'Let daddy sleep.' An uncomfortable truth about night feeds, babies and the mental load.

Attention new mothers, expectant mothers and women who have just occasionally considered being a mother: Every decision you make about your baby will be wrong. 

From what you put in your body while they're living inside it, to however you break them out of there. 

From where they sleep and how much they sleep and, of course, what and how you decide to feed them once they're living outside your body, not inside it. 

Whether you hold them or put them down. How much stimulation and how much rocking in your arms. How much pram-pushing and how much wrapping them tight in a crib.

How much tummy time, how many toys. How many outings and how much cocooning and how many people get to cuddle them and who gets to look after them and what they wear and the pram they ride in.

All of it, wrong, wrong, wrong. 

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Wrong in the eyes of mothers who've gone before. Wrong in the eyes of your friends who made different choices, with a different set of circumstances. Wrong the eyes of your family and possibly the midwife at the Early Childhood Centre and, of course, especially, in the eyes of the Internet. 

Generally speaking, your phone thinks you're a pretty sh*tty parent.

Please ignore it. And all that other noise about all that other stuff.

But, please do not ignore this one strident opinion that I - no expert, without verified data, a mother of two humans who were babies a long time ago - am offering you today. Obviously, it's the ONE PIECE OF NEW BABY ADVICE you should actually listen to. 

If the all-caps are freaking you out, I apologise. But also, get used to it.

It's about sleep. Something that new parents care about more than almost anything else. Who gets it, who doesn't, and how and where and how much.

Specifically, it's about your sleep, and your partner's sleep. Not so much about the baby's sleep. That little person is going to do what the hell they're going to do, in my experience. 

No, it's about the adults. And how tempted you will be - if there are two adults in the home when the little person arrives - to take a "divide and conquer" approach to sleep.

You will be tempted to make a call about who deserves it and who does not. In a heterosexual relationship, very often that decision is made along gender lines: Mother in bedroom with baby. Father on spare bed somewhere else. Worse: Father in bedroom alone. Mother on pull-out bed in baby's room.  

Please, friends. Don't. Do not do that.  

If you are a parent who is the primary carer for a baby, or is planning to be the primary carer for a baby, please, DON'T LET YOUR PARTNER GO SLEEP IN ANOTHER ROOM. And do not go and sleep somewhere else, to save their sleep.

Stay in the room, at all costs.

Of course, this is the internet in 2023, so I must state some disclaimers. 

Number 1: You do you. (That should cover it).

Number 2: Some families have very specific needs due to the nature of their work, their health, their mental health. Obviously, this advice is general.

But in more than a decade of being a parent, interviewing parents and experts in parenting, and in a very long time living life as a woman alongside other women, I've arrived at one hill I'm prepared to die on and it's this:

Women carry the load of parenting in a way that is completely out of step with how most modern families operate in every other circumstance. 

A mother is presented, from the very moment a baby is born, as the only person who can care for it correctly. The baby becomes her area of expertise, her specialist subject. Her job. And then, nine times out of 10, at some point, she goes back to her other job, the one she gets paid for, and gets to keep everything about the other one, too.

And it f*cks up our lives. Our bodies. Our mental health. And often, our relationships. 

And if that sounds a little extreme, good. Because if women are ever going to truly share the mental load, that damned amorphous thing that crushes so many of us into anxious, resentful, overwhelmed husks, we need to rewrite this script from the get-go. Parenting is a team sport, and if you are privileged enough to have a capable teammate, you have to START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON. 

Again, sorry about the caps. 

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The bedroom decision matters, because it sets the tone. 

I don't want to freak out any entry-level friends, but little babies need feeding every few hours, and in most cases, unless you can afford to pay someone else to not sleep with your baby, it's the parents' job to feed them. To wake up every few hours, when your baby wakes, feed them and then try to get them back to sleep. 

Look away now, dreamers, but that can also mean changing their nappies and possibly their clothes, and maybe the sheets on the cot, and then starting the marathon job of settling the baby back to sleep. Sometimes, they drop right back off like one of those Baby Alive dolls we played with in the 90s. Most times... they don't. 

I know what you're thinking. That sounds like a lot of work. It is. And babies don't stop needing to do that for... well, it seems like a long time. 

If you take the separate bedroom route at this point, all of that labour becomes yours. 

Well, you say, I'm the one with the boobs, and I'm breast-feeding. So it has to be me, right? 

Well, I say, yes. Some of it definitely does. And there is a quiet joy to sitting in a dark room, nursing your baby while the non-new-mum world sleeps. But there are quite a lot of moving parts to this nighttime life. Sometimes you need a glass of water. Something suddenly urgent to the settling ritual is in another room. You've run out of wipes, or nappies, or wraps. Sometimes the baby is so unsettled, you're going to give up on the dark, quiet space and pace them up and down a hallway, or walk them around the block, or... sit in front of your laptop with them, headphones in, jiggling and cajoling while you... watch something. Sometimes you're so tired you're going to fall asleep with them on the boob, and wake up with a terrified start because you've heard about this in pre-natal class, and it's bloody dangerous. 

All of these scenarios could do with a pair of helping hands. No, not to sit there rubbing your back like some sort of martyred cheerleader while you feed. But to be within foot-reach when you need to kick them and say, "Hey, can you please take him, just for a minute, so I can go and pee/cry/make a stiff drink (kidding, you're breast-feeding, remember)". 

And what if you're not breast-feeding? More than a third of us don't (more, IMO, see above about why we don't want to tell the truth when asked the most pious questions). Then why would it be you and only you who knows how to make a bottle, hold a bottle, clean a bottle and, yes, settle the baby after the bottle. 

And never mind the emotional validation of someone bearing witness, in however drowsy a state, to the immensely hard work you're doing in the dark.

BUT. I hear you. 

He's got to go to work tomorrow. 

He has to get up early. 

He just really doesn't function well if he hasn't slept. 

No point in two of us not sleeping.

It's just for a little while.

I've heard it all. So have you. 

And here's the brutal truth about those statements. 

You have to go to work tomorrow. Even if you are officially on maternity leave, or not currently working outside the home. Looking after a baby is not, and has never been, leisure.

You have to get up early. In fact, define early. 1am? 2am? 3am? 5am? All of the above?  

You don't function well if you haven't slept. And you're keeping another human alive. 

There's also no point in two of you living in entirely separate realities at perhaps the most intense time of your life. 

Because if one of you has just been initiated into a new world, where night is day and three hours sleep is a triumph, and the other rolls out of bed in the morning, comes in and says, "Bad night? Let me take the baby for an hour before I go to work," you are living in different realities, and their reality has not shifted as much as yours. 

And that's fine. If that's how you want it. If the baby is your job. Just know, the baby is going to continue to be your job as you become the unquestioned expert, 24-hours a day, seven days a week. 

Parenting is a long game. And if you don't both stay in the room when the nights are broken and the spew cloths are dripping then you won't both be in the same room for every little and big shift that comes after. 

You have immigrated to the new world. They are a tourist. 

My friend Mia Freedman intensely disagrees with my Stay In The Room rule. She believes in separate bedrooms for the newborn era. She subscribes to the idea that if you are both having a disturbed night; you are running a three-legged race in the Newborn Olympics, and that a Relay is preferable. 

To that I ask: Which relay events involve one competitor running an actual marathon, on no sleep, and their well-rested teammate strolling around the block for 30 minutes before checking out for the day?

Stay in the room, parents. It's the way to start on equal footing. It's where empathy and understanding lies. 

And sometimes, you just really need someone to fish a spew-cloth out of the wash-basket, quick. 

Hard to do from a fold-out bed in the baby's room. 

Feature Image: Supplied/Getty.