Surviving the Sleepless Season

12 hours by 12 weeks

That’s the gold standard for approximately how long it should take your brand new baby to start sleeping reliably through the night. It’s a helpful anchor as a frame of reference, a target to shoot for when your vision still feels cross-eyed and blurry. 

Of course, when a new baby arrives at your home and requires 24/7 surveillance and wake-ups every 2 hours for feeding, this ideal sleep state feels as fantastical as waking up inside of a Disney movie.

I didn’t think we’d get there at all with our second baby, who was far needier than our first from the early days. Due to some of my husband’s work travel commitments, we ended up spending six weeks in Hamburg, Germany. We took a bleary, red-eye flight with my mother, our 2-year-old and a 6-week-old, then I spent the next 6 weeks trying to get everyone to sleep normally again while my husband set up the sound for the German production for Hamilton, the Musical.

I don’t remember much about that trip (see: sleep deprivation), but I do vividly recall rhythmically parading my baby up and down the city canals in the early morning hours, with a franzbroetchen pastry in one hand and a double americano in the other. 

“I can’t do this,” I remember thinking. “It is actually, physically and logistically impossible for me to manage two kids at once.”

Bedtimes were a nightmare. Due to Jason’s show schedule, I had to manage most on my own, which essentially felt like playing a game of “whack-a-mole” running between the two bedrooms of the Airbnb as different kids cried out repeatedly until they got comfy enough to mercifully, finally close their eyes. 

The apartment we stayed at was only minimally furnished, and so, without any carpeting, every cry reverberated and bounced off the walls, the floors, the ceilings. Just thinking about those piercing wails in that apartment still gives me latent anxiety (even today), a haunting reminder of what it must sound like to be the absolute worst mother in the world. 

“Date nights are over for us,” I told my husband. “Based on what I’m seeing, I’ve concluded that there is absolutely no way that anyone else could ever manage to get both of these kids to sleep at the same time.”

(These are the kind of hyperbolic comments that feel 100% accurate at the time, but of course in reality are approximately 0% accurate.)

Because then what happens is, you go to bed one night and wake up and realize that it’s 6 a.m., not 4 a.m. So you check the bassinet in a panic, and it feels like a damn miracle to see your baby still in there. Still breathing. Still…sleeping.

And then just like that, it’s 8 hours one night. Then 10 hours. Then, down to the buzzer of the final day of the 12th week of your baby’s life, it’s 12 hours. You did it. You made it through. And now, the real adventure begins.

Surviving the Messy First Build

It’s been about 12 weeks since I started MuseKat, my first startup. And it’s been hard to ignore the very similar patterns of “survival nurturing instinct” between this modality and new baby mode.

Since it’s my first company, the shock value at the onset was as severe as bringing home that first baby from the hospital. As each week progressed, I noticed myself adapting in real-time to a varying list of demands and requirements, many of which I hadn’t considered or predicted.

Much like the early days of parenting—cycling through every possible combo to get a baby to eat, sleep, or settle down—I’ve found myself in a near-constant state of “Bop-It Mode.” Twisting, pulling, smacking the same device over and over, trying every sequence, until something finally clicks.

There have been hours-long blocks where I didn’t think I’d ever escape the recursive coding loop of a software bug. Weeks-long windows of people ignoring my emails. There’s been panic-inducing live user testing, too many midnight hack nights laced with AI existential dread nightmares, too many new technological advances and tools to track, coupled with too few new user activations, not to mention the sick kids, the uneven childcare, and the near-death experiences. 

“I can’t do this,” I told my husband. “It is actually, physically and logistically impossible to start a company and manage all of these responsibilities at home at the same time.”

(These are the kind of hyperbolic comments that feel 100% accurate at the time, but of course in reality are approximately 0% accurate.)

Somehow you manage to push a few new feature changes on your own, and you manage to task out a few small project components to a few other people. And other people somehow start manifesting out of thin air, offering to help, at the exact moment when you need them to show up. You’re not quite sure how it’s happening, but you welcome anything you can get.

And then just like that, people start responding to your emails. Saying yes instead of saying no.

Then, down to the buzzer on the final day of the 12th week, you open your Apple Developer account and see it. Your name. Your app. In TestFlight. 

You realize — ohhhh, this is what it feels like to be doing the thing. You did it. You made it through.

And now, the real work begins.