When I was 27, I had a baby girl.
I had a baby who wouldn’t sleep. Like, EVER. We found out (much later in the game) that she was waking up screaming every 20 minutes because she had allergies. The food we were feeding her, the stuff I was eating and passing through my milk, was poisoning her.
So. Sleep deprivation for a full year (and longer, but we’ll get to that another time). There’s a reason why sleep deprivation is a torture technique. Because it’s TORTUROUS. I was absolutely miserable and felt like this little baby and I were literally trapped in hell together. Nobody seemed to understand.
My husband was amazing and got up every single damn time with me to the screaming creature down the hall, but he didn’t have milk to feed her and he worked all day – so it was on me to get through and make my poor baby feel better (somehow). It was just me, and her, and the long nights that stretched out into oblivion.
I’d been off work since I was seven months pregnant, and by the time she was six months old, I was not only a sleep-deprived zombie, I was also bored! I’d always had something to do and now I was left feeling empty and unfulfilled. Despite the challenges I loved being a mother, but it wasn’t ENOUGH. It didn’t fill those spaces inside my soul that had always been there, muted by busywork and nights out. In those dark nights that dragged on, when it wasn’t even worth going to bed because I’d just have to wake up again in ten minutes to rock a distraught baby back to sleep, that whisper inside me turned into a scream.
I’d always written as a hobby, but in my entire adult life had managed one terrible, put-it-in-the-draw-and-never-look-at-it-again novel. I had all these ideas and stories I wanted to tell, but for some reason, I hadn’t. I’d pushed my desires to be somebody greater way, way down, and buried them with work and life.