Turns out, babies aren’t Tamagotchis.

Words by Marjolijn Oostermeijer

Clearly a son of retired club kids, our baby refuses to sleep at night. Between sunset and sunrise, he haunts, draining me (energy and milk-wise) like a tiny Dracula.

Sure, I’m being a bit dramatic. There’ve been good nights, the kind where my Oura sleep tracker shows solid chunks of blue. When my son was about six months old, we had so many consecutive good nights that I naively assumed this was now a thing. That was one sleep regression ago. A few good nights followed, but last night, he couldn’t. He was coughs sick (a ‘lil Mean Girls reference because I’m not a regular mom). I glanced at the clock on my iPhone—3:46—and did the deranged math of the sleep-deprived: If he passes out now, I might get five-and-a-half broken hours of sleep total, which is good. I’ve convinced myself that five hours—followed by my morning Aeropress—is the minimum I need to function. 

But the baby didn’t seem to follow my logic. At some point, he started snoring in my arms, and I gently kissed his Botticelli-angel face before returning him to his crib with the precision of a DJ dropping a needle on a wobbly record. As soon as he hit the mattress, his face scrunched up in frustration, no longer a Botticelli angel but Angelus from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, apparently hungry and vicious enough to drain the entire population of Sunnydale (or my boobs) before sunrise. “Please just go to sleep,” I pleaded as I swallowed away tears and frustration. 

I’m so damn tired.

Granted, this can be said for many new parents. My feed is dominated by Hatch sleep devices, Moonboon baby hammocks, and Snoo smart bassinets, all positioned in the covetable bedrooms of It-girls turned-cool-moms. The conversation at daycare pick-up or in my office pumping room is sprinkled with code words, known only to the initiated (exhausted): wake windows, dream feeds, contact naps… Someone tells me their four-month-old sleeps through the night. Others are keen to share the hack that finally worked after 10 months of sleeplessness: the Ferber Method, lavender baths before bed, or some special kind of sleep sack.

Unsolicited advice lurks behind every corner of the Internet—and I can’t help but wonder: Should I sleep train? Impose a more rigid nap schedule? Let him sleep in my bed? I bottle-feed him pumped breastmilk at night. Is that where it went wrong? Am I a boundary-based parent or a gentle parent? Am I a good parent?

I’ve tried so much in the 227 broken nights since my son’s birth. He anxiously wiggled out of his Puckababy swaddle the first time I put it on him, and it’s been waiting to be relisted on Vinted ever since. The specialized osteopath only made him fart and giggle a lot. In one particularly dramatic week, I tried to enforce a sleep schedule from an e-book I’d bought via Instagram, getting mad at my partner for bringing our clearly exhausted baby to bed at six… which wasn’t his bedtime! At least, the white noise machine makes me sleep better. But mostly, these gadgets and tricks seem to sell a sense of control, as if babies are Tamagotchis that can be “hacked” into a 10-hour hibernation. 

Increasingly, I can approach his sleeplessness with empathy and nonchalance. C’est la vie and besides, isn’t this what late nights on the dance floor prepared me for? My baby’s angel-face—which lights up when he sees me—seems more worthwhile than that Berghain sticker on my iPhone or a Shazam full of exciting new tracks. The rhythm of the night feels intimately cosy; not the ecstatic house of my pre-baby life (I still dance), but the pitter-patter of the rain on our bedroom window mixed with the smacking of the baby’s cupid lips, the purrs of the cat, and Spotify’s Comforting Womb Heartbeats fading in and out.

I must resign myself to the fact that I can’t will my baby to sleep. Some nights, he seems so committed to his vampiric identity that no amount of snuggling, swaddling, or Snoo-ing will make him sleep before sunrise.

Marjolijn is a fashion and beauty writer with bylines at Dazed, i-D, Vogue and more. She also changes a lot of diapers, scours Vinted for pleated Issey Miyake tops and tiny overalls and writes a Substack about the absurdity of modern parenthood; cultural criticism that (unlike her baby) has teeth.