“We drove her around the block 47 times”

I want to start by saying that I am a reasonably intelligent adult. I have a master's degree. I managed a team of twelve people. I once presented a quarterly report to a room of forty executives and did not cry once.

And yet, for six months, I drove my daughter around the block every night to get her to sleep.

I should clarify: it wasn't always just the block. Sometimes it was the ring road. Once, memorably, it was the motorway — because the motorway meant she'd stay under for longer, and we had a dinner reservation the following morning and we needed four consecutive hours. My husband Romain tracked our petrol usage on a spreadsheet. This is not something we discussed beforehand. He just started doing it, quietly, with the particular energy of a man who has no power over anything and so has chosen to measure things instead.

The total, across six months, was 847 kilometres. We live in Lyon. We essentially drove to Paris and back.

It started, as these things usually do, with desperation and good intentions. Juliette was about four months old when the car thing began. She'd been a difficult settler from the start — would fall asleep on my chest, then wake the moment I moved, then scream, then fall asleep on my chest again. We'd tried everything the internet suggested. The swaddle. The white noise machine. The very expensive bassinet that claimed to simulate the womb. (The womb, apparently, does not have a ninety-euro returns policy.)

The car worked. That first night, she was asleep before we reached the end of our street. She slept for three and a half hours. Romain and I sat in the supermarket car park, the engine idling, afraid to move, and ate biscuits we found in the glove compartment. It was the best night we'd had in four months. We cried a little.

After that, it became the thing we did.

What nobody tells you — or maybe they do tell you and you don't hear them because you haven't slept since autumn — is that you can accidentally train your child to need something without meaning to. We weren't putting Juliette to bed with a car. We were just helping her get there. There's a difference. I was very clear on this point until I wasn't.

By month five, she'd wake in the night and we'd have to take her out again. By month six, she'd wake up in the car — because we'd stopped at a red light — and scream until we started moving. By month seven, I sat in a parent group at the crèche and listened to a woman talk about her son who could only fall asleep while someone vacuumed the floor, and I felt a solidarity so pure it was almost spiritual.

The turning point was less dramatic than I'd like to report. We weren't at some kind of crisis. We were just tired of the car. The seats smelled of baby. The back seat was covered in cracker crumbs and one small shoe we could never locate. Romain had started going to sleep in the passenger seat while I drove, which meant I was essentially a taxi driver for my own family.

A friend who'd been through something similar suggested we try building a proper routine — a real one, timed to Juliette's actual sleep window rather than our hopeful interpretation of it. She'd used a programme that asked about Juliette's nap times, wake times, how long she'd been up before we started the bedtime process. The kind of detail that felt almost bureaucratic but apparently mattered enormously.

We started the routine on a Tuesday. I won't say it was immediate. Night 1 was difficult. Night 2 was worse. Night 3 I sat outside her room on the floor and nearly gave up four separate times.

But Night 4 she slept. In her cot. In her room. Without the car.

I went into the kitchen and made myself a proper dinner and sat down to eat it. Romain came in about twenty minutes later. He sat across from me. We didn't say anything for a while.

“847 kilometres,” he said eventually.

“I know,” I said.

“We could have gone to Marseille.”

We could have. We absolutely could have. Instead, we drove around the same twelve streets in our neighbourhood for six months and our daughter did not learn to sleep and we did not learn until later that this was not her fault or ours — it was just a thing that had to be built, deliberately, with the right information and the right timing, rather than discovered by accident on the motorway at 11pm.

She's two now. She goes down at 7:30. Some nights she talks to herself for a few minutes before she sleeps — little monologues we can hear through the monitor, about dogs she's seen, things she ate, some ongoing internal drama we don't have context for.

We sit in the kitchen. We eat warm food. We have not driven anyone anywhere since March.

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