It's 2 a.m. and Nora has been up for 4 hours. She has thrown up once. She has destroyed me. I can't listen to the sound of her crying anymore without going insane, which is where I've landed now. 

Other people, when met with desperate times, will take their baby into bed with them. What do you do when that doesn't work? When she will not, literally can not, fall asleep with you? But if you leave her by herself, she also cannot sleep? You're left in a cycle of insanity in which you're awake for 4 hours, going slowly insane and doing everything in your power to avoid screaming at her, or throwing things against the wall, or destroying the house.

A few times Nora asked for milk so Jake gave her some milk, which she guzzled. Nora did eventually fall asleep for about 15 minutes or so after that, and then very suddenly woke up crying hard. I pulled her into bed with me (she was in the pack 'n play in our bedroom), then some instinct caused me to whisk her out of bed and into the bathroom, where she threw up all over everything. I still smell like vomit. The milk must have triggered her reflux.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to finish the draft of my grant narrative and give it to some internal reviewers. I've got the background and rationale done, I've got the methods and the plan of work and the analysis done, I've got the intellectual merit and the broader impacts done, I've got the education plans and evaluation plans done. I just have to write the personnel section and the results of prior funding section and read over everything and edit and change some things, but how good of a job am I going to do on this with no sleep?

I'll tell you. I'm going to do a crappy job on it, just like I've done a crappy job on everything for the past year and a half. If I had known that a year and a half in I would still have sleepless nights from hell, I wouldn't have done this. I wouldn't have opted to destroy my career, which is what this is doing to me. I never sleep, I am always exhausted, and I cannot handle the pressure of being both the mom and the dad and having all of the responsibility of the family's well being on my shoulders and all of the financial responsibility on my shoulders at the same time. I cannot do both anymore. It is killing me.

I am trying to be strong, and tell myself that I am strong, and that I can keep doing this for another few years, and that I don't need sleep and the day never seems as bad as I predict it will be when I'm up all night. But I am probably shortening my life by releasing all of the stress hormones every night. The kids cry and Jake wakes up and then immediately goes back to sleep. I wake up and then I am awake for another hour, because my body has been flooded with adrenaline, with dread, wondering if this is going to be another one of those nights when Nora throws up or Milo is up 6 times. I constantly feel like I am dragging a giant rock around in my chest and it is growing bigger every day. I cannot handle this pressure.

I know why women with kids don't get tenure. All that stuff about discrimination and not being taken seriously and work-life balance, whatever. It's really the sleep deprivation that makes you not get tenure. The sleep deprivation makes a person stupid and slow and unproductive.