We started tracking sleep using a pen and a notebook—a notebook I rediscovered a week ago on a shelf. Those early pages are something from a horror novel: The scrawled handwriting doesn't even look like ours and the basics of addition clearly eluded us.
During one of the regular dark stretches I spent rocking the baby between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., I found an iPhone app that promised to make it easier, and to sync across multiple devices so we wouldn't have to interrogate each other during each bleary wake-up to find out what had happened during the last round. By that point I was too focused on survival to care about the anxiety-producing qualities of parenting technologies. My one requirement was that the buttons be large enough to see with my eyes mostly closed. They were. Countless nights awake became counted—and weirdly, it helped. Seeing the unexaggerated insanity of our schedule made sense of our exhausted communication glitches and my inability to get through a day without sitting on the kitchen floor and crying. It didn't help much, but it was something.
Originally published in The Atlantic
Link to full article
No comments:
Post a Comment