Newborns sleep sixteen to twenty hours a day, but new mothers are lucky if they get more than two consecutive hours.
It’s a paradox my child-free friend struggled to make sense of: “Okay, yesterday, you told me you were worried because all Celia does is sleep,” I remember her saying. “Today, you say you can’t sleep at all because of the baby … Well, which is it?”
Both, of course.
Yes, newborns sleep a lot, so much that I called the pediatrician twice to make sure Celia’s penchant for sleep wasn’t a sign of a listless, unhealthy baby. (I was assured her sleeping patterns were normal.) The rub: babies don’t sleep for very long at one time.
Newborns typically operate in cycles of about four hours, says Dr. Gary Montgomery, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “They sleep, they eat, they poop, and they sleep again.”
The key for new mothers is to grab sleep just as baby is nodding off in hopes of getting two or three uninterrupted hours. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of advice that rolls off the tongues of experts and been-their-done-that moms with such ease, you know it can’t be that simple.
As a new mom, I wasn’t used to grabbing a couple hours sleep here and there. And I wasn’t used to being in a constant state of OH-MY-GOD-I-HAVE-A-BABY-AND-SHE’S-MY-RESPONSIBILITY. I was tense. I couldn’t just conk out whenever my baby did.
And I had this other infuriating trend going on. Celia seemed to sleep all day and then party all night. By day, I could barely rouse her to feed her. At night, I couldn’t get her to sleep for more than a few minutes to save my sleep-deprived soul.
“Didn’t you know?” my mom friend told me, her sleeping-through-the-night, eight-month-old baby on her hip. “Babies are nocturnal.”
She went on to explain that while incubating in the comfort of a womb, a baby is lulled to sleep by the mother’s activity. At night, the baby is somehow energized by mommy’s slumber. After birth, baby keeps on the same schedule, sleeping during the day and wiggling all night. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what she said, only that I felt like a fool for having missed the memo. As a lifelong devotee of a Good Night’s Sleep, it’s a piece of news I could’ve used.
