I used to think sleep regressions were something sleep consultants invented to sell courses. Then my daughter turned two and, overnight, decided that sleep was a scam she was no longer participating in.

For three weeks, bedtime took two hours. She would fall asleep, wake up at 10:40pm screaming like she’d been stung, need rocking, fall asleep on my chest, and then wake again at 2am ready to discuss, at length, the whereabouts of a specific toy giraffe. I found the giraffe. It was in the bed. She was holding it. This did not resolve the situation.

My husband and I developed a system, which is a generous word for what it was. He took 8pm to midnight. I took midnight to morning. We passed each other in the hallway like shift workers at a factory that manufactures nothing. I started falling asleep sitting up on the nursery floor with my back against the radiator. One night I woke up at 3am holding an empty sippy cup like a phone, mid-conversation with no one.

The flop: I bought the white noise machine with the “womb sounds” setting. Forty euros. She hated it. She pointed at it and said “no” with the moral certainty of a judge, and every time I turned it on she cried harder, as if the fake womb was personally insulting. It’s in a drawer now. Sometimes I look at it and feel the forty euros leave my body again.

What actually got us through was not a sleep trick. It was giving up on everything else.

For three weeks, the house was a mess and I did not care. Dinner was toast or cereal or, twice, just cheese eaten over the sink. I stopped folding laundry entirely — we lived out of the clean basket, and honestly the clean basket system was so efficient I briefly considered keeping it. I said no to two social plans and felt zero guilt. I lowered every bar in my life to the floor, and then I lowered the floor.

Because here’s the thing: the regression wasn’t a problem to solve. It was weather. Her brain was doing some big developmental thing — molars, language explosion, separation anxiety, pick your expert — and no bedtime routine was going to override it. All we could do was survive it without breaking ourselves.

It ended the way it started: suddenly, for no reason. One Tuesday she went down at 7:30, slept until 6:40, and I woke up in a panic because the monitor was too quiet. I checked on her. She was fine. She’d just… remembered how to sleep.

If you’re in it right now: I’m sorry. It’s real, it’s awful, and it’s temporary, which is the most useless true thing anyone can tell you at 3am. Lower the bar. Eat the cheese over the sink. It ends.