feeling like I hate my baby

[Whitemousepinkears]

I don’t but I hate never sleeping and I feel so angry.

@Whitemousepinkears

I can’t sleep undisturbed anywhere. Scream scream scream. I fucking wish I’d never had him.

You need to leave the house to sleep. Just getting one night you catch up on some will make a difference

Also going forward might be worth speaking to your gp and the health visitor.

OP - I know this feeling. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture.

For your own sanity you need short term & longer term solutions.
Short term, you need sleep. Your options are:

• book him into childminder/nursery & sleep all day, so at least you get some rest
• hire a night nanny short term to get some rest & get her view on him

Then you need to discuss options with HV or GP - for some reason he's unsettled at night - could be digestion issues/silent reflux, a referral to a sleep clinic would be worth having.

Until it's resolved I think you & your husband need to sleep in shifts - we had to do this, one does 9pm-2am, other does 2-7am. At least then you can get some sleep, with earplugs in.

Look I do get that people mean well but I can’t be booking hotels every week. That isn’t a long term solution. It will make no difference to how I feel to have one undisturbed night a month, in fact that will make it worse.

HVs do not come out and in any case I never have the house to myself. I can’t be honest about how I feel. I haven’t seen my GP since 2019 and I doubt I’ll ever see him again.

I really want to look into a sleep consultant but DH thinks it’s a waste of money. It’s causing arguments and resentment.

Every time you hit resistance from your DH you need to flip it back to him to come up with something better, he has no right to disregard ideas when it's you who is on their knees with exhaustion. What you're currently doing clearly isn't working or sustainable and in those circumstances anything is worth a go, even if you think it won't work, you have absolutely nothing to lose. Your DH needs to realise that if he's not part of the solution then he's part of the problem and it seems to me he is a big part of the problem here.

We can’t sleep in shifts. He cries, I wake.

Well, he doesn’t. This is just what my life is. He thinks it’s normal.

You don't have to be as honest as you're being here with the HV - you can say that he does sleep for more than an hour at a time through the night & you're getting no sleep.
They can refer you to a local sleep clinic (often free depending where you live). You don't even need to see them in person, you can contact them over the phone.

It sounds like the last of sleep is potentially making you ill- can you sign yourself off sick, send him to childcare & try to get some rest? You can self-certify for up to 28 days at the moment (due to covid).

If you want to see a health visitor on your own ring them and make an appointment at a hub/clinic. If you want to talk opening with without your husband present they will facilitate that.

*doesn't sleep for more than an hour

I used to wrap dd up and in the car seat and drive around until she fell asleep, then I'd carry her in and put her to bed it was the ONLY way to get her to sleep then suddenly she just went off on her own and that phase was over.

They don’t sweets. I tried a few months ago. In any case I’m at work during the day. And being honest there isn’t anything at all anyone can realistically do. In fairness even a sleep consultant isn’t guaranteed to work.

Yeah - but getting him off to sleep isn’t really the issue. It’s the fact he wakes two hours later then will not go back to bed.

How old is he OP?
Can you find out if you can speak to your HV in your lunch break?

He’s 12 months. There’s nothing my HV can do. He’s just not a very easy baby at night. I don’t know why but he wakes constantly, won’t sleep in his cot and screams his head off if left. And it’s running me absolutely ragged.

I can tell OP - it's exhausting.
What we did was put our 1yo down to sleep in his cot bed with the side off & lay down next to him on a mat on the floor (and usually went to sleep ourselves). Then when he woke up we were right there so he had less time to get upset/scream/worked up, would have a cuddle, then eventually go back to sleep. Over time he was less distressed, didn't wake up as much, so slept for longer bursts.

It took a while, and we had no evenings for some time, but it improved slowly.

Yeah you see my DS isn’t like that. He has to be ON you. It doesn’t matter if you’re as close as can be, if he isn’t actually cuddled right up to me he isn’t happy. Then he gets too hot and bothered so starts thrashing around. This happens several times a night. And I’m so tired and run down with it I really do feel like I hate him: I think it’s me I hate though.

Its unlikely that you hate him, you're just severely sleep deprived, which is why you would probably benefit from some time off sick tbh.

Mine had to be on me/touching me all the time, it's exhausting & I really felt all "touched out". Over time we slowly moved to laying "next to" him (him in cot, me on mattress at the same level) with arm over him, then to just my hand on him.
It took a while, but it may be worth trying.

What area do you live in? You don't have to say, but there are lots of government child sleep clinics popping up all over - I know you think it wont help, but it's worth looking them up to see if there's any help/ideas you've not thought of.

Ok OP. Here’s what I would do.

1. Tell DH you’re winding up to a mental health crisis and you need to try something different, what you’re doing isn’t working and after a year, you’ve given it a truly heroic try. He either gets on board with sleep training or he can go sleep somewhere else (like a hotel) while you sort it out.

1. Agree a sleep training plan. Personally I’d just do CIO. There’s good evidence it works quickly, no actual high quality research showing that some crying damages otherwise well cared for children. But pick something and stick with it.

1. Sleep train, it might take a week but I doubt it, probably will be 3-4 days max. If you need to alternate nights who listens to the crying, do that, either sleep in a different home or if you can sleep elsewhere in your own house, ear plugs, noise cancelling headphones so you can’t hear the yelling. STICK WITH IT and agree to be consistent.

1. Please seek a counselor urgently. I had terrible anxiety for a long time after sleep was resolved, seeing a counselor helped immensely.

It feels awful to get some angry with your child but you’re not bad a bad person or a bad parent, you’re just really really REALLY f-ing tired and that is life alteringly horrible.

It is possible to live with a lack of sleep, with an unsettled baby, lots of people have to deal with this. everything will seem worse if you keep being angry about not having your so called free down time, or just leaving the baby to cry. You need to have some kind of a routine with a baby, I personally would not do co-sleeping, as it then becomes a habit for the child.

Honestly a sleep consultant is worth doing. You can’t go on like this. I recognise my own experience in your posts. My DD was the same and I went back to work in a demanding role and really struggled. The rage that sleep deprivation brought on was awful, I hated the world. One day things came to a head and we sought help.

The sleep consultant we used doesn’t charge for expensive packages, just by the hour/call. The advice really did help. It also felt like a weight had been lifted to talk in detail to
Someone about our experiences and have it acknowledged. It was like therapy for me! It was also really helpful to develop a plan that I could follow when I was too exhausted to think for myself.

Also, you fantasied about a night nanny, I fantasized about being in jail because at least there are no babies there.

If you can be honest with your DH about your feelings, hopefully he’ll realize how serious the situation is. It took me quietly telling mine I was suicidal, he’s otherwise lovely and caring but I do t think wanted to look at what was happening to me because it was so scary.

It's impossible to think straight when you're not getting enough sleep, OP. You need to break the cycle by getting a couple of decent night's sleep so you can decide what to do next. It's absolutely unbearable not getting enough sleep over time. It makes you feel desperate, bad tempered and even a bit like you're going mad, so it's unsurprising that you feel like you hate your baby.

Whether this is getting a sleep trainer or getting to a hotel once a month, it's worth every penny in the long run, and you'd see this if you had the rest to be able to see it clearly. It makes perfect sense to give you enough rest to do your job properly, to make your baby happier (it's all going to be a vicious cycle as your baby will sense your distress, which will unsettle him further) and to help your marriage, which is under intolerable strain.

Good luck OP, it's neither you, nor your baby that's in the wrong, it's the situation.

I don't use it but I've heard of an app from a friend called 'Moshi', a moshi monster themed app suitable for young kids to help settle them to bed.