[Formerly] Sleep Divorced
Grief, Marriage, and Separate Bedrooms
“I’ve been bragging on her the last few weeks, telling people she’s such a great sleeper! Is she not?!”
My husband and I laughed over coffee the next morning, recalling his words from the night before—spoken in the bleary-eyed haze of frustration after being woken up every 45 minutes for nearly three hours straight.
For context…
It was the first night our youngest daughter had ever slept in her crib the entire night.
And it was the first night we had slept in the same bed since she was born six months ago.
And over the past few years, we’ve spent more nights apart than together.
His words were funny in the light of morning. But in the dark, I had nearly caved—nearly crawled back to the guest room and brought her with me, back to the bassinet she was outgrowing more quickly than I cared to admit.
In the midnight fog, I found myself wondering if sleeping side by side—like “normal couples” do—would ever feel normal again.
We’ve never regretted the decision to sleep separately. I’ve said before that the choice to sleep in separate rooms was never about a lack of love. It was about survival. About trying desperately to figure out how to be a married couple in the midst of unexpected challenges…and profound loss.
Nearly two years ago, I wrote about what it meant to sleep apart from my spouse—and what it didn’t. Today, I’m writing about what it’s like to begin again. To move forward.
Unnecessary Assumptions
I do feel like it’s worth noting that our decision to push toward sleeping in the same bed again has absolutely nothing to do with the preconceived notions of people who have never walked in our shoes. It has everything to do with both of us suddenly realizing that the season was shifting—and we were ready for the next one.
When most people think about couples sleeping separately, they assume that choice is made out of dissatisfaction. I suppose that assumption is rooted in some truth. Most people don’t factor in trauma, medically complex parenting, child loss, and grief because they simply don’t know what they don’t know. It’s hard to empathize with what you haven’t lived. And as I say frequently, I don’t desire for anyone to experience it in order to fully understand.
As I have done in the past, I hope that sharing our story accomplishes two things:
I hope it helps someone feel seen. I hope those parents who are in the years of survival don’t feel alone in the dark.
I hope the onlookers—the ones drawing assumptions—have a reason to give pause before they judge what love looks like after the bedside lamps turn off.
The In-Between
So, what did it look like in those early stages when we first decided that separate beds were necessary?
During my second pregnancy, high amniotic fluid levels made sleep especially difficult. It was a high-risk pregnancy, and the medical complications our unborn daughter faced left me desperate for connection through the grief. When she was born, terminal diagnoses, back-to-back hospital stays, and round-the-clock care left us scrambling to find sleep wherever—and whenever—we could get it. Navigating the unexpected left us fighting for joy and hope.
There were no night nurses—we were the night nurses. We quickly became experts in managing supplemental oxygen, seizure medications, and respiratory therapies.
Every night after our oldest was in bed and our daughter had received her evening medications and treatments, we looked at each other through weary eyes and said some version of, “See you on the flip side.”
For nearly two years—while we were blessed to have her on this earth—this is what it looked like to try and survive. At times, separate beds felt like a failure. But in reality, they were our lifeline.
Then, suddenly, she was gone.
What now?
“Hi,” my husband said as he waved at me from across the bed. “It’s been a minute.”
I was about two months pregnant with our third child. And our daughter had died just hours earlier.
How do you rekindle connection with your spouse when the thing that brought you back to the same bed was the death of your child?
I bounced between our bed and the guest bed throughout that entire pregnancy. Restless legs, insomnia, and grief often kept me up at night. Once our youngest (another precious girl) finally arrived, the newborn chaos drove us back to what was familiar—separate beds.
Surviving…again.
Fighting and Thriving
“Surviving” is often set in contrast to “thriving.” And for a long time, we saw it that way too. Many times in our season of separate sleeping, there was a bitterness present despite a lack of regret. A longing for the ease of what came before. Grief shifted when our daughter passed—it changed shape. From anticipatory grief to actualized grief. And our marriage shifted, too.
We didn’t know it at the time, but our grief taught us two enduring truths—truths we clung to in the absence of ease or sleep.
We have to fight for each other. Whether in shared sleep spaces or separate. We have to fight for the sacred history we shared. Conflict means a chance for connection.
Thriving looks different in different life stages. Sometimes surviving is, in fact, thriving.
For two years, we fought the burnout. We tuned out the horror stories, the statistics, and the ominous headlines about medically complex families and broken marriages. But the real danger wasn’t the staircase that separated us—it was the failure to understand how the other person needed connection when nothing separated us anymore.
It was the feeling that after years of surviving we were too broken to thrive. It was believing the lie that our sacred history we had built couldn’t overcome a few stairs and a mountain of grief. It was the lie that God wasn’t big enough to carry us anymore.
In the year since our daughter passed, we’ve had to learn what it means to truly thrive in the aftermath of loss. Thriving again would take more than just returning to a shared bed.
It would take intention.
It would take grace.
It would take patience.
It would take mutual respect and a willingness to learn each other again.
We didn’t decide to come back to the same bed in hopes that it would fix anything. In fact, the decision to go back brought a lot of anxiety.
Would the baby be okay alone? Would she sleep? What if she doesn’t sleep and we are up all night?
I already spoiled it for you, but she definitely didn’t sleep most of the night and neither did we.
But we did it anyway. In the moments I was tempted to sneak back downstairs to the familiar, I chose to stay. And in the morning, the sunrise brought with it a breath of healing.
Hope in the Small Things
I’m not sure where this blog post has found you today. Maybe you’re still in the thick of things, feeling like you’re barely hanging on. Struggling to figure out what living out vows looks like when you spend more time together than apart. Maybe you’re in a renewal season and this brought back familiar memories—for better or worse. Maybe you’re someone who stuck around to learn about what love looks like beyond the typical expectations. Maybe you learned a little bit about not judging what you haven’t had to survive.
Whoever you are, wherever you are, I hope you’ve received a different perspective on healing. Sometimes it’s loud. Other times it’s a crib in a separate room and a shared bed for the first time in years. I’m not sure what healing looks like for you right now, but I do know this:
God is capable is redeeming even what the world doesn’t declare worth saving. And that redemption might look different than you ever expected.
God meets us in the middle of the night. He holds broken things together. He honors the smallest milestones—because He knows how big they really are.