You think you’re doing ok for the first few weeks. You can still form sentences and you haven’t started throwing things. Then one day, when you’ve burst into tears because your toddler dropped their bowl of cereal and you’ve decided it’s necessary to call security because the bloke on the supermarket checkout wouldn’t give you an extra bag, you’ll realise the sleep deprivation that comes with having a newborn and a toddler has started to wear you down.
You’re not ‘tired’. ‘Tired’ is when you’ve worked a 12-hour day at the office without stopping for lunch. ‘Tired’ is when you had to wake up at 5am to meet your friend for boot camp. ‘Tired’ is for people who don’t have small children. Those people, bless their cotton socks, need a good nap.
You are exhausted. Shattered. Stunningly fatigued. You don’t need a nap. You need an induced coma. You haven’t slept for more than three hours in a row in weeks, if not months and you’re fantasising about that magical four-hour stretch. You’re convinced that if you could just get four hours in a row, you might be ok. Your head throbs with idiocy and it feels like a wad of wet toilet paper is wedged behind your eyeballs, slowly squeezing them out of their sockets. Rusty razor wire drags over your eyeballs with every blink.