Excellent 4.7 sur 5

My husband David sent a video to my sister on the group text at Leo's first birthday party.

He did not know I was on the group text. He must have forgotten.

In the video I am sitting in a white folding chair beside the picnic table in our backyard. My sister Jamie is standing next to my chair holding a paper plate. She is mid-sentence, telling me something about her son Ollie's daycare. My head is tilted to one side. My eyes are closed. My mouth is a little bit open. I am not participating in the conversation. I am asleep.

The video is 14 seconds long. Jamie's voice keeps going the whole time. She does not notice for the first 10 seconds. Then she says, "Rach?" and pokes me gently with the paper plate. In the video I jerk awake and say, "Sorry. Sorry. I heard you," and Jamie laughs and David laughs behind the camera and I laugh, and Jamie says, "Girl. Go to bed."

Two hours later I was in the kitchen wrapping leftovers and I opened my phone and I saw the video sitting in the group text. Jamie had replied with two words.

I am writing this because two friends from work asked me last month what I had been doing differently, and I gave them the short version, and now three other people at my company have asked. I am writing the long version down.

I am Rachel. I am 33. I am a marketing manager at a mid-size company in Portland. My husband David is 35 and teaches high school Spanish. Our son Leo is 14 months old. We live in a two bedroom house in North Portland that we bought a year before I got pregnant.

For most of my adult life I had been a person who slept.

Not perfectly. I had a normal 20s of losing some sleep to work stress and travel and college finals. But when my head hit the pillow at 11 I was out by 11:15 and I did not open my eyes until my alarm at 6:45.

When Leo was born everything about sleep changed. I do not need to explain that to anyone who has had a newborn. Every three hours for the first three months. Then every four hours. Then he started stretching to five and six. By six months he was sleeping from 7pm to 5am on most nights. By nine months he was sleeping from 7pm to 6am on most nights, and by ten months he was sleeping from 7pm to 6am on every night. He is a good sleeper.

Everyone told me sleep would come back once he was sleeping through. I believed them. My mother believed them. My pediatrician believed them.

By the time Leo was 12 months old he had been sleeping through for three months and I had been waking up every night at 2am for three months. I would wake up and I would lie in the dark and I would listen for him. He would not make a sound. I would lie there for an hour or an hour and a half and eventually fall back into a thin sleep and get up at 6am when my alarm went off.

I did not tell anyone.

I told myself it was just how moms sleep now. I told myself my body was still adjusting. I told myself I would sleep once he was in a toddler bed. I told myself I would sleep once I stopped worrying about him at night.

He did not need me at night. My worry was not about anything happening. I was not listening for a cry. I was just awake. My body had learned to be awake at 2am and it had not learned to stop.

By the time Leo turned one I had been getting five hours of interrupted sleep on a good night for over a year. I had been telling coworkers I was fine. I had cut coffee down at first because I read that would help. Then I put it back up to two cups. Then to three. Then to a fourth in the afternoon. My yoga class three times a week became one time a week and then zero. I stopped doing the Sunday brunches with Jamie and our friend Priya because I was too tired to sit still and be a person on Sunday morning.

I told David I would get back to yoga once the year mark hit. Toddlers were supposed to be easier. Everyone said so.

Then David sent the video.

David did not send it to me. He sent it to my sister the same night after everyone had left, without showing it to me first. Later he told me he did not know how to bring it up.

Jamie sent me a text the next morning. She said, "I love you. Please call me before work."

I called her from my car in the parking lot at seven forty-five. I did not go into the office right away.

Jamie is 30. She is a physical therapist. She has a 2 year old, Ollie. She lives in Salem, an hour away. We used to talk every Sunday and now we talked every couple weeks because I was tired on Sundays.

She said, "I have been meaning to say something for months. I have been trying to figure out how to say it without making you feel bad."

She said, "Rach, I have a two year old. Ollie is a nightmare sleeper. He was in and out of our bed until he was 20 months. And I sleep. I do not sleep perfectly. But I sleep six or seven hours most nights and I feel like a person. What is going on with you."

I sat in the parking lot for a long time. My coffee got cold.

I made an appointment with my primary care doctor that morning. I could not get in for six weeks. That is Portland.

I saw my doctor, Dr. Chen, in early April. Leo was 13 months.

I told her the whole thing. The 2am wake. The listening. The video. Jamie. The yoga. The coffee. All of it.

She ran the full panel. Blood work. Iron. Thyroid. Vitamin D. She had me record two weeks of my actual sleep and bring it back.

Everything came back within normal range.

She said, "Rachel, this is very common in the postpartum window and the standard checks do not catch it. When you have a newborn your nervous system spends months in a state of high alert. For most people the nervous system stands down after the baby starts sleeping. For some people it does not. It gets stuck. Your baby is not waking you. Your baby stopped waking you at nine months. Your nervous system is still on his old schedule and it is not adjusting on its own."

She said the wear on the layer that holds you under during the night compounds when you have been running on interrupted sleep for a year. So the fall asleep part still works. The stay asleep part is thin.

She told me not to reach for a sleeping pill. She knew I would not. I had stopped nursing when Leo was eight months old but I still had not touched anything stronger than an occasional glass of wine since I got pregnant.

She said, "If you want to add something in the nervous system layer, that is a sensible thing to try. Add it. Do not change anything else."

I am going to skip the reading I did over the next few weeks.

Here is what I concluded.

The stuff on the shelf at the pharmacy is mostly melatonin. My OB had told me during pregnancy that melatonin was one of the things she did not recommend. I did not want to start it now.

The category I actually needed was different. Magnesium in a form the body could absorb. Amino acids the body converts into its own calming compounds. Plant extracts that have been used for a long time for the same thing. All working on the hold layer, not the fall-asleep signal.

I read about a small company called Tryluvre.

They make one product. A melatonin free sleep gummy. Eight active ingredients on the label with the doses printed next to them. Magnesium glycinate at 150 milligrams. GABA at 160. L-tryptophan at 100. Tart cherry, passionflower, chamomile, wild jujube, hops.

The gummies are deep red cubes. Cherry flavored. One gummy about 30 minutes before bed. Thirty in a jar.

I called Dr. Chen's office before I ordered anything. I read her the eight ingredients over the phone. I asked her twice about the fact that I had stopped nursing eight months earlier and she said yes, that is fine, add it. She said to give it six weeks and to call her if anything felt off.

I ordered the three pack because it came with free shipping and three small extras I did not care about at the time. One of the extras was a weighted sleep mask. I ended up using it every night. I did not open the other two.

You take one gummy about thirty minutes before bed. That is the whole routine. Thirty seconds. Tastes like cherry.

I want to tell you what happened. I am not going to make a claim about what caused what. I am going to tell you what came back in what order.

The first week nothing dramatic. I still woke up at 2am on Monday. I still woke up at 2:15 on Wednesday.

The second week I slept until 4:30 on a Thursday. I noticed because David's alarm goes off at 5:15 and I woke up when he got out of bed. I had not slept past 2am consecutively in over a year.

The third week I made brunch on Sunday. I called Jamie and told her I was making pancakes and she and Ollie drove up.

I ate two full pancakes and drank one cup of coffee and I was not shaky.

The fourth week I went to yoga for the first time in months. It was a beginner class. I could not do half of it. I did not care.

The fifth week I did not have a fourth coffee. I did not decide to skip it. I just did not want it.

The sixth week Leo was up early on a Saturday. I heard him at 6:15. I got up and went to his room and picked him up out of his crib and brought him back to bed with me and David. Leo lay between us and looked at the ceiling and pointed at the fan and said "fan" and I actually laughed. I had been so tired for so long that I had stopped being present in the mornings with him.

Around the eighth week I went to a work happy hour after work on a Thursday. I had one drink and I stayed for ninety minutes and I still made it home in time to see Leo before bed. I had not gone to a work happy hour in a year and a half.

I went back to Dr. Chen at the three month mark. She ran the panel again. She said the numbers looked better than they had since my six-week postpartum visit.

I want to be careful here.

I am not a doctor. I am a 33 year old marketing manager who had a baby who is a great sleeper, and I still could not sleep for over a year after he stopped waking me, and I had been telling myself that was normal because everyone told me it was normal.

I do not know for certain that Tryluvre was responsible for what changed. I know I had been trying to power through a locked schedule for a year. I know I added this and I started sleeping and Jamie stopped worrying.

What I am telling you is what I did. What I noticed. What Dr. Chen said about it. What Jamie said about it. What David said about it.

That is all.

If you have a baby who sleeps through and you do not, and you are past the newborn window and past the sleep-regression window and you are still lying awake at 2am, here is what I would say.

Ask a friend with a kid the same age. Ask your sister if you have one. Ask a mom in your circle who is one year further out than you are. Compare notes honestly. If they are sleeping and you are not, this is not what being a mom does to everyone. This is something else and it is worth checking.

Talk to your doctor. Tell her how long it has been. Have her rule things out.

If everything comes back fine, and you are not currently pregnant or breastfeeding, ask her about adding something in the nervous system layer. If she agrees it is a sensible thing to try, add it to what you are already doing. Do not change anything else.

Give it a few weeks before you decide anything.

Bodies are different. Some people notice something in the first week. Others take longer. Be patient with yours. And be patient with the mom you are while your sleep is coming back. She is doing a lot with very little right now.

That is the whole story.

P.S. Jamie sent me a text three weeks after I started. She said, "You sound like yourself again on the phone." I had not realized I had not sounded like myself.

P.P.S. Here is what I would tell you if you are thinking about trying it. Check with your doctor first, especially if you are pregnant, breastfeeding, or on any medication. Take one gummy about thirty minutes before bed. Do not stop anything else. Give it six weeks before you decide anything.

P.P.P.S. Tryluvre has a thirty night money-back guarantee. They have a 4.9 star rating from over four thousand customers. They send the jar back to themselves if it does not work for you.

P.P.P.P.S. Leo climbed into bed with me and David on Sunday morning and pointed at David and said "dada" and then pointed at me and said "mama awake." He is a chatty kid. It landed differently that morning.