I held on to that dream for a year and more. Each month, and another, and another

When my first baby was a newborn (and then not such a newborn), I had a dream.

The dream was simple. To sleep six hours in one stretch.

“Do you think,” I’d ask my husband plaintively, “do you think that it will ever, ever happen again?”

It just didn’t seem possible, in the spaces between feeds, in the two-hour stretches that were over almost before I could begin to dream.

“It will come, you’ll see,” the experienced mothers told me, but I just couldn’t see it. How? When? Really?

“When I finish nursing,” I’d say dreamily, wistfully, yearningly, “I’m going to a hotel for a night. Just me and no one else. And I’ll bring books and nosh. No phone. And I’ll sleep. I’ll sleep for hours and hours. With no one to wake me and nothing to stop me.”

I held on to that dream for a year and more. Each month, and another, and another, pushing myself on just a little longer, for my baby, for me.