She is not a deep sleeper. She hasn’t been since her baby son was born seven weeks early. While he slept, or didn’t sleep, in the NICU, she got the best and longest sleep every night until he came home from the hospital. “Sleep while you can,” the nurses told her. They were right.
After she brought him home, he only slept two hours at a time unless she was holding him, which meant she only slept two hours at a time. When he turned three, he slept four hours at a time. It got easier to just let him sleep with her so when he woke up, she could snuggle up next to him and they could both get the sleep they needed.
And yet, the first two years were brutal. Her husband did not understand that their baby was not going to go back to sleep by himself. There was a panic in his infant cries that she instinctively knew was terror that he had been abandoned.
She had no way of knowing that fourteen years later, after two years of facing his serious mental health struggles, she would finally meet a doctor who told her that babies in the NICU had been more often diagnosed with severe separation anxiety than normal term babies.
Instead, she would haul herself out of bed, every two hours, until she collapsed with him on the futon that was moved to his room for that purpose. Then she would get herself up, get dressed, and go to work. Her mother, who…
