The four-month wall
Sleep regression, partner stress, work re-entry. Why the second three months are harder than the first three.
In progress6 min↓ 1,282 words
§ Journey
Sleep regression, partner stress, work re-entry. Why the second three months are harder than the first three.
At three months, everyone told me the worst was over. Visitors had stopped. The sleep was supposed to settle. My wife was officially "recovering." I remember telling a mate at a barbecue, drink in hand, that we'd cracked it. He had a six-year-old. He looked at me the way a man looks at a kid riding a bike for the first time. He said, "Mate. Wait."
Four weeks later the sleep collapsed, my wife went back to work two days a week and cried in the car, and I logged into a 9am Monday meeting on five hours' sleep with baby vomit on my collar. The man at the barbecue had been kind. He'd pulled the punch.
This module is about the wall almost no one warns first-time fathers about. It's not the newborn weeks. Those are hard but well-documented. It's the four-month mark, when the easy story stops and the genuinely hard parenting begins.
Three things land at once. They compound.
The four-month sleep regression. Your baby's sleep architecture rewires somewhere between fifteen and twenty weeks. The deep newborn sleep, the kind where you could vacuum the room and they'd stay under, is gone. They wake every forty-five minutes. They link cycles unevenly. The thing that was working a fortnight ago no longer works, and nothing has visibly changed.
It is not a phase that resolves in a week. Plan for six.
Her recovery hits a second curve. The visible postpartum healing (stitches, bleeding, the surface stuff) is mostly done. What replaces it is quieter and longer: pelvic floor weakness, hormonal flatness, hair falling out in handfuls, a body that does not look like the one she used to have. Add the return-to-work decision (her own income, her own identity, her career trajectory measured in years) and the four-month mark is when most partners have their first real cry that isn't about the baby.
Work re-entry, the lie of "back to normal." You're back at the desk. The colleagues who were sympathetic in week one have moved on. The expectations are calibrated to pre-baby you. Pre-baby you slept seven hours. Current you slept five, on a couch, in your work shirt, with a finger in a small mouth.
Three forces. Same fortnight. Nobody briefs you on this.
Month one had structure: a recovery period, time off work, well-meaning visitors, casseroles in the freezer, a script everyone follows. The first weeks are a war footing and you rise to it.
Month four is when the war footing ends and ordinary life resumes, except ordinary life is harder than it used to be and nobody else has noticed. The casseroles stopped. The visitors stopped. The one-on-one time with your partner stopped, because by 8pm you're both unconscious. You are now living the new normal full-time.
There is also a thing nobody told you was happening, which is that the version of you that worked twelve hours a day, trained four times a week, drank with mates on a Friday and went on a city break with your partner every other month, that man is gone. You haven't replaced him. You've just been too busy to notice the empty room.
Month four is when you walk into the empty room.
1. Re-stage the sleep, before you re-stage anything else.
If you and your partner are both running on five hours, nothing else you do this month works. Sleep gets the first hour of attention.
Options:
This is not chivalry. It's keeping both adults functioning enough to make decisions.
2. Have the return-to-work conversation, properly.
If she's going back, the logistics are going to land on both of you. Childcare waitlists, sick days, the school-run handoff, who leaves work early when daycare calls about a temperature. Most couples discover the unfairness of the default arrangement (mum carries it) about three weeks into her return, in a fight on a Tuesday night.
Have the conversation in week one of the return, not week three. Map out:
Write it down. You won't remember it on Wednesday.
3. Acknowledge the work lie out loud.
You are not "back to normal" at work. You are working at 70 percent on five hours' sleep. Telling your boss you are crushed is not a career move; you don't need to. Pulling back the volunteer work, the optional travel, the 7am calls, that is the move. For the next six months, do the job. Don't add to it.
4. Stop pretending you're fine to your partner.
The instinct, especially for men in long relationships, is to shield your partner from your own struggle because she has her own. This is a kindness that backfires. By month five, she has noticed you're shielding her, and the gap between you widens because she's now alone in two ways: in her own struggle, and in not being trusted with yours.
A weekly twenty minutes, after the baby is down, no phones, no TV. What's hard. What's helping. What's worrying. What you each need from the other this week. It is a meeting, basically. Same time. Same questions. It saves marriages.
The first three months are the version of fatherhood the books cover. The four-month wall is the version that builds the actual father. The mate at the barbecue had pulled the punch because there's no kind way to land it. The first hard part isn't the baby. It's the slow disappearance of the man you used to be, while you're too tired to clock it happening.
You do not solve this in a weekend. You solve it the same way you'd solve any rebuild: pick the right two things to protect this month, and let the rest slide.
Sleep first. The marriage second. Everything else third.
A blunt field guide to the first month after the conversation. Sleep, paperwork, the kids, and the part nobody warns you about.
5 minHow to start the talk you've been rehearsing in the shower for six months. A practical guide to the words, the room, the aftermath.
4 minWhen she ends it and you didn't see it coming. The first 72 hours, the stories you'll tell yourself, and what to actually do.
4 minA self-interrogation guide for the man considering ending his marriage. Not advice. Questions. The hard ones, in order.
5 min