My second slept through the night around seven months. I remember the first time it happened because I woke up in a panic at 5:45am convinced something was wrong. Checked the monitor. She was fine. Just sleeping. Like a normal human being.
I stood there in the hallway for a second thinking, ok, this is it. This is where I start feeling like myself again. The sleep was the problem and now the sleep is fixed.
Except it wasn't fixed. Not even close.
The sleep got better and I still felt like I was moving through wet concrete by 2pm. Still forgetting the word for basic things like "colander" and calling it "the pasta bowl with the holes." Still snapping at my husband over nothing and then feeling terrible about it ten minutes later. Still hitting a wall every single afternoon where I genuinely could not keep my eyes open.
I blamed it on having two kids. I blamed it on not working out enough. My doctor said my labs looked "fine" and suggested I try to manage my stress better, which is a fun thing to say to someone who has a two year old, and a baby.
Here's what nobody connected for me. And honestly I'm still a little annoyed it took me this long to figure it out.
Pregnancy doesn't just make you tired for nine months. It physically takes nutrients from your body to build another human. Calcium from your bones. Iron from your blood. Choline from your liver. Your baby needed those things to develop, and your body handed them over because that's what it's designed to do. The problem is that most of those stores don't just bounce back after delivery. They stay low. Sometimes for years.
And if you breastfeed, it keeps going. Your body pulls calcium, B12, iron, and vitamin D into your milk supply, which is amazing for the baby and genuinely rough on you, especially if your stores were already low from the pregnancy itself.
So here I was, two kids deep, wondering why I couldn't function like a normal adult when the answer was pretty simple. My body was running on basically nothing. Not because I wasn't eating or sleeping. Because the raw materials my cells needed to actually produce energy had been draining out of me for four years straight and I'd never deliberately put any of them back.
The word for this is postnatal depletion. I'd never heard it until I went down a rabbit hole one night after putting the kids to bed. Apparently it affects a huge percentage of mothers and it can last for years postpartum. The symptoms are exactly what you'd expect, fatigue that sleep doesn't fix, brain fog, anxiety, hair loss, feeling cold all the time, irritability. I read the list and checked off every single one.
What really got me was learning how specific the deficiencies are. It's not just a general "you're run down" situation. It's specific nutrients doing specific jobs that your body can't do without them.
Magnesium is involved in something like 300 different processes in your body including energy production and nervous system regulation. When it's low, you feel wired and tired at the same time. That thing where you're completely exhausted but you can't actually relax? That's often magnesium.
Iron is what your blood needs to carry oxygen to your cells. When your iron is low, your cells are basically suffocating. They can't produce energy efficiently no matter how much sleep you get. And here's the part that frustrated me the most, you can be iron deficient without being technically anemic. Standard bloodwork misses it all the time because they're checking hemoglobin, not ferritin. So your doctor says you're fine and you're not.
Choline is one I'd literally never heard of before. Your brain needs it for memory and focus. Most prenatal vitamins don't even include it, and most women aren't getting nearly enough from food alone. When I learned that, the "mom brain" thing suddenly made a lot more sense. It's not some charming side effect of parenthood. It's a deficiency.
I could keep going. B12, vitamin D, calcium, folate. They're all part of the same pattern. Pregnancy takes them, breastfeeding takes more, and unless you're very specifically and intentionally putting them back in the right forms and the right amounts, your body just adapts to running at half capacity. And you adapt too. You start thinking this is just what being a mom feels like.
It doesn't have to be.
I'm not going to pretend I have it all figured out. But I started paying attention to this stuff and the difference has been noticeable. Not overnight. Not dramatic. Just gradually feeling more like an actual person and less like a zombie in athleisure. The 3pm crash got less brutal. The fog started lifting a little. I stopped losing my patience over things that genuinely do not matter, like a sock on the floor.
It's the main reason I made Mama Fuel. The formula is specifically built around the nutrients that pregnancy depletes most, in the forms your body can actually absorb. Check it out here!