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5 hours ago
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Sleep is a feminist issue. Or should I say, lack of sleep is a feminist issue. During a particularly thickly cut bout of tiredness, when my son was a newborn, I became so convinced that my tiny, milk-stained baby had rolled out of my arms and somehow, unfathomably out of the room, into the night outside that I started crawling along the floor of our hallway, in the dark, sobbing. The fact that the boy couldn’t yet roll over, was in his cot, and the door was closed, while my partner snored like a mechanical digger beside him, could not penetrate the exhausted fug of terror that had enveloped me after weeks, months of broken, fluttering, barely snatched rest.
Whether it’s waking up every 45 minutes to feed a screaming baby, making shopping lists while roasting under the duvet in an insomniac hormonal flush, staying up past midnight to clean the house once your children are in bed, or setting the alarm for 4.45am so you can get your elderly mother to the toilet before she has an accident; the night shift of unpaid, unrecognised and uncelebrated domestic labour is still predominantly undertaken by women. While the Office for National Statistics found that in 2022, almost 4.9 million (56%) night-time workers were male and almost 3.9 million (44%) were female, this does not by any means mean that women are getting more sleep. I very much doubt that it was a breastfeeding woman who smugly declared Friday 14 March as World Sleep Day.
After becoming a parent, I slipped into a twilight zone of sleeplessness in which I felt my eyes were coated in sand, my bones seemed to creak against each other, and my tongue had the consistency and flavour of an old pub carpet tile. I stared into the halogen-stained night wondering why my clothes were on backwards, why there was a packet of almonds in my underwear drawer and when I’d last brushed my teeth. And the things I did; the dangerous, hallucinogenic, unfathomable acts of disorientation, distraction and confusion. Putting my shoes neatly in the bin, forgetting how to spell my own name, calmly putting my phone, keys or dirty nappies in the washing machine, “seeing” my baby rolling under the bed when he was in fact still in my arms; these things are the familiar stuff of banter outside the school gates. And yet, if we dig beneath them for a second, what does it say about the mental capacity of the millions of people carrying the weight of their helpless infant’s survival, day in, day out?
Studies have shown that sleep deprivation causes impairment of our cognitive and motor skills equivalent to being floridly drunk. Being awake for 24 hours, as some parents and carers will certainly be, is the equivalent to being well over the limit for drink-driving in some countries. If I was in this state, while walking my baby or mother along the river, because I’d been downing whisky for breakfast or getting baked on skunk at the kitchen table, social services might well be called. People would worry. Authorities might intervene. But because my exhaustion was just the result of that miserable cocktail of breastfeeding, an unfair share of housework and the unfathomable crying of a baby in the night, I was simply left to get on with it.
When I was writing my book Holding the Baby, I asked on social media for stories from people clenched in the jaws of parental sleep deprivation. What I got back was hilarious and frightening in equal measure; people backing cars over their (mercifully empty) buggies; parents trying to soothe a pillow as their child cried in the cot beside them; women making tea out of dishwasher tablets and not only brushing their teeth with hand soap but not even realising until days later. While it’s tempting to brush these off with a smile and nod of recognition, every single one speaks to the fact that actual human health and life is frequently put at risk by chronic sleep-deprivation. If someone mistakes haemorrhoid cream for toothpaste or leaves their baby at the fish counter of a supermarket, why do we shrug it off as embarrassing and unavoidable? Well, if I may be so bold, perhaps because these experiences have been largely, and historically, experienced by low status and marginalised people; women, disabled people, people on low incomes, people of colour, carers. So even when this sort of “domestic tiredness” is experienced by a male or non-binary parent, the assumption that they just have to get on with it comes from a history of female tiredness being ignored.
After seven years, I recently became a parent again, for the second time; I am edging towards that inky, panicked state of sleeplessness, in full knowledge that I may well lose my mind, and certainly my health. A lack of sleep, according to an article I read while my daughter churned and grunted in the bed beside me, has been associated with an increase in the likelihood of developing dementia, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity and even cancers of the breast, colon, ovaries and prostate. These articles are informative, sure, but are they helpful? Someone reading books like Why We Sleep – which frighten the living daylights out of anyone who’s been awake for 20 hours and is currently playing “Hairdryer Sounds 2 hours ASMR White Noise” on their phone in the pointless hope that it will send their baby to sleep – does not benefit from the knowledge that their exhaustion is making them ill. It doesn’t put their mind at rest – nor help to settle their dependents.
What they would benefit from, of course, would be free, state-funded childcare, equal domestic labour, and compulsory parental leave for both partners. And probably secure housing, a well-funded NHS and access to green space to boot. But I suppose that’s just a dream.
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Nell Frizzell is a journalist and author
