The Late Nights and Early Mornings: The Season No One Warns You Ends So Slowly

If you're reading this at 3 am with a wide-awake baby on your chest, or you've been up since 5 am because a toddler climbed into your bed insisting the dark is "too scary", I want you to know something before anything else:

This is not a phase you're failing. This is the phase.

We named this month's box The Late Nights and Early Mornings because it's the truest thing we know about early parenthood. Not the nursery photos. Not the onesies folded just so. The truest thing is the hours in between, the ones nobody posts about.

It's Not Just "the Newborn Stage"

Here's what nobody tells you going in: the sleep deprivation doesn't end when the newborn stage does. It just changes shape.

First it's a newborn adjusting to the world, day and night not yet sorted out. Then it's a baby cutting teeth. Then it's a toddler who got sick overnight, or one who suddenly decided she's afraid of the dark, or one who simply isn't ready to sleep alone yet, and won't be, not on your timeline. From newborn to toddlerhood, there's rarely a stretch where you feel fully, reliably functional. You're always up late, or up early, or both.

A Night I'll Never Forget

I have three children. My oldest is approaching 24 now, but there's one night I still carry with me like it happened last week.

She was barely two months old, and she had her days and nights completely mixed up. One particular night, she was wide awake and bushy-tailed from midnight to 6 am. Not fussy-awake. Alert. Watching me. Wanting to be up.

By the middle of the night, I was at my absolute wit's end. So I did what felt like the only move I had left: I strapped her into her car seat, walked out to the garage, and backed slowly out into the dark at 3 am, hoping the drive would do what nothing else could.

We lived in the country in North Carolina at the time, where the roads wind and curve for miles. I drove those bends hoping the motion would lull her to sleep the way it was making me sleepy. And it worked; she grew quiet. I made the turn back toward home, easing the car into the garage as gently as I could, closing the door without a sound, tiptoeing around to get her out.

I remember thinking: if she's asleep, this is a win.

I opened the door.

There she was. Wide awake. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, grinning the biggest, gummiest smile right up at me, like we'd just gotten back from the best adventure of her life.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Honestly, I think I did a little of both.

Morning came. She finally drifted off around 6 am, and I closed my eyes too, if only for a little while.

You Will Survive This, Too

So much of that season is a blur to me now, a distant memory folded into all the ones that came after. My daughter is nearly 24. We survived the late nights and the early mornings, all of them, even the ones that felt endless at 3 am in a car on a winding country road.

If you're in it right now, I won't tell you it goes by fast, because in the moment, it doesn't. Some nights feel impossibly long. But I will tell you this: you are not doing it wrong. You are not the only one driving in circles at 3 am, bargaining with a baby who has other plans. You are in very, very good company.

This month's box was built for exactly this season, for the mama who's running on fumes and still showing up, night after night, morning after morning. Because the truth is, motherhood doesn't run on a clock. It runs on whatever hours it needs from you, for however long it needs them.

And you deserve to be nurtured through every single one.

The Mother Needs Nurturing Too.

— Marsha
Founder, Cater to Mom