Daddy Cool: 'I had parked outside our flat... and dozed off'

IT is a sad state when the thing you most look forward to on rousing yourself to full consciousness in the – early – morning is the very time you are unconscious again. Sleep deprivation has delivered me to that terrible, tragic territory.

I was going to re-phrase the above along the lines of when you get out of bed what you obsess about is crawling back in it, but that would have been bogus. The receptacles I employ for rushed restfulness might be the couch, my daughter's bed or, indeed, a crouched position beside it. My bed is no sanctuary. It has long since succumbed to the invasion of the body-batterers: wee people who kick, punch and cramp you without so much as opening, never mind batting, an eye.

I know the old sleep thing is the bane of parents' lives, but I feel a bigger bane than most. Though not all. I remember my late father telling me he was so out on his feet as my brother, sister and I refused to conform to any humane sleeping patterns that he would snatch some zzzs in my cot. I didn't believe he would go to the lengths of flunking out in the foetal position for the sake of some sanity.

I have now been sorely tempted to carry on a family tradition. Especially as my 18-month-old spends increasingly little time in his. But I don't think I would even have the energy to climb those bars come half past midnight ... or half one ... or quarter to three ... or whenever one or other or both of my weans jolt, scream, howl or merrily spring to life.

I took them for a run in the car yesterday. To get them to sleep. Next thing I remember my wife Sara was poking her head in the passenger window telling me it was time to get them in. They had dozed off, I had parked up outside our flat ... and dozed off myself.

So now you are thinking: "Ah, that could be one cause of their inability to sleep through a night on their own." We have thought of all possibilities why my four-and-a-half-year-old Sylvie has managed 13 times.

The breastfeeding on demand ... the singular failure (mine) to do any sleep training that involved letting them cry ... the giving in to bed-sharing. Yeah, yeah, I know I might be deserving of no sympathy over the fact that my relationship with sleep – the greatest love I have, according to my wife – has become strained and distant. But please afford me what the siren of slumber does not.

Come back and let me feel your warmth again, for a six, seven, eight-hour stretch, I beg of her. "Not with your weans," she comes to me in the middle, start and end, of the night, and cackles. And cackles. And cackles. And cackles.

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on June 12, 2011