The Bad Mother. Esther Walker

been out, come back, drunk some bottles, batted a few toys about. Kitty hadn’t even been weaned at that point, so there was no pureeing or cooking to do. I had had two hours all to myself in the middle of the day while Kitty slumbered in her cot in her own room. What on earth was so tiring?

      I noticed eventually, when Kitty was about eighteen months old, that this constant droopiness had lifted. During Kitty’s lunchtime nap I no longer rushed through a few tasks in order to lie on the sofa and stare numbly at the ceiling. I made calls and chatted, packed up things to go to charity, worked, poked determinedly at neglected corners of the house.

      Then I got pregnant with my second child, Sam, and a new era of tiredness hit me like a truck. Having not been especially exhausted while pregnant with Kitty, I was staggered at how tired I was all the time. Every lunchtime I would be wiped out for two hours, like chalk on a board. An alarm would raise me at 3pm to get Kitty up and I would lurch up the stairs to the nursery, still mostly asleep, nauseated to my bones. I would wake her up and let her play in the room (i.e. smash the place up) for another half an hour while I lay on that same single bed, drifting in and out of consciousness.

      Sam was born in May, two years and three months after Kitty, and despite seeming to be a perfectly good sleeper and getting the same night nanny treatment that Kitty had had, at four months old he started waking up at 5am. Then that stopped for a bit and then he started waking up at all times of the night. Sometimes two or three times a night, always at different times. I had no idea what he wanted.

      Having had no experience of this with Kitty I was completely adrift. And I suddenly realised what being really tired actually meant.

      I hadn’t been tired with Kitty at all! I had been slightly fatigued! I was concentrating hard because everything was so new, and learning is exhausting, and I had been bored out of my mind because it was all just pretty boring, which makes you feel like you’re tired. But I wasn’t actually tired.

      After Sam was born and spent months and months mucking around at night, driving me to distraction, winter came along and not only was he awake at least once in the night, Kitty was also getting ill and waking up, and then I got ill and all of a sudden I was open-mouthed and demented, one-eyed and bonkers with fatigue.

      It struck me how dangerous it all is. When I consider how many people have children who do not sleep well and how many of those people have to go to work in the morning it really is a miracle that the entire world doesn’t just grind to a halt in a pile-up of errors because everyone is so flipping wired out on coffee, fags and sugar because their bloody kids have kept them awake since 4.30am.

      No-one, as my sister says, gets away with it. You can have all the help you possibly want, can possibly afford, but unless you have your kids sleeping out of earshot and you’ve got a live-in nanny who your babies call for if they are sick or frightened, when your kids wake up in the night, it’s on you.

      It’s one thing if you don’t work or aren’t working much when your children are small, but what if you are up with your kids at night and then have to fucking get up and get on the tube and go to work? It’s a miracle that trains even turn up, that the financial markets don’t collapse in on themselves, that surgeons don’t remove MORE wrong limbs, that banks don’t make more errors in our favour.

      So I learned, humbly, what it was to be really tired. I recalled an interview with Stella McCartney (who has four children) a few years ago in which she stated that she had been up a lot the night before because three of her four children were ill and she was exhausted. ‘I’ve got burny eyes,’ she said to the interviewer. That’s it. Burny eyes.

      I learned that being actually physically exhausted from no sleep is a completely different feeling from feeling crushed by boredom. When you have barely slept you can actually feel really awake, in the same way that people are said to fling their clothes off and claim to be boiling hot just before they die of hypothermia.

      Exhaustion is often accompanied by hyperactivity, jitteriness and hysteria, and a reluctance to nap during the day. When you are being woken up and kept awake at night, you feel a resentment about going to sleep during the day. All you are doing, you start thinking, is fuelling yourself to do this awful, boring thing at night. If you have an hour to yourself during the day, going to sleep seems like such a waste when you could be poking about on the internet or sorting out your diary or tending to a small, terrifying and now critical pile of admin.

      You grind through the day, not stopping because if you stop you start to think about just how tired you really are. And it becomes harder to carry on. In my mind’s eye, when I am very tired, I see myself pitched forward at an angle, bowling through my day as if walking against a very stiff wind.

      With two children, even though the exhaustion was real, the sleeplessness was real, the pain of it all was real, it was – and occasionally still is – better and more bearable than the crushing ‘knackered for no reason’ with Kitty. Genuine sleep deprivation was not as bad as I had feared – it is bad, don’t get me wrong, but not as bad as I worried it was going to be. You get used to it. And by that I don’t mean you simply bend under it, suffering silently like some kind of put-upon beast of burden, feeling the pain of it but not saying anything because complaining is just futile; what I mean is that, unless it’s really bad, you actually don’t feel it any more.

      But there is also, it’s true, very much an element of suffering it and feeling the pain but not saying anything – because after a while you realise that most people are in the same boat, feeling the same pain, but carrying on regardless. They’re all just taking it, taking the hit, wordlessly. Occasionally it can feel like one of those awful dreams where you’re in a crowded room and you notice it’s on fire and you’re screaming ‘Fire! Fire!’ and everyone around you just carries on regardless.

      Then slowly you get it. This is life, this is it. This is what being ‘in the club’ means. You’ve been let in on the secret. And the secret is: it’s not always very nice.

       Eat

      I lie to everyone about breastfeeding. I tell people that I tried, but I didn’t really. I mean, I did try, but not very hard. The first time I fell asleep and nearly keeled over sideways while breastfeeding Kitty at 3am was also the last time. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘is fucking barbaric.’

      Plus, my evil plan to get Kitty sleeping as much as possible as quickly as possible was based on the theory that babies need to take on the majority of their calories during the day so that they can sleep at night. If I was breastfeeding the paltry amount that expressing told me I was, then this plan was never going to work. Kitty would simply be too hungry. As it was, by the time she was three or four days old, she started crying after an hour’s breastfeeding and wouldn’t go back to sleep. I saw everything she did through the prism of this eat/sleep ratio, so I instantly concluded that she was hungry, gave her two ounces of formula and she passed out until it was time for her next feed.

      On top of this sleeping obsession I just felt so fucking trapped. The physical constraints of pregnancy, being so heavy and confined to the house, had sent me partly bonkers before I even had Kitty, so the thought of having to breastfeed for hours a day, for months, was horrifying, terrifying. It was like getting to the top of a mountain and feeling like you were so exhausted and pushed to the physical brink that you were going to die but at least it was all over, and then being told that behind that cloud, over there – two days’ walk away – is the actual, real top of the mountain.

      I just wanted to get out, get away. I wanted to leave Kitty with my husband for an hour or two hours. I wanted him to be able to feed her, too, and not just with a pathetic dribble of breast milk, which she would suck down in eight seconds and then scream for more.

      I, personally, had no problem giving up breastfeeding. Now that I have some perspective on the matter, I know it was a decision I made for my whole family, not just for me. I wanted Kitty to be full. I wanted all of us to sleep. I wanted to not go mad and kill everyone. Plus, I have enough anecdotal evidence (and also some scientific evidence) to convince me that exclusive