I’m On Your Side: Sleep Deprivation, Unconditional Love, & Other Things That Just Might Kill You
By: Paul Jacobsen
Tags: Songwriting, Music, Babies, Parenting, Paul Jacobsen

This is part three of a series about my new album, Two-Headed Hearts, with my band Paul Jacobsen & The Madison Arm. I’ll be talking about the songs, the recording process, and other stuff. This one’s for the parents quarantined with kids they love to the ends of the earth and might sometimes need a reminder of that tenderness.

Babies sleep. Until they don’t. And then you don’t. And when you don’t, it can get a little touch & go. Or a lot.

If you spend any time at all in the Parenting section of a bookstore (remember those?), you’ll find a robust literary arm constructed around the sleeping of babies. Each author drops knowledge like a mountaintop guru who has selflessly walked the arduous path to enlightenment and is now ready to dispense this hard-won wisdom, different from the other gurus’ adorably outdated ideas, just kindly pay the nominal book fee and all your sleep troubles will be a thing of that past. GUARANTEED.

Whatever you do, though, don’t read TWO of the books. Stick with the one. Hold its principles dear. Obey it religiously. THERE’S A SYSTEM. It will work. Just give it the requisite 57 weeks to really become, y’know, habit. These things take time.

Because if you read a second book, you might find that the authors actually directly contradict each other.

“Never put your baby to sleep with food.”

“Always feed your child before bedtime.”

“Never wake a sleeping baby.”

“Wake your baby at regular intervals for feedings.”

“Let the baby cry. It’s fiiiine.”

“You are a monster. Never let that precious soul feel abandoned.”

And on and on. The conflicting advice will drive you mad, pinging between philosophies like a tennis ball at Wimbledon. Another thing that will (privately) drive you mad? The success stories of your friends whose baby “just, like, sleeps all the time” or “we just swaddle her and put her down and 19 hours later, she wakes up SO HAPPY” or whatever. You will be forgiven for praying that your friends’ child goes through a protracted juggalo phase or something. You’re only human.

To get your baby to sleep, you will do anything, though. Anything. Believe anything. Try anything. The baby will fall asleep faster if I sacrifice 3 fingers to the Infant God of Sleepytime? Perfect. I already know which fingers! Such is the desperation of sleep deprivation. It’s no joke. In the words of Lana Del Rey, “it’s enough just to make you go crazy, crazy, crazy…”

When our first child was born, my wife & I read all the books. (OK. She read them and then transmitted knowledge as it became applicable.) We were fine at first because a lot of babies sleep early on. Then, it happened. “It” being sleep trouble. And we were a mess, changing sleep strategies on the sleep-starved fly at 3am, arguing over who got up last in the wee hours, bickering over which book we were currently adhering to, deciding to swap Nights Of Sleep where one of us would be on baby duty the entire night, only to swap again at 4am when the Knight of Sleep was about to go all Jack Nicholson in the Shining. Again, cue the Lana Del Rey.

Don’t get me wrong: there were magic times with our babies. Rare were the ones, though, that occurred between the hours of 11pm and 6am. Surely that’s no surprise to anyone.

So when we would stumble upon something that was calming to our little son during those stressful hours, it felt like a miracle. One of those things I turned to when my wits’ end was farther in the rearview than I’d like: the piano.

I sat on the piano bench, held my son in the cradle of my left arm, and with my right hand began to slowly pulse a quiet triad made up of the notes A, D, and F-sharp. I’d swap out the F-sharp for a G now and then. And, light cascading from the heavens and angels whisper-singing (because no one needs a choir of angels startling the baby with their hallelujahs, much less a Drummer Boy), the baby would stop crying. And the dad might too. We could all breathe again. This was heavenly peace.

It was just a D chord occasionally flirting with a G chord on an old piano. I hadn’t invented some Brian Wilson- or Bach-level chord progression. It’s as primal and basic as you can get. And, in a very tiny way, it was a lifesaver.

That’s the beginning of “I’m On Your Side,” a song I wrote as a brand new, freaked out, overwhelmed-but-happy-as-all-get-out new parent, desperate for even a couple hours’ of sleep but even more desperate to convey to this little human just how loved he truly was and is and always will be, no matter what. No matter when. No. Matter. What.

“ In the hurricane eye, let the waves rise, I’m on your side.”

(Hear the song here, if you’d like: https://pauljacobsen.bandcamp.com/track/im-on-your-side)