Nightwalking and the Wisdom of Nurses
The empty street rang with Theo’s cries as I carried him through the warm summer night. I walked downhill toward the road that ran along the river, usually busy but now dark and empty. Usually, dark, empty, and quiet. Some impulse had driven me outside, but now as I jiggled Theo gently up and down, the change of air made no apparent difference to him. I wondered if I was simply waking up everyone on the street instead of only the owners of our apartment who lived on the floor above.
Nightwalking as one word is used for walking outside at night, sometimes for nefarious reasons, but I’m claiming it here for a parent walking through the night with a crying baby. It’s also been called “walking the floor,” but that sounds like “floorwalking” as in patrolling store employees; anyway, the main point to me is that it’s nightwalking, when you’re supposed to be sleeping.
According to my understanding and experience up to that point, new babies mostly sleep. They wake up and are fed, they open their eyes for long enough to be cooed at and photographed, then they get sleepy and drop off again.
So far Theo had declined to follow this pattern. I couldn’t understand how a new baby could stay awake for so long. I don’t remember him being up for a whole night, but for hours on end he would not sleep. As a result, Theo’s father and I felt exhausted much of the time. “Sleep when the baby sleeps” was advice I had gladly taken to heart but didn’t have much opportunity to enjoy!
Years later, my husband’s aunt laughed when she came across a photo of us all sitting outside on their back deck for tea early that summer, Theo in his seat and Theo’s dad and I looking pale and haggard. (The mother of five children, she was allowed to laugh.)
At night, I would try to put the baby down, as the saying is, in his crib. Nope. Theo would start crying and the nightwalking would begin. I paced back and forth across the living and dining rooms, jiggling him. After a long time, his eyelids might start to flutter and close; I would stop to study him (as in Theo-logy), hopeful of rest coming soon for both of us. Then the baby’s lower lip would push out, the certain prelude to renewed crying—and the walking and jiggling up and down would go on, hour after hour.
“You need at least four hours of sleep per night to feel human.”
My phone calls to the pediatric nurses who handled the after-hours helpline continued. I loved all of these nurses, sight unseen, for their patience and understanding. Even when they didn’t really have an answer for what I was asking about (“it could be this, it could be that”), I always felt better after talking to one of them.
Finally, one nurse revealed a nighttime approach that really helped. “You need at least four hours of sleep per night to feel human,” she said. “Can you figure out a way to be able to sleep four hours at a stretch?” I explained that it was hard for my husband to help because he couldn’t carry the baby around.
Thanks to that nurse, though, we found a way. We set up Theo’s room (formerly his dad’s office) with everything that my husband would need to take care of Theo for four hours, all within easy reach. Theo was on a blanket on the floor with my husband sitting on the floor near him, and if my husband needed to leave the room, he could lift Theo into his car seat.
It worked. Across the hall, I didn’t know if Theo kept crying or not; I slept. After his four-hour shift, my husband would come to bed, and I was back on call. This made a big difference to how I felt during the day.
“He’s trying to heal his brain, right?”
But I continued to marvel over this baby who didn’t seem to need sleep. The night nurses who took calls all knew Theo’s story about what had happened after he was born.1
“He’s trying to heal his brain, right?” a nurse said.
“Ohh,” I said. Suddenly, my baby appeared, not as a passive victim of the “insult” to his brain but staying awake for all the stimulation it could provide him in his healing, taking in the sensory world, making connections, storing the information.
Maybe staying awake really was better for him in his earliest days. I don’t know what the science is on that. But it turned the whole nightwalking experience into a more natural, hopeful picture. That, and getting at least four hours of sleep a night. God bless nurses.
Wrapped in the humid air of the summer night, sweaty in nursing nightgown and sandals, I walked as Theo cried. Near the bottom of the gentle hill that was our street, I turned around and walked back home.
1. See the first post, dated Dec. 4, 2021.