Success Isn’t Measured In Sleep

Today's parenting team wants you to know that your success as a mom is definitely not measured in sleep. For me, the mother of a toddler with insomnia and an infant with colic, that's great news.

If having my kids in bed by 8:00 or even 9:00 and getting at least 7 hours myself is the measuring stick for awesome mothering, I'm in big trouble. If that's how we're measuring success these days, I'm failing at this mommy thing.

Thankfully, it's not.

To the New Moms,

I know you're tired. Really, I do. I know you're so tired that you aren't quite sure the last time you brushed your teeth and you barely know up from down right now. It's hard. It's SO hard to be that tired.

You're telling me! My husband and I are drinking ridiculous amounts of caffeine.  We should probably buy stock in those little “5 hour energy” drinks. Even with that, we're sleeping through our alarms and muddling through this past month.   Sometimes we're just praying we don't fall asleep standing up and drop the baby.

When people asked me if my daughter was sleeping – I wanted SO badly to be able to say yes. Because good mothers are mothers who get their babies to sleep, right?

Wrong.

Good mothers are mothers who love their babies. Good mothers are mothers who realize that babies are actually tiny humans and will sleep through the night when they are good & ready. Good mothers do not measure their worth in REM cycles.

Thank God for that! I'm not sure any of the people living in this house have experienced an REM cycle in the last 6 weeks. Is that healthy? Probably not.

So the next time someone says to you “My baby slept through the night at 3 weeks!” I want you to smile, nod, and keep on keepin' on.

And, by the way, I know you're going to keep googling ways to get sleep.

But just give yourself, and those gorgeous bags under your eyes, some grace right now. Because you're a good mom – and you'll sleep again. Promise.

So I can't slap the next person to tell me all about their kid that sleeps so easily all through the night? I'd really like to sometimes. You're right, that's probably not acceptable behavior.

Still, it's good to know that sleep will return and, in the mean time, the lack of it doesn't mean I'm totally screwing this up.

Get more encouragement from the moms at Today's Parenting Team and give a little to all the new moms out there in the comment section too.