born with ninety-ninth percentile giant heads. The beanie just slid right off Hunter's head like a champagne cork every time he turned his neck. It's a great product, it just is not a match for our family's genetics, so we ended up passing it along to a friend whose baby has a more reasonably sized noggin.

If you're currently nesting and staring at a wall of baby products feeling completely overwhelmed, just skip the wipe warmers and the fancy electronic rockers and browse through Kianao's organic baby clothes to find simple things that zip from the bottom and fabrics that really breathe because trying to match tiny metal snaps in the dark will make you want to burn your own house down.

We eventually survived the newborn phase, mostly by lowering our expectations of what a clean house looked like and learning how to communicate without yelling. My husband learned how to load the dishwasher the way I like it, I learned how to let him soothe the baby his own way without hovering over his shoulder, and we both agreed to never speak of the things we said to each other during the four-month sleep regression. You're going to get through it, but having a plan before the contractions start is going to make it a whole lot easier.

Before you completely lose your mind reading another intense internet forum thread about sleep training methods, go pour yourself a giant cup of coffee and look at something nice, like Kianao's sustainable sleepwear, to give yourself a little sanity boost.

Real talk questions from the trenches

Do I really need to hire a postpartum doula to survive?

Absolutely not, but if you've the cash, it's amazing. I didn't have the budget for it and I survived, but it required swallowing my pride and begging my family for help. A doula is just a guaranteed, professional village. If you can't afford one, you've to build your own village with friends, neighbors, and family members who are willing to genuinely scrub a toilet instead of just wanting to hold a sleeping infant.

How do I get my husband to genuinely wake up for the night feeds?

You have to establish the shifts before the baby arrives, and then you've to literally kick him under the covers if he pretends not to hear the crying. My husband could sleep through a freight train, so our rule was that if it was his shift, I'd turn on the bedside lamp and verbally announce that it was his turn. You can't expect them to just magically wake up if they're heavy sleepers, but you also can't let them use that as an excuse to get out of the rotation.

Are those relationship workbooks for parents seriously helpful?

I used to think they were a waste of time, but after almost divorcing my husband over how to fold a burp cloth, I get it now. Having a workbook forces you to talk about the uncomfortable stuff before you're sleep-deprived. It's way easier to argue about mother-in-law boundaries on a random Tuesday afternoon while you're pregnant than it's when she's standing in your kitchen critiquing your breastfeeding technique.

Why do people make such a big deal about organic cotton for sleep?

I thought it was just a trendy marketing thing until I had a baby with super sensitive skin who sweat like a marathon runner in his sleep. Regular synthetic fabrics trap the heat, and when a baby gets hot, they wake up screaming. Organic cotton honestly breathes. Once I switched our sleepwear, my oldest stopped waking up with that damp, clammy feeling on the back of his neck, and we all got at least an extra hour of sleep.

When does the newborn exhaustion honestly end?

Everyone lies and says it gets better at six weeks, but I'm just gonna be real with you, I didn't feel like a functioning human being until about four months in. Once they drop the middle-of-the-night feed and start giving you a solid six-hour stretch, the fog lifts. Until then, just drink the coffee and lower your standards for everything else in your life.