About Me
Hi, I’m Jen.
I want to tell you something I found really hard to say out loud for a long time.
When my first baby did not sleep, I used to count down the minutes until she was asleep again. I was angry. Resentful. I loved her endlessly, but I could not enjoy all the time I spent with her, all the sweet moments that I should have been taking in because I was too tired. I kept asking myself whether I was cut out for this. Not whether I loved her but whether I was built to be a mum.
That is notsomething you say at a baby group.
I wanted to be a calm, happy mum. I thought motherhood was going to feel easy and joyful, that I would just enjoy watching my children and be present with them. What I did not account for was everything else. The noise. The chaos. The never stopping. The mental load. I was bouncing between this is the best thing I have ever done and ‘oh my god, what have I done?’. I was so tired that I couldn't recognise myself.
I didn't know I had ADHD until I was already deep in motherhood. It was only when I started seeing things on social media that I began to investigate, and suddenly everything started to make sense. The reason the unpredictability felt unbearable. The reason I could not regulate without knowing what was coming. Why every evening I had to choose between spending time with my husband or going to bed early to try and protect myself from whatever the night might bring. Most nights I chose bed. I was so frightened of the unknown that I stopped being present entirely.
I was disappearing and working on my baby's sleep changed that.
Not because everything became perfect. But because having a routine gave my brain something to follow. I knew when nap time was. I knew when my day would end. I could go to the gym and know my kids would still be sleeping when I got back. I could just hold it together until I got that pocket of quiet in my day, and in that quiet I could reset and start again.
I stopped counting down the minutes until they were asleep and I started missing them when they went to bed at night.
When I realised that sleep was the thing making all of that possible, I also realised nobody was talking about it that way; not just about getting your baby to sleep, about what it does for you. About what it means for a mum with an ADHD brain that genuinely cannot cope without those moments to stop. Because an ADHD brain already cannot stop overthinking, cannot stop overanalysing and when it doesn’t get rest on top of that, it is truly destabilising.
That is the gap I built Siesta to fill. Infant sleep support that gets your baby sleeping and a plan designed so that you, as the mum who has to follow it, can do that when your brain is running on nothing.
I am an OCN certified infant sleep consultant, currently training as an ADHD coach, and mum to two little girls.
I took a break from my business for a while after my diagnosis because it all felt too much. I needed to get to know myself again. I spent that time with my daughters, truly enjoying them, and slowly forgiving my earlier self for the times I could not, because I did not yet understand that ADHD combined with sleep deprivation and no predictability made it almost impossible to be the mum I wanted to be.
It was during that time that I started noticing nobody was talking about what sleepless nights and unpredictable days do to a mum with ADHD. Not in any real way. Not in a way that felt like support rather than just more information to process. I knew because I had needed that support and could not find it. So I came back to Siesta to build it.
If you have read this and recognised yourself in any part of it, you are exactly who I built this for.