For the middle of the night
One page to read when everything feels wrong
It is 3am, this is the worst hour of the whole day, and you are not the only one awake in it.
Right now there are thousands of women sitting almost exactly where you are sitting. In the dark, holding a baby, certain they are the only person in the world feeling this. That is the trick this particular hour plays. It takes something that is happening everywhere and makes it feel like it is only happening to you.
Everything is worse at 3am. Not a bit worse. Enormously worse.
The version of your life you can see from here, at this hour, on this little sleep, is not an accurate one. It is not a clear-eyed look at how things really are. It is what a very tired mind does in the dark, and it will not survive daylight in one piece.
You do not have to fix anything tonight.
Not the feeding. Not the sleeping. Not the question of whether you are any good at this. None of it has to be solved before morning, and none of it can be. Anything you decide at 3am you will have to decide again tomorrow anyway.
Tonight is only about getting to morning. That is the entire job.
If you can manage one small thing, try one of these.
Put a light on. Not the big light, a lamp. The dark is doing some of the work here, and taking it away helps more than it should.
Get a glass of water, mostly so your hands have something to do that is not scrolling.
Or say it out loud to the empty room. “This is really hard.” Nobody has to hear it. Saying it out loud tends to make it smaller than it is when it is just going round and round.
The morning will not solve this. It will change it though.
Nothing about your actual situation will be different at eight o'clock. Same baby, same washing, same tiredness. But the feeling will have shifted, because it always does, and you will be able to think in a way that simply is not available to you right now.
Here is something for tomorrow, not for tonight.
Tell one person the true version. Not “we are doing fine, he is a good sleeper”. The true version, which is “I am finding this really hard”. Your partner, your mum, a friend, your health visitor, whoever comes to mind first.
It does not have to be a big conversation. One sentence, to one person, at some point tomorrow. That is the whole task, and it is a far bigger thing than it sounds.
If you have been carrying something you have not told anyone, something that frightens you, the person you tell will have heard it before. Health visitors and GPs hear it often. Tomorrow is soon enough for that too.
You are doing the hardest job there is, on the least sleep you have ever had, at the worst hour of the night.
Get to morning. That is enough.