The scene: a woman on a Sunday afternoon. Her head feels hollow, her mouth is dry, and her eyes are only open with the support of tiny sticks. Her stomach is churning, her skin is hot, and her body only obeys her brain’s commands after a confused “Huh? What?”

Sounds like your average collegiate hangover, right? Ah, but the woman is no foolish co-ed binge-drinker — she is, in fact, the mother of an 18-month old child who no longer sleeps through the night. Accustomed to collapsing into bed after the boy’s 8:00 bedtime and sleeping the blissful sleep of sleeping sleepers, she has been blindsided by his new night wakings that are filled with tears, cajoling, and begging. And that’s just from her.

I know the story well, my friends, because it is mine. After many months of self-congratulatory slumber, I am a student once again of “How to get your child to sleep?” You see, right around the 18-month mark, Kyle started waking up crying around 12:30, then 1:30, then 5:00, and sometimes 6:00. Not with a whimper or a scream, but with honest-to-goodness baleful weeping. The sound breaks my heart, and it is very difficult to let him cry it out, which is what worked for us so many months ago to get him to sleep through the night in the first place.

Oh, we tried everything. This book said to stay with him for 20 minutes until we knew for sure he was sleeping. That book said to leave the room five minutes later each time. Eventually I got sick of all those books and came up with my own plan, which was a combination of all the books’ ideas, and inevitably a design borne of parents’ instinct and exhaustion.

Because, please. After the ten months of pregnancy insomnia, six months of newborn insomnia just put me right over the edge. I was becoming dangerous, leaving the house in the same clothes I wore to bed, my hair in tatters, and wearing two different shoes. My baby boy was dressed adorably of course, but I would usually forget to pack at least once crucial item in his diaper bag. Like a diaper.

And let’s not even turn to napping as a solution. The once delicious naps I took as a pregnant woman on maternity leave were lost in my past. If bedtime was hard for me and my son, naptime was even harder. There were moments during The Great Nap Wars of 2005, as I call them, during which I would simply lose my reserve and sob along with my screaming baby. It worked for Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News,” so I thought I’d try it. Surprisingly, after 10 minutes of crying as hard as I could, and giving the baby some stiff competition in the “Who Can Cry Harder? Game,” I would feel stronger, and try to lay the babe down in his crib once again.

It’s funny — I remember those dark days vividly. Eating a pint of ice cream for breakfast as I poured over The Baby Whisperer, looking for her secret. How each book’s technique worked for about two weeks and then Kyle would become his old non-napping, non-happy-to-go-to-bed self again. But I don’t really remember the transition days between our sleepless state and the success of having a baby who slept mostly through the night without complaint. I can tell you it happened, and it stayed that way for a good long time. Enough for me to become smug and complacent, and regard other mothers with pity when they would tell me their tales of sleepless woe.

I guess it’s bad karma then, which makes me feel guilty, because it’s not just me who gets jerked awake in the middle of the night. It’s my husband, who, arguably, needs his sleep too, and Kyle himself, who has been on a happily predictable toddler schedule since his first birthday. It keeps him in good spirits, and if it is disturbed in any way, I am left with a defiant child who will look me straight in the eye as he drops food from his high-chair tray into the dog’s mouth as if to say “Whaddya gonna do — fire me?!”

About three months ago, he transitioned from two naps a day to one, nicely partitioning his day into halves. If I am home with him, I try to nap when he is napping. (Insert laugh track here. Admittedly, during the second half of the day, I start looking at my watch around 6:00 PM thinking “How long until bedtime?” Usually at 7:45 I think “Close enough.”

Now that Kyle’s night waking has entered its second week, my husband and I have developed survival tactics. At first we tried bringing him into our bed. I know, the lazy way out. Well, if you can sleep with a 32-pound toddler laying across your bladder, with his feet in your husband’s spleen, you are a better sleeper than I. Another time, my husband brought Kyle out to snuggle with him on the living room couch, leaving me to toss and turn because I couldn’t fall back to sleep. One night I tried just ignoring him, but his pitiful sobbing was no match for my vulnerable heart.

Eventually, I turned back to The Baby Whisperer (The Toddler Years, which told me about separation anxiety! Hey! It has a name! I can handle this! So I tried sitting in Kyle’s room with him, talking to him in a quiet soothing voice to reassure him of my presence, and that actually seems to work. It works so well that I have fallen asleep in the chair myself. So it’s all the more hazardous, as I sleepwalk back to bed, if I had neglected to pick up his toys before bedtime. I now have a few nasty bruises from tripping over blocks and Little People and gashing my shin into the edge of the door.

I am confident that this, too, shall pass. Although I am staring age two (as in the terrible twos right in the eye, and then comes potty training and a Big Boy Bed — I have a feeling that I’m going to be transferring the Nighttime Potty Assistance duty to Kyle’s father.

– Kim Tracy Prince

Kim is the loving mother of one very energetic toddler. She has worked on the hit show, “Bringing Home Baby.” Have a comment for our very blunt Mama? kim@themommytimes.com