According to many self-help experts, helping others is an important part of any personal growth spurt, no matter who you are, or how self-actualized you may feel at any given moment. “The first thing you should do in the morning,” said one such expert during his book tour, “is wake up ready to help someone.” If you’re a parent, that’s an easy one.

The first words I heard this morning were “My bed is wet, Mama.” My daughter Sophie was standing next to the bed; it was early, or late, depending on your habits. It was 3:00 AM, which brings me to something I’ve never understood: Why call it AM when there’s nothing remotely morning-like about three o’clock?

I began the ritual of stripping Sophie out of her wet pajamas, tucking her shivering little body into the warm spot I’d made in my bed. I was prepared; her bed was fitted with two sets of sheets separated by a waterproof mattress cover, so that a fresh layer of bedding was waiting for Sophie as soon as I’d peeled away the wet stuff. If it sounds as though I like to keep things simple enough to do them in my sleep, it’s because I hope someday to get some of the uninterrupted kind.

Going in, I knew that the famed sleep deprivation of parenthood was going to be the thing that dogged me the most. I barely logged enough hours when I was single, and so I prepared myself for the kind of suffering that accompanies surrendering one’s last vice. One priority or another has claimed coffee and cocktails, the orgies of fat and cholesterol that used to define dinner every night, and I shouldered these losses with a certain amount of sport. But I knew that, in particular, I was going to grieve the loss of sleeping in late, especially when the temperatures and snows started to fall. For a time it seemed that there would never be enough sleep, and there were a few times when I began to genuinely come undone because of it.

I clung to any philosophy, any ideology, that urged me to press on through the exhaustion despite the dizzying mood swings I was enduring. Most of the time, there simply was no other option. Unable to focus or retain information, I turned to meditation, affirmations, exercise, anything that would burn off the fog, and for the most part, they served me through the worst of it. I could support forgoing sleep as an act of love, and when I considered that I had lost sleep over less deserving things—money or men, a party I’d missed—it didn’t hurt as much.

I trusted that helping someone who wasn’t even capable of knowing she was being helped had to, in a small and profound way, help me too.

I once saw a Zen monk point to his heart and say, “Suffering ends here.” I think understanding the relationship between love and sacrifice is how I made it through the notorious sleepless months of infancy without resorting to gratuitous online shoe shopping or writing threatening emails to my spouse during the day.

Months into Sophie’s infancy, after I had returned to a schedule that was closer to normal, I couldn’t sleep anymore; a lifetime first. I also couldn’t do things like remember my debit card PIN, or the directions to places I had been before. I couldn’t blame Sophie; at eight months of age she’d been sleeping through the night for half the year. The headaches and fatigue were unbearable, but the insomnia kept me up for 48-hour stretches without so much as a wink of sleep. “Maybe I’m sleeping and I just don’t know it,” I told my husband one night at dinner. He looked bewildered. “Maybe I’m sleeping right now,” I said. When he swore we were both awake, I said, “You must be right. If I were dreaming this, you would have volunteered to do the dishes. In a pink tutu.”

Four grueling months later, I learned I had a thyroid condition, and with treatment, returned again to a version of normalcy, just in time for three relocations and multiple bouts of wintertime illnesses to upend every molecule of peace we had assembled and re-assembled during the course of a year and change.

That’s life for you: A two steps forward, one step back kind of dance that, like a certain advertising prop keeps going and going—if we’re lucky. And it’s that dance, that ever-changing dance, that had me waking up each day helping someone without expecting a reward for it. I can’t measure it, can’t see it, can’t explain it, but I know I’m better for it.

In the dark of that three “AM,” with Sophie lying in the warmth of my bed, I said, “I’ll be right back to get you after I change your bedding.” But when I returned just a few minutes later, she was snoozing comfortably next to her dad, lying in a position identical to his, which, along with demanding to know who’s on the phone the second I answer it, made me wonder what other sorts of peccadilloes were hiding in her DNA.

Since it’s no picnic sleeping next to the child who performs gymnastics in her sleep, I trudged back to her twin bed, where I slept under Dora the Explorer sheets until a time that was decidedly more AM.  Again, Sophie stood at the side of the bed, this time with a different concern.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“He probably left for work,” I said, checking the time: 5:30. “Were you two Amish in another life?”

She smiled, poked at my face, and gave me what I hope was a compliment. “You smell like golden,” she said.

“Thank you,” I mumbled, closing my eyes, dozing off again. Suffering ended there, for a few minutes.

“Oh, and Mama?” she put her hand on my shoulder. “Your bed is wet.”