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night terrors taught me about trust and patience

I remember the first time my daughter bolted upright in bed, eyes wide open but unseeing, screaming as though something was chasing her through the dark. It was two in the morning in our Brisbane home, and the summer heat had finally broken, leaving the house quiet enough that her cries seemed impossibly loud. I did what most parents do in that moment: I scooped her up, turned on every light in the hallway, and whispered the kind of soothing nonsense that felt inadequate even as I said it. She couldn't tell me what she was seeing. She didn't know where she was. And I realised, standing barefoot on the cool tiles, that something fundamental had shifted in our little family.

In the weeks that followed, the episodes came and went like unpredictable weather systems, which felt fitting in a country where the forecast can change in an hour. Some nights we sailed through without a sound. Other nights, around 11pm or 2am, she would sit up rigid, point at the corner of the room, and weep about spiders that weren't there. I read paediatric sleep resources, joined a Facebook group for Australian mums, and slowly began to understand that these weren't bad dreams. They were night terrors, a different beast entirely, and they required something I wasn't sure I had: the willingness to simply be present without trying to fix everything.

When the lights come on at 2am

The first few times it happened, I treated each episode like an emergency. I would wake her gently, offer water, change her pyjamas if they felt damp from the heat, and try to coax her back into reality. Sleep specialists at the Royal Children's Hospital had told me, during a routine visit about her eczema, that waking a child mid-terror often makes the episode last longer and feel more intense. So instead, I started sitting beside her bed, one hand on her back, breathing slowly, and waiting.

It felt counterintuitive. Every instinct screamed at me to act, to do something, to banish whatever was frightening her. But night terrors live in a part of the brain that doesn't respond to logic or comfort. They run their course in ten to twenty minutes, and the kindest thing I could do was to be the steady presence in the room until they passed. I started timing them on my phone, not because the data mattered, but because counting minutes gave my nervous system something to do while hers processed whatever storm was rolling through.

What night terrors actually are

Once I accepted that I couldn't talk her out of these episodes, I started reading everything I could find about them. Night terrors, I learned, are a type of parasomnia that happens during the deepest stage of non-REM sleep, usually within the first few hours after a child falls asleep. They're more common between the ages of three and seven, and they tend to run in families. Our GP in Brisbane confirmed that my own childhood sleepwalking, which my mum still talks about with a mix of amusement and exasperation, was likely the same wiring expressing itself differently.

This was oddly comforting. My daughter wasn't broken, and neither was I. Her brain was simply doing something that brains do, particularly when they're processing big feelings, changes at childcare, or the general overwhelm of being small in a fast world. I stopped seeing the episodes as problems to solve and started seeing them as symptoms of a child whose inner life was richer than her verbal skills could yet express. That shift in perspective changed everything.

The honesty of small bodies

Children are terrible liars. They haven't yet learned to package their feelings in polite containers, and the things they reveal in the dark of night are raw in a way that daytime conversations rarely allow. My daughter, in the hazy aftermath of an episode, would sometimes whisper things she couldn't have made up: that she was worried her grandparents were lonely, that she missed her old kindergarten in Melbourne before we moved north, that she wished the dog could sleep in her room. These weren't nightmares. They were unfiltered truths slipping out while her conscious mind was elsewhere.

It made me rethink how much of parenting is really just listening. We get so focused on milestones, on phonics assessments and swimming lessons at the local pool, on whether they're eating enough vegetables, that we forget kids are processing enormous emotional loads in those small bodies. The night terrors, in their brutal way, were giving me a backstage pass to feelings she didn't have words for during daylight hours. I began to keep a little notebook by my bed, and in the quiet minutes after she settled, I would write down what she said. It became less about solving anything and more about witnessing.

Trusting the process, even when I couldn't see it

One of the hardest parts of those months was the uncertainty. The episodes didn't follow a pattern. They didn't respond to earlier bedtimes, or later bedtimes, or cutting out screen time after dinner, or any of the other strategies I tried with the desperate energy of someone Googling at midnight. Our GP suggested keeping a sleep diary, which I did dutifully for six weeks, looking for correlations that never quite appeared. I felt like I was failing her, because surely a good mum could figure out the trigger.

The shift came when I stopped trying to control the outcome and started trusting that she was capable of moving through these moments. That didn't mean I disengaged. It meant I stopped white-knuckling every night and started accepting that some things in parenthood unfold on their own timeline. I read a beautiful piece on the books page about slowing down as a mother, about letting go of the myth that we need to have answers for everything. The author wrote about how her own son's sleep struggles had taught her to hold uncertainty with open hands. It felt like someone had finally given me permission to breathe.

Patience as a form of love

Patience, I've come to believe, is one of the least glamorous virtues in parenting. Nobody writes Instagram captions about the night they sat on the hallway floor at 3am, listening to their child mumble about shadows. Nobody brags about the weeks they spent sleep-deprived without a single breakthrough to show for it. But patience is what those months demanded, and it's what slowly rewired my expectations of myself as a mother.

I started small. I committed to not checking my phone during the episodes, just to be fully present. I committed to not blaming myself on the mornings after rough nights. I committed to asking my husband to cover the early shift so I could sleep, without feeling like I was failing some invisible standard of maternal sacrifice. Australian mums, in my experience, put enormous pressure on themselves to do it all, and that pressure is rarely helpful when you're in the trenches of a season like this. I had to learn that asking for help wasn't weakness, and that sometimes the most loving thing I could do for my daughter was also the most loving thing I could do for myself.

The unexpected gifts of a hard season

Looking back now, more than a year since the worst of it passed, I can see what those nights actually gave us. They taught my daughter, in ways I couldn't have planned, that her body knows how to regulate itself, that scary feelings don't last forever, and that her parents will sit with her in the dark without trying to make her be okay before she's ready. They taught my marriage the value of trading nights without keeping score. They taught me that trust is built in the boring, unglamorous moments of showing up, again and again, without any guarantee of progress.

Things that helped our family through the nights

If you're walking through this season with your own child, here are a few gentle strategies gathered from paediatricians, sleep consultants, and other parents who went before us:

If you'd like to read more about preserving the small treasures your kids create during these years, there's a lovely piece on kids artwork keepsakes that might resonate. And if you find yourself craving more honest reflections on motherhood, marriage, and the everyday beautiful chaos of family life, you can always come back to Motley Mama for a cup of tea and a longer read.