What seven months of broken sleep does to a marriage — and the conversation we finally had

I want to be careful about how I write this, because it's easy to make this story sound more dramatic than it was. We weren't having screaming fights. Nobody threw anything. David didn't sleep on the sofa and I didn't call my mother crying. What happened was quieter than that, and in some ways worse: we just stopped being kind to each other.

Finn was born in October. He was — is — a wonderful baby in most respects. He's curious and funny and has this very serious expression he makes when he encounters something new, like he's evaluating it on behalf of a committee. We adore him completely.

He also didn't sleep. Or rather, he slept — in forty-five-minute increments, three or four times a night, in a pattern that seemed specifically designed to prevent either of us from getting more than ninety consecutive minutes at any point.

For the first few months, we handled this the way most people do: with caffeine and solidarity and the shared conviction that it would get better soon. We'd pass Finn back and forth in the night without complaint. We'd catch each other's eyes over his head at 4am in that way that means *this is hard but we're doing it together.* We were a team.

By month four, something had shifted. I couldn't name it then. I can name it now: we had started keeping score.

Score-keeping in a new parent relationship is insidious because it feels rational. You are both genuinely exhausted. You are both doing things the other person doesn't fully see. You are both, at some level, convinced that you are doing slightly more than half.

I was keeping track of the night wakings — specifically, the ones David slept through. He was keeping track of the mornings — specifically, the ones I spent an extra hour in bed while he handled Finn. Neither of us said any of this out loud. We were too tired to fight and too proud to admit we were keeping score. So instead we were just... careful with each other. Polite. The way you are with someone you're slightly angry at but can't quite articulate why.

There were smaller things. The way I'd started giving one-word answers when he asked how I was. The way he'd started going to bed before me without saying goodnight. The way we'd stopped touching each other — not just in a sexual sense, just physically. No hand on the shoulder while passing in the kitchen. No knee touching on the sofa. The small, unconscious intimacies that, when they disappear, mean something is wrong.

The conversation happened on a Tuesday in May. Finn had just gone down — it was around 8pm, which felt like a miracle, though we knew he'd be up again by midnight. We were in the kitchen and David made two cups of tea and put one in front of me without asking, which was such a small and normal thing to do, something he'd done hundreds of times before, that it undid something in me.

I said: “I think we're not okay.”

He didn't argue. He sat down. He said: “I know.”

What came out after that was not elegant. We were tired and unpractised at this kind of honesty, and some of what we said came out clumsy and slightly unfair. But we said it. The scorekeeping. The resentment. The way we'd both retreated from each other without either of us making a decision to. The thing I'd thought at 3am that I was most ashamed of — not about Finn, about David; something ungenerous that I hadn't understood as resentment until I heard myself say it out loud.

He had his own version of the same thought. Different content, same shape.

We sat with that for a while.

Then David said: “We should probably fix the sleep thing.”

He didn't mean as a substitute for fixing us. He meant that the sleep thing was the condition we were both living inside, and that making a real decision together — not just surviving each night as it came, but actually doing something structured and agreed-upon — might be one way of being a team again. Of making a joint decision instead of two separate, exhausted improvisations.

We started a proper routine that weekend. We did it together — went through the assessment together, read the plan together, agreed on exactly how we'd handle the nights before the first night happened. That agreement mattered almost as much as the plan itself. We weren't keeping score anymore. We were executing something we'd both signed up for.

Finn slept through — properly, six hours straight — on Night 6. I remember waking up and not trusting it, lying there waiting for the sound from the monitor that didn't come.

David was already awake. He looked at me.

“Is he—?”

“I think so.”

We lay there in the quiet and I thought: this is the first morning in seven months that I've woken up next to this person and felt glad to be here. Not just enduring it. Actually glad.

I'd missed him. I'd been sharing a bed with him for seven months and I'd missed him.

*If you're in a similar place — and you want something you can do together rather than something you do separately at 3am — the Pack is built to be a shared plan. Same information, same timing, same response. Both of you on the same page before Night 1.*

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