i’m about a month back into my job, hybrid schedule, and my kid is five months old. the advice i keep getting is ‘it gets better when they sleep through the night,’ as if the entire problem is a simple deficit of hours that can be paid back. i’m starting to think that’s the wrong frame for the problem entirely. some nights he’ll give me a solid six-hour stretch and i’ll still feel like i’ve been hit by a truck the next day, especially on a WFH day.
the issue isn’t just the quantity of sleep, it’s the fragmentation. getting woken up every 2-3 hours, even if the total adds up to 7 or 8, is not the same neurochemically as consolidated sleep. your body never really gets into the deep restorative stages. it feels like trying to manage two separate clocks.
there’s the sleep/wake clock, and then there’s the hormonal clock that’s still completely haywire postpartum. they’re not synced. the fatigue feels like the same kind of confusion people talk about in perimenopause, where the problem isn’t just that estrogen is low, it’s that it’s erratic. the system can’t find a baseline.
it’s like the postpartum hair shedding thing. everyone says ‘hormones’ but it’s telogen effluvium, which is driven by the shock to the system from birth and the rapid hormonal shifts. it’s two mechanisms