My son has never been one to be able to fall asleep in his crib\/cot. We’ve either had to walk around with him in his buggy or he contact naps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the past few months, his morning nap has been after I breastfeed following the usual morning routine. I used to get really frustrated with contact naps (at least once we were out of the newborn period). But then I shifted my thinking that actually this was a good opportunity for me to rest too. I’m your classic Human Doing kind of ADHDer and have always struggled with being a Human Being. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I started to do that morning feed and nap with me sitting on the bed with my pregnancy pillow hugging me, and I would put on the podcast that I like to listen to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I actually started to really look forward to it. I knew that after breakfast and the usual morning chaos, there would be a point where I had to sit down. I couldn’t clean, answer emails or suddenly decide I should be doing something more productive because there was a sleeping baby on me. For an ADHD brain that is very good at turning every spare moment into an opportunity to do another job, being physically forced to stop was surprisingly helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem came when my brain started treating this as a fixed part of the day. It wasn’t just that my son often<\/em> had a morning nap. Somewhere along the way it became: this is the routine now, and this is when I get to rest.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n So when he suddenly decides he isn’t going to nap, it throws me far more than I think it should. I’m not just thinking, oh well, no nap today<\/em>. I’m thinking: when am I going to get a break now? Is he going to nap later? Does that change lunch? Are we still going out? Is bedtime going to be a disaster? And why does the whole day suddenly feel wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cue: Meltdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is one of the slightly ridiculous contradictions of being AuDHD, what I like to call my Jekyll and Hyde brain. My ADHD brain is terrible at maintaining routines, while my autistic brain absolutely loves knowing what is going to happen next. When something finally becomes predictable, I start relying on it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, babies are possibly the worst people in the world to rely on for consistency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think what I’m slowly realising is that it isn’t really the nap itself that matters. It’s what the nap gives me: a pause. A bit of quiet. Some time when nobody expects me to be productive and I can let my brain switch off for a while. It’s one of the few times I get to practice mindfulness too, which is so important when you have a busy brain. I will force myself to focus on my son, how he looks when he’s asleep, before I put the podcast on. Then I force myself to fully listen to the podcast and not get distracted by planning and social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the nap disappears, it feels like that recovery time has disappeared with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I’m trying to change the way I think about it. Instead of his morning nap is my downtime<\/strong>, I’m trying to think I need some downtime in the morning<\/strong>. If he naps, brilliant. I get my podcast and my contact nap cuddle. If he doesn’t, I need to find another way of getting even a small bit of that pause rather than powering through until I’m completely overwhelmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It sounds like a tiny difference, but I think it matters. I can’t control whether my baby follows the routine I’ve mentally created for him. I can, however, get better at recognising what I was relying on that routine to give me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And perhaps that’s the real challenge of AuDHD motherhood: learning to create enough structure to keep my brain happy while accepting that the small person I’m building that structure around has absolutely no intention of sticking to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My son has never been one to be able to fall asleep in his crib\/cot. We’ve either had to walk around with him in his buggy or he contact naps.\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[38,43,37,44,40,48,23,20,45,47,49,46],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-divergently-parenting","tag-adhd-motherhood","tag-audhd-motherhood","tag-autism-and-motherhood","tag-baby-routines","tag-baby-sleep","tag-contact-naps","tag-motherhood","tag-neurodivergent-motherhood","tag-parenting-as-an-autistic-mum","tag-parenting-with-adhd","tag-routine-changes","tag-sensory-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/213"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}