The Real Monster Under the Bed

Sleeplessness scares me. Terrifies me, actually.

Why? Because I’m a mom.

I am acutely aware of the fragility of sleep. It is the axis upon which my world and my household turns.

My fears of days’ past - sharks, snakes and semis carrying massive logs (thank you, Final Destination) - don’t hold a candle to my fear of sleeplessness.

You can’t truly grasp the lifeline that sleep is until you go without it for an unpredictable period of time - days, weeks, months? Only time will tell. Sprinkle in postpartum hormones and you’ve entered an entirely new stratosphere of understanding sleep’s oxygen-like qualities.

That endless abyss of time is what’s most terrifying, making nighttime loneliest.

Will tonight be the night she sleeps for two 4-hour stretches or will it be 30-minute stretches thread together with 3 hours of rocking and soothing?

(After I go back to bed for the third time that night at 4 a.m.) Will my day get to start at 7 a.m. or will I be greeted by dawn at 5 a.m., just 60 short, short minutes away?

You know and pray, through tears mostly, the light will come again in just a few hours but you also know darkness will inevitably follow.

So how do we, as moms, keep going, night after night, baby after baby, knowing this monster lurks just under the bed (er, crib)?

My best answer so far is this: The hope, while fleeting, does come if we open our ears enough to drown out the deafening silence. 

It’s in those quietest, darkest, loneliest moments of night that the truth we bury deep inside - well beyond the clutter of dirty diaper counts, feeding schedules and tummy time attempts - bubbles to the surface: the truth that I am all my baby needs. 

I am exactly enough in that sleep deprived moment, and the piece of myself that lays in my arms somehow knows this truth even more than I allow myself to believe it. I am exactly enough because our God, who makes no mistakes, created me to be my daughter’s mom. 

It was in this darkness that I can now clearly see how I experienced the Light in a radical way. 

It was in these moments where I was at my weakest and most vulnerable that I recognized most my desperate need for God and His perfect strength, not just to get me through the night but to get me through, period. 

These lyrics from the hymn “My Hope is Built on Nothing Less” were made real to me and the unwavering truth of these words have carried me through daily the last three years:

“On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand”

All the books and advice columns and Instagram reels revealed their cracks in the darkness of those sleepless nights. God was the only light that pulled me through time and time again.

Those sleepless nights ultimately changed me for the better. There was so clearly a purpose in my pain. And isn’t that what it’s all about? Finding God in every circumstance?

As I prepare for the “newborn haze” once again in just a few months, I’d be lying if I said the return of the monster under the bed doesn’t still scare me. But my own experience also tells me that the same God who met me in the darkness the first time is no match for the monster …. And the monster does, in fact, have an expiration date.

A-men to that.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs.

Click here to view the next post in the series "Sleepless."