Surviving Sleep Deprivation and Finding Purpose with Christine Brown

In this podcast episode, I interview Christine Brown, a certified child sleep consultant and founder of Bella Luna Family. Christine shares her personal journey of how she became interested in sleep and ultimately founded her business. She recounts the difficult middle she experienced as a working mother of twins who were not sleeping well, and how she ultimately sleep trained them and became passionate about helping other families. Christine also discusses her experience working in a high-pressure corporate environment and the challenges of balancing her full-time job, growing her business, and raising her children. She shares how she prayed for a layoff and ultimately got one, which allowed her to focus on her business full time. We also discuss the importance of going through the middle moments in life and the personal growth that can come from them.

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Bella Luna Family

@bellalunafamily

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Transcript

[0:00:06] (Lacey): Welcome to Sharing the Middle, where recovering perfectionists overachievers and anyone in the middle of a struggle come together to learn to embrace the messy middles of life. I’m Lacey, your friend in the middle and guide whose claim to fame this week is just making it because showing.

[0:00:21] (Lacey): Up is all we need to do sometimes.

[0:00:23] (Lacey): Today I am joined by Chris Teen Brown. She’s a mom to twin boys who she jokes tried to kill her from her sleep deprivation when they were six months old. This experience ignited an obsession with sleep and a passion to help families. Christine became a certified child sleep consultant in early 2016 and founded Belaluna Family, a parent consulting company where they specialize in helping parents with the most challenging aspects of parenting, including child sleep, child behavior and potty training.

[0:00:57] (Lacey): Christine and her team can be found at all social channels at Belaluna family and we’ve got links in the show notes. Let’s dive right in.

[0:01:11] (Lacey): Christine Brown with me. Welcome, Christine.

[0:01:14] (Christine): Thank you for having me.

[0:01:15] (Lacey): Yay. I’m a process person, so Christine and I had to reschedule a bunch of different times because our kids kept getting sick and that kind of stuff. So to be able to see you now and be here is awesome.

[0:01:28] (Christine): I’m thrilled and so excited to be here. And I saw it pop up on the calendar and I was like, yeah, it’s finally happening.

[0:01:33] (Lacey): It’s happening. Yes. Well, I like to start with my initial question of when you first heard of the middle or started to look into this, what kind of first popped in the mind? I find people tend to have a visceral this is what the middle is reaction.

[0:01:50] (Christine): Yeah. So when I think of the middle, I think of the kind of mess that happens. Right. So sometimes you’re in the middle of it. That’s what I think of that expression. Right. And going through some challenges and some struggles. And it’s the stuff, ultimately, that I think we come to learn that we had to go through that in order to appreciate the good stuff. But it’s not always so easy to see that when you are in the middle.

[0:02:17] (Lacey): 100% agree. So would it be fair to say that you kind of have a little bit more of a negative feeling towards the middle?

[0:02:25] (Christine): I think I probably would have when I was younger, but now that I’m older, I don’t want to say that now that I’m more mature, I recognize that the middle is when I’m in it, I’m like, this is tough, but I know it’s going to get better. And I think you have to go through those middle moments for a while in order to have that perspective.

[0:02:45] (Lacey): Was there any? And now I’m just being nosy because this is all about figuring out ways to embrace the middle because I suck at the middle, like I want to get to the end and that kind of stuff. So I’m just curious, was there anything that triggered that for you? Or was it just a little over time realizing that?

[0:03:03] (Christine): I think just on my personal development journey, just kind of reading, because I think when I was younger, I always just like, I’m just supposed to be happy all the time, and life is just supposed to be easy. And I would be like, what’s wrong with me that I’m not happy all the time? Right. And when I look at that and nobody’s happy all the time, I think about that with my kids when they’re having big emotions, right?

[0:03:25] (Lacey): Yes.

[0:03:26] (Christine): They’re having a really hard time right now, and it’s okay for them to have that hard time. Right. And so through personal development work, I came to see, oh, that middle is okay. It’s hard while we’re there, but it will get better. Yeah, definitely. Personal development work.

[0:03:41] (Lacey): Absolutely. And I think Motherhood also really has been helping me with that a lot, too. So to hear you say to see my kids go through it absolutely, I agree. I usually like to ask people to share a middle moment for us to kind of talk through. And you mentioned you kind of have two. What were you thinking about here?

[0:03:59] (Christine): So these are both tied to Motherhood.

[0:04:02] (Lacey): Okay.

[0:04:02] (Christine): I used to work for a Fortune 50 company. I worked for them. It was a technology company. And I always felt I think the expression is round peg, square hole. So I always felt like I was good at what I did, but I never really felt like 100% belonged, and it never filled me up. I had my twins, who are now eight years old, but at week 14, I called my boss and I said, hey, Tom, I think it’s going to be difficult for me to come back full time. I’d like to come back part time.

[0:04:33] (Christine): And I was in the thick of it. I was sleep deprived, ridiculously sleep deprived.

[0:04:38] (Lacey): Yes. I cannot even imagine.

[0:04:40] (Christine): And it was wild, but it was life altering to go through that experience. And so he said, you’ll either come back full time or no time, so which one would you want to do? And so that was a real middle moment for me, because then at that point, I was like, I’m going to have to figure this out. And so I went back to work full time. I ultimately ended up teaching my kiddos to be healthy sleepers, which created me starting my business, ultimately a little bit later.

[0:05:08] (Christine): It was about a year later. So that middle for me was tough, though, because I was trying to work in this corporate, really high pressure corporate environment and have infant twins. And I worked some of the time from home, but a lot of the time I was having to go into the office, and it was downright dangerous for me to be driving with the level of sleep deprecation I had. I used to sit at stop signs waiting for them to turn green.

[0:05:37] (Christine): My neighbor was like honking behind me. I have twins. And so that middle part for me was really challenging and I ended up teaching, like I mentioned, the babies to be healthy sleepers and that ignited a passion for helping families and also an obsession with sleep. And ultimately that journey through the middle and going through all of that led me to start my certification to become a child sleep consultant, which ultimately changed my career trajectory. I knew when he told me I had to come back full time, I was like, I’m going to need to find another way to do this because this is just not going to work for me.

[0:06:13] (Lacey): You know what I find the most interesting? Well, there’s a belt of million questions that I have now, but I think is the most interesting to me is because you didn’t have a middle option, right? It was either this or this. There was no flexibility in between. You were forced to go through a middle. I joke that the middle is very meta, but it is interesting to me that middle ground didn’t exist and that’s what really pushed you. I also personally am very passionate about we expect women to come back to work and be the same person that they were before and they’re not. They have physically gone through a life changing event and then it’s like, hey, welcome back. And it just makes no sense to me. I am curious now.

[0:06:53] (Lacey): So this was eight years ago and we’ll come back because I’ve got more questions about sleep and I know you said you have another one. Now that I feel like we are seeing more of this flexibility emerge and that kind of thing. What are your thoughts on that? Do you still think you would have ended up in the same place? I don’t want you to have to play the what if game, but I think as someone who was essentially pushed out of the corporate world to see kind of this reckoning with COVID and I think organizations are realizing that we can’t keep pushing mothers that way.

[0:07:22] (Lacey): I just would love to hear your thoughts.

[0:07:23] (Christine): Yeah. So I did have some flexibility even before the pandemic stuff. So the company that I was working for was fairly progressive on their work from home policies. So I did have a little bit more flexibility than probably other mothers had, especially that had to go back into the office full time. But it was still really tough to navigate. And that middle part too. Also I decided to become a sleep consultant and so then I had toddler twins, I was working full time in a high pressure job and I was going to school at night and so it was tough to navigate it all, but I knew that I was doing it for the long term goal. I do still think I would have left corporate no matter what, because I like to call myself multipassionate. But I had left that company before and I actually went and worked in the beauty business. I sold cosmetics into the spa industry, which was a total Pivot in itself, right? So I think I was always just looking for what was going to light me up and what was going to give me that fire, and I was helping people in a way that felt meaningful.

[0:08:30] (Lacey): Multipassionate is a term that I just recently learned in the past few months, and it describes me to a T as well. And I have just now started to accept that, oh, maybe I’m not meant to be in a corporate world. I do love all of these different things. I want to be able to do all these different things. So I relate so hard to that idea of, like, well, I could be good at this, I could be good at this, and I want to do with it.

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[0:09:49] (Lacey): Release your inner goddess today.

[0:09:53] (Lacey): So let’s go back to sleep because I have two trains of thoughts, so I’m going to say them both so I don’t forget them both. One, what made you interested in sleep? Kind of that area, but also how did you take a very difficult situation like not sleeping? Because I’ll be honest, both of my kids were pretty good sleepers, but I’m a crazy. I will research the heck out of something and then we’re going to have a plan and stick to it. So we were able I feel like we did that. And people have some opinions about sleep, sleeping children and whatnot, but how you took that tough time and said, I want to solve this problem for other people. Let’s just start with why you were interested in sleep.

[0:10:35] (Christine): I ended up having to sleep train my twins and you’re right. Sleep and sleep training. It’s like right up there with religion and politics right oh, my gosh. Definitely divisive. So I sleep trained my twins, and I think I’m like you in that I read the entire internet, right? And we were sleep training dropouts. So we tried one night, and I remember our pediatrician said, your babies are no longer hungry anymore. The fact that they’re up eating like four times a night is not the real thing that needs to be happening. And so I was like, Tonight’s the night to my husband at like 02:00 in the morning. And he’s like, but they’re starving to dog. And I remember, you know how sometimes you have like, whisper fights and you’re.

[0:11:17] (Lacey): Like, yes, no, that’s not it.

[0:11:19] (Christine): We were actually literally yelling at each other in the nursery in the middle of the night.

[0:11:23] (Lacey): The kids are awake anyway, so who cares?

[0:11:26] (Christine): I tried to get them to resettle without it. And he was just like, you can’t do it. And so I remember sitting there, this is another kind of moment, sitting there going, I’m going to divorce this buffoon the minute I can do this by myself. Right, because you’re so sleep deprived.

[0:11:43] (Lacey): And in that moment, it’s just, what can I solve? And that’s going to solve something.

[0:11:46] (Christine): At some point, I’m going to take him out of the picture. So we ended up I went back, read more, kind of formulated a plan. I sent my husband, who’s six three and filled with wonderful rainbow colored marshmallows, to the basement to sleep with the earplugs in. And I ended up sleep training them. But it was hard and it was miserable, and I did it by myself, so I didn’t have support because my husband just couldn’t he’s just I’m a sensitive soul, too, but he is really, like especially with our babies, it’s really, really hard to hear.

[0:12:21] (Lacey): So hard to hear them cry.

[0:12:23] (Christine): Absolutely. So hard. I still want to soothe other people’s babies in the supermarket, right? So we ended up going through that. And then I had reached out to a friend that had twins, and I said, how did you teach your babies how to sleep? And he said, we hired a sleep consultant. And he sent me her information. I didn’t even know sleep consultants were a thing. And I read her website and I was like, and I’d always been looking for what my business was going to be. I’ve been entrepreneurial since I was young, and I just had never found the right fit.

[0:12:54] (Christine): And I was like, this is it. And I said to my husband, I’m like, I’m totally going to do this. And so that started that whole research project. And so taught them to be sleepers and then went on to help thousands of other families be sleepers, healthy sleepers, too.

[0:13:09] (Lacey): I’m going to share my own sleep story with my children. I did all this research, and my husband is a very scientific man, but every once in a while, is that like, softy, especially with our children. And so I explained to him, I’m like, okay, I’ve read about the Ferber method, and we’re not going to do the full Ferber method because that scares me. But this is what we’re going to do, and we’re going to do this. We’re going to do this. You didn’t do this. And he was like, all right. He just didn’t believe me that it was going to be hard until it was.

[0:13:37] (Lacey): And then my stubbornness of we have a plan meant it was going to happen. It was him being like, no, he’s crying. I’m like, he’s fine. We know he’s fine.

[0:13:51] (Christine): Attachment is the things that you build by doing the things you do every day and meeting being attuned to them most of the time. But as parents, we’re always going to miss cues sometimes. But the healthy attachment comes from all the things you do all the time, and after a missed cue, coming back and then loving again. And so sleep training does not affect attachment. I know I may get a lot of flack from that, but it really does not affect attachment. I wouldn’t do what I do if I thought that I was hurting children. Yeah.

[0:14:22] (Lacey): And I remember at the time, I was seeing a therapist, and she was like, have you ever met someone who doesn’t have the tools to sue themselves? And I was like, yeah, I have. And she’s like, you’re giving him the tools to sue themselves now? And that was also a big AHA moment of, oh, okay. Yeah. That’s also been one of the hardest parts of parenting in general, is not stepping in to fix a problem. And I feel like sleep is one of those places where it feels in the beginning.

[0:14:51] (Lacey): That’s one of those first steps. Definitely.

[0:14:54] (Christine): Well, and it’s hard because we start when they’re newborns and they’re really like, technically, they should be in the womb for an extra three months, but our bodies can’t handle that, right? So they come out and they’re underdeveloped, and they need so much to sleep in the beginning, and so we get caught in that pattern. And some babies transition well and learn to be healthy sleepers and others don’t. And it’s our job as parents, in my opinion, to teach them the skills that they need. And children that have sleep problems become adults that have sleep problems. And so it’s important, in my opinion, to start early.

[0:15:23] (Lacey): Yeah. I want to know more about the period that sounds, frankly, like hell. We had two small twins. You were working full time and going to school. Do you just look back now and think, how did I do it? Or do you have a play? Tell us how you did it.

[0:15:41] (Christine): My nanny was my best friend. I have a ton of family support. I’m so fortunate. My mother in law was constantly there. My mom was constantly there. We had a nanny, and she was literally my best friend, she used to fold their laundry. She used to pick up the house for me. She was just like she was I love her already. Yeah. I still get chills when I think about how much I love her. And it was like, all of that help was really what helped me and my husband. I have to give him 100% props because he’s really supportive of everything that I’ve wanted to do, because it doesn’t make his life easier when I go and want to do all of these things.

[0:16:19] (Lacey): Now, as a sleep consultant, are you developing plans? Are you going there to someone’s house in the night? I genuinely don’t even know what that looks like.

[0:16:29] (Christine): Yeah. So most of our work is virtual and kind of always has been virtual. Before the pandemic, we would sometimes go into people’s houses if they really wanted to meet face to face. But through Zoom, we can do almost everything. And so we families, we have them fill out, like, an intake form so we get a really good holistic view of what’s going on, and then we do a consultation over Zoom and really devise the plan together, pick a sleep training method, and then we put together a customized plan and then support them through the process. And so that’s like email, text messages, phone calls, and we keep a sleep log so we can give feedback back and forth.

[0:17:02] (Lacey): So it’s like having a coach. It is like, hey, this is what you’re going to go out there and do today. Yeah. Like I said, I feel very lucky that both of my kids really did sleep well once we figured it out, and that goes, would I love if my four year old would stay in his own bed all night? Yeah. But it doesn’t wake me up. And then I just wake up, and his face is next to mine. So it’s the worst things in the world, but I do know so many people who don’t have that, and then it just becomes a cycle.

[0:17:31] (Lacey): So that is a very valuable, very valuable service. You said that there’s kind of like a second pivot or a second middle. I want to hear about that too.

[0:17:41] (Christine): Yeah. So I graduated and started my sleep consulting business. And so then I had toddler, twins, a full time, high pressure job, and I was working nights and weekends with growing my business. And every day I would pray for a layoff. I would say, oh, my God, please let today be the day that I get a layoff and I get a package. Please let the day. And so it was actually October 31, 2016, and there was a buzz going around that there was going to be a layoff coming. And so I called my boss and I said, hey, I hear there’s a layoff coming.

[0:18:22] (Christine): Am I on the list? And he’s like, no, you’re not. And I was like, can you put me on the list. And so on November 1, I got laid off. And that was like such a middle moment of like, oh, my gosh, I was so excited. But then I was so scared to make that pivot to the next thing. And so I remember for a week just sitting there, stunned, my husband’s like, let’s do it. Let’s go all in on the business. But that was a really scary time and trying to figure out how are we going to make ends meet because I left a healthy salary to rely on just what I could produce.

[0:19:01] (Christine): But it’s been amazing because it’s been seven years, which is a huge achievement.

[0:19:07] (Lacey): Yeah, huge. I’m having a very similar experience in some ways and different in others. But I know that feeling of like, oh, maybe this was meant to be. And that’s kind of what it sounds like you were feeling. I’m going to put this it seems as if you’re a high achiever. Well, a little bit.

[0:19:28] (Christine): Just a little bit recovering perfectionist.

[0:19:32] (Lacey): Yes. Wholeheartedly here. Even though you ask to be laid off, did you still have negative feeling or was it hard to be laid off? I feel like that would be a very complicated feeling moment of like, but I’m high achiever and I am good at my job. All those things.

[0:19:49] (Christine): Yeah. I was scared out of my mind because you’re leaving the known to go into the unknown. And there was a part of me that was like, why can’t I just do this? Everyone else does this and they’re happy, right. And for me, it was really soul sucking and so I was scared, but I was also really excited at the same time. So there was a whole host of emotions and that impostor syndrome like, can I really be a business owner? Can I really be a successful business owner?

[0:20:22] (Christine): That was all coming up and I mean, honestly, sometimes that still comes up, right? And that’s working through that’s just working through kind of old programming. But it’s been the best thing that I’ve ever done and I would do it again.

[0:20:34] (Lacey): That’s awesome. Something you just said really hit me to my core of why can’t I do this? Everybody else does this. And I just really relate to that because I’m very Midwestern. I live in Ohio. And so it’s very much that you get a job, you work there for a long time type thing. And so I keep talking to women like you that it’s like, oh, you felt that way too. Of like, this doesn’t feel right. But I kept pushing and pushing and pushing and then I’m trying something new and it just feels so good.

[0:21:05] (Lacey): Thank you.

[0:21:06] (Christine): My parents thought I was crazy. They’re like, you’re leaving a stable job with a 401 to start your own business. But they were super supportive. But they think it’s also generational too.

[0:21:18] (Lacey): Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for sharing your story. Is there any other middle thoughts you have before I ask you about advice?

[0:21:28] (Christine): No, I think that’s a really good wrap up of my middles.

[0:21:32] (Lacey): Yeah.

[0:21:33] (Christine): Or at least two of them.

[0:21:34] (Lacey): At least two of them, I know because they’re all around us. So I love a solid takeaway or a piece of advice to give our listeners. And really, for me, because I love other people’s learned advice. So if you could either talk to yourself in the past or just a hard lesson you’ve learned, what would you say is your piece of advice?

[0:21:54] (Christine): I think it’s something we kind of already talked about at the beginning, and it’s if your head and heart are going to be at war, if you’re feeling like you’re not in the right place. And so always you have your head, but you have to follow your heart. And when you’re in the thick of it, just try to remember that you are going through a ton of learning and a ton of transition to bring you to that next place where you’ll be able to truly appreciate all of the fruits of that difficult labor that happened in the middle.

[0:22:23] (Lacey): I desperately needed to hear that today.

[0:22:25] (Christine): Thank you. You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

[0:22:30] (Lacey): Absolutely. Is there anything that you’d like to plug? Yeah.

[0:22:34] (Christine): So if anyone is having challenges with their child’s sleep, we also focus on behavior, which is another middle moment that we could have discussed. But I also am a parent coach, so help their families, their children’s behavior, and potty training. So if you’re struggling with any of those things, you’re being well rested and having tools in your toolbox to manage motherhood can make those middle moments much easier. And so if you need help, feel free to reach out. I have tons of free resources on my website, which is belalunafamily.com. And if you want to follow us on social, it’s at belalunafamily on all the most popular social channels.

[0:23:09] (Lacey): Awesome. Well, thank you so much.