Baby In Bed

I didn't remember either of these messages the next day. I also woke Julie up all the time to search for the baby.

Baby In Bed is a kind of behaviour that some parents exhibit shortly after having a baby. It involves thinking that their baby is sleeping with them in bed and then struggling to find the baby in the bed when in reality the child is sleeping safely in a bassinet. This is a well-established phenomenon among new mothers, but it also happens in fathers.

In my family, this happened to me, Roshan, for a couple of months but not Julie. In another family I know, it happened to the father for a couple of weeks but to the mother for many months. The father reported that he literally saw a lump moving under the sheets, something that happened to me as well. I literally saw her moving under the sheets and struggled to find her by lifting the sheets and so on. If I woke up without Julie next to me, I'd text her to ask if she had the baby. One time, I searched the sheets for minutes, then sort of realized my wife had our daughter and texted her and then fell asleep without any real memory of doing that forming.

The most recent occurrence was for me in August, some 5 months after the birth of Astra, though it's been months and this was not nearly as severe. I woke up, rolled over to see her in the bassinet and went to sleep unreasonably anxious. Other people on the Internet report that they've experienced this into 7 months for both the father and mother and some report doing it as often as every night 3 months in.