The Night I Made Coffee Instead of Baby Formula

In November 2018, I wrote a warning about training yourself to survive on four hours of sleep.

My advice was simple:

Do not get too good at it.

Because one night you may wake up to prepare formula for your child, walk into the kitchen, and come back holding a cup of Nescafé.

I added one more note:

Based on a true story.

That is the entire original entry.

It may be one of the shortest descriptions of early parenthood I ever wrote.

Not because coffee has anything to do with babies.

Precisely because it does not.

Somewhere between bed and kitchen, a tired brain received one instruction and completed another.

Wake up.

Go to the kitchen.

Prepare something.

The hand knew what to do before the mind did.

Unfortunately, the hand had years of experience making coffee.

The baby had requested something else.

Sleep deprivation has a special kind of comedy because the person making the mistake often does not recognize it immediately.

You are awake enough to walk.

Awake enough to open cupboards.

Awake enough to operate familiar objects.

But not awake enough to ask why you are doing any of it.

This is a dangerous level of competence.

The body is functioning.

The person is temporarily absent.

Anyone who has lived through repeated interrupted nights knows this state.

You do not wake up cleanly.

You surface.

There is a sound.

A responsibility.

A room that seems farther away than it did during daylight.

You begin moving before your thoughts have arrived.

At three in the afternoon, preparing baby formula and making coffee are clearly different tasks.

At three in the morning, they apparently belong to the same broad category:

Things one does in the kitchen while barely conscious.

That was the joke.

But underneath it was a change in life much larger than the cup in my hand.

For years, lack of sleep had been something I often chose.

University.

Work.

Late nights.

Deadlines.

Travel.

Television.

Internet.

Conversations that continued longer than they should.

You could be tired because you had decided not to sleep.

That creates a strange sense of ownership.

You did this to yourself.

You can complain, but somewhere in the background you know there was an alternative.

Parenthood changes the arrangement.

Sleep may no longer be entirely yours to schedule.

The child does not care whether you have an early meeting.

The child does not care whether yesterday was exhausting.

The child does not care that you have already calculated the minimum number of hours necessary to function.

A baby has never accepted a calendar invitation.

There is only need.

Now.

That word changes the night.

Before children, getting out of bed may require motivation.

Afterward, sometimes it requires only a sound.

You hear it and stand up.

Perhaps reluctantly.

Perhaps automatically.

But you stand.

This is one of the quiet transformations of responsibility.

You become capable of action before willingness has fully formed.

The younger version of adulthood often imagines responsibility as a serious decision.

I will be responsible.

I will take care of this.

I will do what is required.

Real responsibility is often much less dramatic.

It is walking to the kitchen half asleep.

It is finding the bottle.

Checking something.

Cleaning something.

Holding someone.

Doing the same thing again tomorrow.

Nobody applauds.

There is no grand feeling.

Some nights there is barely consciousness.

That may be why the coffee mistake is more revealing than a sentimental description would have been.

The scene does not say:

I became a father and learned sacrifice.

It says:

I was so tired that I prepared the wrong drink.

Much better.

Daily life is usually where large changes reveal themselves.

You can announce that you have become a parent in one sentence.

Understanding what that means takes thousands of small incidents.

The first time you leave the house with too many bags.

The first time your plans depend on a nap that may or may not happen.

The first time you learn to interpret several different kinds of crying.

The first time you realize silence is suspicious.

The first time you get excited because someone slept longer than expected.

The first time you walk into a kitchen at night and come back with coffee instead of formula.

These are the real measurements.

Life has shifted.

The house has new priorities.

Time behaves differently.

Sleep behaves differently.

Even the kitchen has changed meaning.

Once, nighttime coffee might have meant studying.

Working.

Driving.

Talking.

Staying awake by choice.

Now the coffee appears accidentally during childcare.

Same object.

Different life.

That is one of the reasons old mundane details become valuable later.

Nescafé is not important.

The mistake is.

It tells me exactly how tired I was without needing an adjective.

I do not have to write:

I was extremely exhausted.

The cup does the work.

Good memories often contain their own evidence.

The wrong object in the hand can explain the whole night.

There is also a very specific kind of arrogance behind the original title.

Training the body to sleep four hours.

People like to imagine sleep as another thing to optimize.

How little can I get?

How much productivity can I extract?

Can I adapt?

Can I become the person who needs less?

There is always someone claiming to function perfectly on four or five hours.

Maybe they do.

Maybe they believe they do.

Maybe everyone around them has a different opinion.

The young professional mind can treat sleep like wasted space.

If eight hours are recommended, perhaps six is efficient.

Five is ambitious.

Four is elite.

Then biology sends an invoice.

You forget something.

Say something strange.

Read the same paragraph four times.

Walk into a room and lose the reason.

Prepare coffee for a baby.

The body has an excellent sense of humor about productivity theories.

It does not debate.

It simply degrades performance.

The original entry did not attempt medical science, and neither should this one.

It was not a study of sleep.

It was a lived observation:

Being accustomed to very little sleep may feel manageable right up until your tired brain performs the wrong familiar routine.

That is enough.

What interests me now is how habits compete when we are tired.

Under pressure, we often return to the most practiced action.

The coffee-making habit was probably older than the formula-making habit.

So the kitchen offered a familiar stage and the older routine walked on first.

This happens everywhere.

When attention weakens, habit gets stronger.

We drive familiar roads automatically.

Reach for familiar buttons.

Say familiar phrases.

Put objects where they usually go.

A tired parent can become almost archaeological.

Old layers of behavior reappear.

The baby says:

Your life is different now.

The hand says:

Coffee.

In that moment, both versions of the self are present.

The old routine and the new responsibility.

That is why becoming a parent does not feel like replacing one identity with another.

You do not wake up as an entirely new person.

The old person remains.

The one who likes certain music.

Needs coffee.

Gets irritated.

Wants sleep.

Wants time alone.

Has work.

Has habits.

Has unfinished thoughts.

Parenthood arrives on top of all of that.

Sometimes beautifully.

Sometimes chaotically.

Sometimes at night when the wrong drink is being prepared.

There can be pressure to describe parenthood only in elevated language.

Love.

Devotion.

Meaning.

Joy.

These are real.

But they are not the whole texture.

There is also confusion.

Boredom.

Repetition.

Fatigue.

Ridiculous mistakes.

Unwashed things.

Objects everywhere.

Plans abandoned halfway through.

Conversations interrupted.

Food eaten cold.

Coffee forgotten.

Coffee made when nobody asked for coffee.

The humorous details do not weaken the seriousness of the relationship.

They make it believable.

Affection lives comfortably beside exhaustion.

You can love someone completely and desperately want them to go back to sleep.

There is no contradiction.

In fact, that may be one of the first lessons of caring for another human being.

Love does not eliminate physical limits.

A loving parent still gets tired.

Still becomes impatient.

Still needs rest.

Still makes mistakes.

The fantasy of endless energy is not love.

It is fantasy.

This matters because people can be cruel to themselves when reality does not match the ideal.

You are supposed to enjoy every moment.

You are supposed to feel grateful.

You are supposed to manage everything.

You are supposed to remain functional.

Meanwhile you are standing in the kitchen wondering why you are holding Nescafé.

Sometimes the more humane response is laughter.

Not because exhaustion is trivial.

Because comedy creates a little distance.

The mistake becomes a story instead of evidence that you are failing.

This is one of humor’s best functions.

It converts fatigue into something shareable.

You tell someone:

I went to make formula and came back with coffee.

They laugh because the scene is absurd.

If they have lived something similar, they laugh harder.

Recognition is relief.

So I no longer read the 2018 entry only as a joke about sleep.

I read it as a tiny record of adjustment.

The household had changed faster than some of my automatic habits.

My nights belonged partly to someone else now.

And apparently my brain had not fully updated the kitchen routine.

That is ordinary family life.

Transformation without ceremony.

The child does not need to understand how much your routines have changed.

Children rarely see the invisible labor around them.

Why should they?

To them, food appears.

Lights turn on.

Clothes become clean.

A parent comes when called.

The machinery of care is hidden.

Only adults remember the night shift.

And even adults forget most of it.

That is perhaps why small entries like this matter more with time.

Without the sentence, would I remember that particular night?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Sleep-deprived periods have blurry borders.

One night resembles another.

The very exhaustion that creates the memories also damages the ability to preserve them.

You remember the era.

Not every scene.

Then an old line survives:

I went to make formula and came back with Nescafé.

Immediately the period has a shape.

There was a child young enough to need formula at night.

There was insufficient sleep.

There was a kitchen.

There was coffee.

There was a mistake funny enough to write down.

That is already a lot.

Archives do not need to preserve every important event.

Sometimes they preserve one ridiculous event that allows the entire period to return.

And there is something else I like about it.

The joke is self-directed.

Nobody else is the idiot.

Not a company.

Not a stranger.

Not a driver.

Not a professor.

Me.

I am the person who walked into the kitchen with a clear job and returned having completed the wrong one.

These are healthy stories to keep.

They puncture the polished version of ourselves.

Years later, you may become more experienced.

More serious.

Better organized.

People may ask your advice.

You may stand in front of a classroom or meeting and appear to know what you are doing.

The archive quietly says:

Yes, but once you tried to feed the night with coffee.

Good.

Everyone needs evidence against their own mythology.

Perhaps the best family stories perform that role collectively.

Remember when you did this?

Remember when the baby did that?

Remember how we had no idea what we were doing?

People become competent slowly.

Memory tends to edit out the learning curve.

Funny stories put it back.

That is comforting.

Especially when new responsibilities arrive.

Nobody begins fully prepared.

You become capable through repetition.

Feedings.

Baths.

Nights.

Mornings.

Mistakes.

Corrections.

Eventually the actions that once required full attention become familiar.

Then another stage begins and the rules change again.

Children are excellent at preventing mastery from becoming permanent.

Just when you understand one routine, they stop needing it.

The bottle disappears.

The sleep pattern changes.

The stroller becomes unnecessary.

The clothes become too small.

A new problem replaces the solved one.

Parenthood is full of equipment whose period of importance is intensely real and surprisingly brief.

During the stage, the object is everywhere.

After the stage, it vanishes.

Years later, you see one and remember.

This may be why the phrase “the days are long and the years are short” resonates with so many parents, though I do not need to borrow the phrase to understand the phenomenon.

At night, a single waking can feel endless.

Looking backward, the whole stage becomes small.

That is another reason to preserve the coffee story.

It slows the blur.

One night remains one night.

One mistake remains visible.

The child in the source is not named.

The hour is not given.

The kitchen is not described.

There is no reason to invent any of that.

The power comes from how little is needed.

A tired parent.

A request for formula.

A cup of coffee.

Wrong answer.

True story.

Sometimes that is enough to keep a whole period alive.

And perhaps the lesson, if there must be one, is not about sleeping four hours.

It is simpler.

Human beings can adapt to almost anything and still remain human.

You can become accustomed to interrupted nights.

Learn the routine.

Function at work.

Carry responsibility.

And then one evening or morning, the brain quietly reminds you that adaptation is not invincibility.

You walk into the kitchen.

You return with Nescafé.

And for a moment, the entire heroic story of functioning on four hours of sleep collapses into a cup.

Which is probably where it belonged all along.