I startle as he nudges me awake. It is pitch black in the room; the sun, sensibly, is still snoozing somewhere in the east. It takes a minute to adjust. Why is Tom waking me up in the dark? “It’s your turn, Jess,” he says, his tone becoming exasperated. I try to rouse myself and hear the gentle grunts rising from the basket by my bed. It is 4.30am on a cold December morning and my son Danny is six weeks old.

Danny is my second child, so the painfully sleep-deprived three months that follow his arrival should not be as much of a shock as when I had my first son. My expectations for a good night’s sleep, a good time and being the perfect 10 are already pretty low. But the darkness of the days and the cold air that engulfs my home in the early hours damn me once again to the desperation of being a new mum.

Harry, my eldest, was born in the springtime. I don’t want to pretend that the first eight weeks were all daffodils, little lambs and Cadbury’s Caramel bunny dreaminess. But waking at 4.30am each day is far more bearable when the birds are rising with you, and the sun’s appearance means you can con yourself into thinking it is perfectly reasonable to be awake before even John Humphrys starts being infuriating. By 6am in the springtime I could have got myself and the baby dressed and put him in the buggy to go for a walk, to break up the long morning. The eternal days of new parenthood could be spent in the park, the baby on a blanket while I chatted with friends in the same rocky boat.

My winter baby offers no such whimsy. This day, like every day, opens with bitter negotiations about whose turn it is to get up. “I’ve been up all night with him,” I plead, in the hope it will mean I am spared the next three hours in a cold, dark living room. I lose the battle – my husband sees through my lies, insisting that he has been up and I was in fact asleep all night (by which he means “new-parent all night” – a four-hour stretch). Because it is so dark I cannot see the clothes we will need to keep warm. I want to punish everyone around me, so I switch on a lamp and bang around to cause maximum disruption, which makes me hate myself.

I take the baby off my husband’s chest, where he has attempted to settle him while I flounce. It’s hard to find the boy among the blankets. Together, we pace downstairs to the cold of the front room. He is old enough to raise his head as I carry him, looking at me expectantly. We must not wake his brother. Three-year-old Harry would be like napalm to our routine. We are pre-Netflix and TV on demand; how would I distract them both until the TV programmes start?

In the front room, I flick on the Christmas lights and set them to dance and pulse. Danny is transfixed and I watch his little face light up in delight, his eyes reflecting flecks of red, green and white. I am never annoyed with him, not to his face at least. He cannot be blamed for daylight saving. Together, we sit on the sofa and wait for it to absorb our body heat. The tiny space we fill in this room glows with heat, but we must stay in this spot because we cannot puncture the bubble and let in the cold air. In our grove, with our blankets, we are vacuum-sealed. It takes planning. If you forget to put everything you need, like the remote control, or the baby’s bottle, within reach and, God forbid, have to get up and fetch it, you are done for! You will pierce the balloon, breach the walls and the chill will rush in.

Here we sit, as the darkness stretches out in front of us, for three more hours. Then we can pretend it never happened and get dressed, eat breakfast, take Harry to nursery, chit-chat with people as we go, as if we are just living a normal winter’s day.

I hold Danny close to my chest, so he is staring at the fairy lights, and bounce him up and down in the desperate hope he will go to sleep. I flick on the TV, at an almost inaudible volume, and watch the BBC’s Stephen Sackur talking to some intellectual about a faraway dispute. I am basically studying foreign affairs for three hours every day. By now I should be Henry Kissinger, but in fact I struggle to negotiate between Ready Brek or toast.

At six o’clock, the whir and click of the central heating is followed by the clanking of the pipes as the house stretches out its limbs for the morning. It’s still dark outside, it’s still not OK that I am awake, in this bleak midwinter, me and the frosty wind making moan together, but by now I have come to terms with it. In the winter months of 2008 I barely function but I am sure of one thing – I have given this baby my heart. Actually, two things – I will never again make the mistake of becoming pregnant in late January.

• Jess Phillips is MP for Birmingham Yardley.