It is difficult for me to approach the subject of sleep with the lightness that I wanted to instill here when I was woken up at 5:15 a.m. by my son. I knew well, when I became a parent, that I was not signing up for a makeover. But I didn’t imagine to what extent the lack of sleep would transform me, take over my personality, trample on the slightest shadow of motivation, leave me, staring blankly, lost in the supermarket shelves, wondering what I could fuck right here.
The thousand and one regressions
Before I pose as a big victim of parental fatigue, I owe you a confession. My first child slept through the night at 3 weeks old, and I was then able to have the presumption to think that having a newborn wasn’t that complicated. I was well aware of being one of the lucky ones, but nothing more. I experienced fatigue, of course, but not the annihilation for which I would later be the victim. I laughed at the adventures of my friends, who told me about the follies of their children. My friend Marie, who every night for several weeks, found her 2-year-old son playing in the bathroom at 4 a.m. My friend Mélanie, exhausted, who gave chips to her child in the middle of the night, because he simply asked for them. Matéo, who took advantage of every second of his son’s nap to doze off anywhere, and thus try to recover the hours forever lost in the darkness. And Stan,
