MY colleague yawned widely, then said 'I'm just so tired!'

I withered him with my glare.

As a child-free individual, complaining about exhaustion to a severely sleep deprived mum won't get you much sympathy.

You can sleep uninterrupted all night. Alone. Without someone hanging off a nipple, poking you in the face, or yelling 'are you awake yet?' at 6am (on a good day).

There's a reason that sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture; it is torture.

I'm not talking 'oh I only had five hours sleep last night.'

Five hours is luxury.

I'm talking the kind of exhaustion where you've had months of interrupted nights, with no longer than two, three, four (if you're lucky) hours passing before being awoken again.

The kind of exhaustion that makes you forget everything – why you walked into a room, where you put just about anything, and any essential dates, names, events (there's a reason my girl's birth dates form part of my tattoos).

The kind that makes you walk into doorframes, missing the doorway entirely, or bump your car into a kerb, bursting a tyre (these things happened to me and my partner last week).

It's so hard. We are 'blessed' with lively children; this means they are up with the birds and are fully charged at hideous-o-clock, belying the fact the baby has already been up half the night.

I'm too tired to suggest any solutions.

I'm too tired to think of any witty anecdotes or analyse different sleep techniques.

I'm just exhausted, and don't even like coffee.

So if you are in the fug of sleep deprivation too – at least we are not alone.

And it will pass, it will become a memory and we will look back from empty houses, our children grown, as much sleep as we could wish for, and we will long for just one more sleepless night with our beautiful babies.