I have been sleeping little and poorly for twenty years

BarcelonaMotherhood is at odds with sleeping through the night. There is no Estivill method for mothers who have been left scrambled after so many nights of breastfeeding. We are exhausted from filling Dalsy syringes with half-closed eyes in the middle of the night and from sleeping like contortionists to try and fit in the child who has climbed into our bed looking for a safe place. I have spent almost twenty years sleeping little and poorly because with four children I have been through every stage: checking if they are breathing, viruses, nocturnal vomiting, slumber parties, shouts at dawn playing on the Play, and now the moment has arrived to go out partying.

I confess to you that I projected an optimistic future thinking that the issue of sleeping would stabilize when they grew up, but no, on the contrary. Now that they go out at night, new worries have been added to my restless nights. You can imagine that I cannot be counting sheep or focused on my breathing when in my head I only have catastrophic scenarios: parks in the dark, rats, cans of energy drinks, alcohol bought at the last minute, vapes, riding in a car with novice drivers, and the ES-Alert alarm for rain that always sounds when one of my children is away from home.

I must also tell you that sleeping intermittently helps to manage the anxiety when they start going out to party. Having light sleep allows you to perceive the only sound that facilitates rest: the jingling of keys turning and the slamming of the door that indicates they are home. No matter how stealthy your teenagers are, you will see how you will always hear their footsteps arriving at dawn. My ability to be on guard allows me to detect, with my eyes closed, the light from the mobile screen when a new notification arrives. I am about to update my LinkedIn with this new power: it is when I sleep that I see clearly. Half-asleep, I can read the whatsapp where they ask me to go pick them up because in the end, the father of someone-or-other cannot. Wide awake and in my pajamas, I end up going out in search of the child of the moment and various friends whom I drop off until I reach the destination.

I don't know exactly what they do when they go out to party. When I ask them, the answers are usually “all good”, “with the usual group”, and “a kebab”. I don't get much more information out of them. This summer they have gone a lot to the local festival concerts, and the fact that Rodalies has such a lousy service has meant that they have voluntarily ruled out outings to the nightclubs in Sabadell and Mataró that involved returning home on the first train of the morning.

The kids have grown up and luckily, so have I. That's why all these late-night outings have been joined by my own hormonal festival, which causes me brutal insomnia that I wasn't counting on, because there's very little talk about all the changes that come with perimenopause. But that's another topic. So, whether you are in the pit of the early years of parenting or living through the adolescent struggle, prepare some coffee and a good concealer for those panda eyes. At the very least, the day after a night out we are guaranteed a truce because they will sleep until two, and in no case do I recommend getting your Gremlins wet after a long night. Take advantage of it to rest, since hours of sleep are always scarce.