I will not negotiate with the sleep terrorists. But I will let them outside to pee at night.
On a reunion with exhaustion, two years of missing memories and another week that was in Canadian journalism.
Welcome, Code 47 readers. I am exhausted. So there will likely be some typos below. Because, well, like I said, I’m fried. Or, as some guy from Liverpool once said:
I have only myself to blame, of course. I was just joking with my old friend Supriya Dwivedi a few weeks ago about how amazing it is to get normal sleep again. Supriya has a young child, so she knows what I mean. Years ago, she and I hosted an early morning radio show (though only briefly, I got moved to another slot after about a year and a half) at a radio station in Toronto, and I remember very little of that time. Getting up to do the show didn't help! But I also am the father of two kids who were both terrible sleepers.
I guess that technically isn't true. My firstborn slept fine ... as long as she was in bed with us. We really did fight this as long as we could, but when my wife was pregnant with our son, it just became too much. We couldn't spend half the night fighting with our daughter to sleep, so we gave in and let her just sleep with us. We'd start her in her crib and have a few hours to ourselves, but when she inevitably began to fuss, it was into bed with us, a bottle, and a generally decent night of sleep after that. This wasn't ideal, but it worked.
My daughter, aged two, sleeping soundly … on my side of the bed!
It was my son who blew it all up. Years later, my friend Asher coined the term "sleep terrorism" to describe one of his beautiful daughter's nighttime routine. That term perfectly describes my infant (and toddler) son. He wouldn't sleep more than two or three hours, and when he woke up, he was awake. Instantly. He didn't cry, normally, but he would start moving around, talking, loudly playing, and, most memorably, humming and singing. Every night, for years. We tried everything. Medical checkups, sleep consultants, every form of sleep training you can imagine. Nothing worked.
For years.
I'm being 100 per cent honest with you, dear readers: I don't remember about 18-24 months, starting after my sleep terrorist son was born. I know, in a general sense, what happened during those times. I have a timeline of events in my mind: career milestones, family developments, moving from our house in the 905 to our current home in Toronto. All that stuff happened during this dead zone. But actual specific memories? Almost none. Someone asked me what I remember from around the time my son was born — the first few weeks of his life. And I had to think about that. I remember him getting some balloons to his hospital room. And I had a new iPhone that broke so fast it was under a warranty and they mailed me a new one. And, uhhh ... that's .... it? For about six months. We had Chinese food one night and it was a bit of a let down. That's what comes up in my memory file for that period.
A couple of weeks ago I went back and read my columns from this time (for the Post and also for Global News, where I worked for a few years) and, gosh. Again, some of these things I remember happened. Like events in the news. "Oh yeah, I remember when that occurred." But do I remember writing the columns? Nope. The same is true with family photos from that time. I look at stuff, recall it happened, but can I tell you much of anything beyond what's in the pictures? No way.
This is why my most-important honest advice to new parents is to take an insane number of photos and videos. Film everything. Shamelessly. I know that sounds just sentimental and nostalgic, and I guess it is partially that, but also, you've got to use your phone as a memory aid, because you're gonna be exhausted. For years. You will function. You'll eat, shower, work, and the kids will be taken care of. But that's about it.
Photographic evidence of a rare event: my son sleeping.
Anyway, all this came to mind when I spoke to Supriya because we were laughing about how I have to basically rely on her memory of a whole window of my life, a period during which I was basically functioning on mental autopilot while most of my brain slept, the way a shark sleeps while swimming. Glad I'm not doing that anymore!, I told her.
And then, like a moron, I bought a puppy.
The details of that were the subject of last week's newsletter. If you want more frequent and detailed updates, you can find plenty on my Twitter. Suffice it to say, he's a good boy and a lovely dog, with a good personality, but he's wildly inconsistent at night. He's a bit of a sleep terrorist himself, come to think of it. Some nights, he curls up and sleeps soundly for seven hours, has a pee break — optimally outside, but not always — and then goes right back down for a snooze. Other nights? Not so good. And there's no way to predict which is which yet. That's the genius of sleep terrorism. You never know when they'll strike.
It won't last forever. We have been crate training Scotty this week and it's a frustrating process, but it's working. So this won't last long, God willing. A month or two of chaos at the start should earn us years of rewards.
But boy. Am I ever reminded again of how exhausting parenting is. I have said many times, entirely seriously, that parenting is the only thing in the world good enough to be worth how terrible it is. And that sounds like I'm being cute, but I think parents will agree with me. It's amazing, because it has to be to offset the downsides.
I was telling my daughter not long ago about a night I had with her when she was maybe a year old. It wasn't her fault, she was sick with some bug. And she simply could not settle unless being rocked and bounced. If I stopped, even just for a minute, she'd wake up and start crying. So I walked around the house rocking her for literally seven or eight hours. My wife slept upstairs, my daughter slept on my shoulder, and I walked. The sun was coming up, and this was a work day, when my daughter woke up, looked at me, rubbed my cheek with her tiny hand and smiled at me. "Dada," she said.
At that moment, I could have talked another seven or eight hours with her. She was worth it. (She still is, though she's a bit bigger now.)
Or, to put it more bluntly, our kids are cute because they have to be. We love them or else we'd never bother. I am especially in awe of single parents, most especially those with young children. My wife and I could at least sometimes try to give the other a break to catch up on some sleep. I couldn't imagine doing it solo.
It's not quite the same thing with a dog, but ... it's close. Scotty is a good boy. And it's a damn good thing for him that he is!
Oh, and one more thing on the kid sleep front: for future or new parents who might read the above and become discouraged. It does get better. With both of mine, the sleep issues just ... stopped. When my daughter was three, we told her one night, hey, you're a big girl now, and you have a big girl room, so you'll just sleep in there. And she accepted that with no questions, and was basically fine from then on out. My son took longer, but gradually began improving around the same age, sleeping longer and longer stretches. If anything, today, I'd say he's the better sleeper. But he took his time getting there.
So, anyway. Yeah. An unexpected "benefit" of having a new puppy is being reminded of what having infants is like. It's hard to believe I forgot how disruptive lack of sleep can be.
Actually, no, it' s not. If we weren't programmed to forget this stuff, we'd never have more than a kid each.
For those of you here who know me via my National Post journalism, you've probably been wondering where I've been. I've mentioned the last two weeks that I've been working on a project and I still am. I've had one of you email me already asking what the project is, assuming there was some big secret I was hinting at. Honestly, it's just internal stuff, management chores and paperwork that I've been wading through because our fiscal recently ended and we need to plan for a very challenging year ahead. The pandemic has had a huge impact on our revenues so the math is harder this year than most (and it's never easy). So it's a lot of meetings and math — probably my two least favourite things.
But I actually have some good news on the journalism front — I'll be working on my next Post column shortly, because I finally have the raw materials to do so. Forgive my vagueness here, I don't want to go into too much detail yet. But I had a theory a few months ago, and I felt pretty strongly about it, but I didn't have the data to back it up. (The data, at that point, simply didn't exist.) By fluke, I saw a paper this weekend that not only confirmed my hunch, which is always a super validating feeling, but also helpfully pointed to a bunch of other material that also supports my thesis. So I'll be working on that in the early part of this week, time, management and puppy permitting. It's not the most exciting topic in the world, but I think it's an important one — and it's one that very much has bearing on our modern reality in COVID Year 0.
I did have time to do a video for the Post, though, on the difficulty of trying to figure out what's allowed (and not) as Ontario reverts to a light lockdown in response to the second wave of COVID-19.
I wrote on that same topic on TVO.org, with the obvious luxury of more space than a short video would permit. The Ontario government, including elected and unelected officials, are all insisting that the province has a plan and that the plan has been clearly communicated to the public. But then you talk to anyone who actually constitutes, you know, the public, and you find that no one has the first frickin' clue what's going on. I pointed to the examples of the various athletic teams and activities my kids are (supposed to be) involved in, and none of them can figure out what they are allowed to do.
My daughter's gymnastics class is an instructive example, I noted: "Are gymnasiums gyms? That’s not wordplay. That was the crux of the ambiguity. Etymology aside, it wasn’t clear to the gym owners whether their gymnastics centre was, by provincial or municipal definition, a recreational facility or, well, an indoor gym. They originally chose to proceed on the assumption that they were a recreational facility, not a gym, but after a meeting on the weekend, parents got a further update, shutting the facilities down for a month. It included this absolute gem of a line: 'We had hoped [a meeting with provincial officials] would result in additional information about gymnastics clubs. We were informed that no definitive answers were received and, therefore, we are considering the factors outlined in the new restrictions as best as we can. In accordance with the new measures, an extremely difficult decision has been made to pause all recreational classes effective immediately.' We should frame that. That might well be the defining sentence pair of Ontario’s pandemic response right there."
Also at TVO.org this week, I wrote about why I'm making a point of supporting some of the local bars and restaurants, as they find themselves shut down again by Ontario's new modified lockdown."Spending on restaurants has risen steadily in recent years," in Canada, I noted. "Spending on dinner out (or food ordered in) is the Canadian public’s top self-identified indulgence, and that’s certainly true in my household. In a broader sense, there’s also the community impact of a gathering place open to all. Pubs sponsor local hockey teams and host game nights and community clubs. I’ve often wondered if, in some ways, the local restaurant has come to serve much the same role houses of worship once did in terms of providing a gathering place and sense of community. My Baptist ancestors would probably be horrified at the notion of a beer-soaked sports bar being a 21st-century church, but what else fills that role today?"
That column ran on Tuesday, and on Friday, as promised, we ordered in again from the local pub, and it was delicious.
As for my daily grind, of course, you can always hear me on the radio. I'm on SiriusXM's Canada Talks (channel 167) every weekday morning from 7-8 Eastern time. Tune in at any time (during that hour)! Hopefully, tomorrow, I won't be slurring my words due to fatigue.
Talk to you soon, Code 47 readers. Take care. And have a good sleep.
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney