This meme came across my Facebook the other day and it made me laugh because it is SO true! First of all, I don’t know why people use the phrase “sleep like a baby” to imply good sleep. Oh really, you slept like a baby – so you were unable to fall asleep on your own and you woke up crying every two hours? Right.

And the second truth is that husbands sleep through everything! Somehow my husband manages to snore away peacefully, undisturbed by our crying baby, which we can hear through the bedroom wall as well as on the baby monitor (paranoid mum over here!). I, on the other hand, wake up to the slightest sniffle or uneven breath.

And unfortunately, I can’t even be mad at my husband because it’s not his fault. Male brains just don’t respond to babies cries the same way that female brains do. The sound of a baby crying results in changes to brain activity in women but not men. And in fact, animal research indicates that maternal hormones may even amplify the sound of babies’ cries for mothers.

So it’s less the case of lazy husbands but rather another example of how women’s bodies prepare us for the immense task of motherhood and all that it entails. If I want to “sleep like a husband” it seems that I would need to trade in my supercharged mother brain for one of those male brains, and I’m not so sure I’m ready for that!