Gabrielle Ho­sein

Why oh why does my won­der­ful daugh­ter want to wake up to prac­tise stand­ing up, jump­ing on the bed, hand wav­ing move­ments, chew­ing on my aunt's ex­pen­sive wood­en bed­head, rolling over me like I'm the near­est play­gym, at­tack­ing my breasts like some starved pup­py, and then falling asleep for all of 20 sec­onds while ly­ing across my pil­low two mil­lime­tres from my head, in a repet­i­tive cy­cle from 3.30 am to al­most dawn? This is in ad­di­tion to be­ing up at 11 pm, then again at around 1.30 am and fi­nal­ly at 3.30 am. Why? My? Child? Of course, every sin­gle oth­er moth­er I speak to tells me their ba­by sleeps through the night. The sec­re­tary in my of­fice, the neigh­bour next door, even the ran­dom woman in Hi­Lo this morn­ing said her nine-month-old son sleeps straight through the night un­til 9 am. And she was just telling her moth­er how she could go out and fete and come home to meet him still sleep­ing. Nine am? Fete?

Some peo­ple tell me to give my girl wa­ter at night and she will stop wak­ing up to feed. But when she gets up to feed, she re­al­ly does feed-two or three ounces. Oth­ers ad­vise me to give her ce­re­al to weigh her down so she'll sleep, but that tac­tic doesn't work. Plus don't give her for­mu­la. Oth­ers say leave her to "bawl" it out, but that's not my phi­los­o­phy. Be­sides that, we sleep in the same room, so an in­fant stand­ing in the crib and scream­ing is go­ing to get me up any­way, right?

Most nights, my hus­band stays up to feed our ba­by un­til 3 or 4 am and then drags him­self through the day bare­ly able to blink. His dif­fi­cult life in­volves strolling the five feet from the bed­room to the stu­dio, and work­ing at mu­sic in be­tween watch­ing Net­flix in his air-con­di­tioned heav­en. He does the gro­cery shop­ping, dish­es and break­fast most days, let me not mis­rep­re­sent, but af­ter a few hours up with the ba­by, he seems to need to be checked in­to a spa-sleep-re­cov­ery cen­tre, the hard­core kind for Hol­ly­wood stars.

I, on the oth­er hand, breast­feed, dri­ve to work, pump, work man­i­cal­ly, pump, dri­ve home, breast­feed, pump-and then still wake from 4.30 am to breast­feed again. I on­ly have four days of babysit­ting and need to use those days to get all my uni­ver­si­ty and aca­d­e­m­ic work done. Fri­days to Sun­days, when I have my sleep­less-in-San­ta Cruz ba­by, I fig­ure that she, the pri­vate sphere, re­pro­duc­tive work and the care econ­o­my de­serve at least two non-ne­go­ti­at­ed days, right?

Some­times when I look at her snug­gling right up close and sleep­ing peace­ful­ly with her arm warm and soft on me, and know­ing she's had me up at in­ter­vals just close enough to send some­one (me) mad, I don't know what to think or feel. So, here I am. I. Must. Sleep. No, sor­ry, what I meant to say was: I. Must. Work. There's a day job to get done.