It is more than likely that I will spend pretty much the rest of my life debating whether Lily is such a patient, generous soul because I was in yoga practicing vasisthasana right up to the day before she was born or because, as the second child, she is doomed to my “been there, done that” approach to parenthood.
This is not, all joking aside, to say that I in any way fail to appreciate what a special human being she is. Or that I love her any less than I love Jake. Or, for that matter, that, when I’m being honest with myself, I give her any less attention than I gave Jake during his infancy.
It’s just that, now that I’m doing it for the second time, I’m a whole lot smarter about choosing what kind of attention I give her.
I mean, really, could six-month-old Jake truly not stand to be left alone to entertain himself for just a few minutes? Probably, but I would have pulled my hair out before continuing to wash it had he screamed the way Lily has on occasion when I have taken a shower that did not fall during her nap time. To my credit, I carefully open the shower door every few minutes to show her we are in the same room. Though I’m pretty sure the message is lost the second I close the door again.
So, too, Mike asked me the other day how we knew Jake needed his bottles warmed. Did I ever offer him the room temp bottle I so handily pull out of the diaper bag for Lily now that she is far too interested in new surroundings to nurse anywhere other than in a hermetically sealed room? I am embarrassed for myself, but I have a strong suspicion that all those times we plopped a cold bottle in a cup of hot coffee at rest stops and counted ourselves clever for this less than adequate bottle warming solution may not have been strictly necessary.
The other night, however, I gained some much needed reassurance that I am not squelching the needs of my second born simply because I’m too lazy to expend all the needless energy I wasted on my first.
On this night, I found myself queasily reduced to a little sleep training. And, I discovered, I was far more sympathetic to Lily’s cries than I ever was to Jake’s.
The Sleep Training Dilemma
Not unlike in other areas of life, we all — especially first-time parents — have that one area of child rearing where our instincts fail us. Where we find ourselves unable to pooh pooh the experts. Where we will not be moved — as I was a month before capitulating to sleep training for Jake — to toss What to Expect During the First Year into the recycling bin in a pique of I would never do that to my child! frustration and uncertainty.
(Note to my sister, who was kind enough to buy me that copy of What to Expect During the First Year as a gift: I discovered a pristine copy sitting on the daybed in the office a month or so after Lily was born and, upon querying Mike, discovered that he saved it from the recycling bin lo, those two-and-a-half years ago and hid it from me and my hormones. I can even see it right now, still safe and unrecycled, from my desk.)
For me, the subject of much angst-y, I-will-destroy-my-child-if-I-make-the-wrong-decision handwringing was sleep training.
To be more specific, it was sleep training at five months of age. Because, whether I called it sleep training or not, the way I dutifully followed the instructions of the lactation consultant who told us to awaken infant Jake every two-and-a-half hours during the day so he’d be full enough to sleep through most of the night was, call it what you will, sleep training. And the middle-of-the-night lazy decision to bring ten-month-old Jake into bed with me instead of spending my sleep hours walking him out of consciousness when his first ear infection hit was another sleep training decision. The kind that translates to deciding not to do it because it’s just too much trouble.
When Jake was five months old, however, he did one of those five-month-old turnarounds that left us scrambling and desperate for an explanation. Any explanation. Except the obvious one that, right around five months of age, infants start to, you know, develop minds of their own. And those minds might think, “Hey, I dig it when my mom holds me as I sleep and I’m going to tell her that next time I wake up flat on my back on this hard, cold co-sleeper mattress.”
And, so, our child who had so magically awakened just once a night from his very first nights, suddenly began awakening every two hours. All night. This may not sound terrible to you if you are not at this moment being awakened for the third time in the middle of the night. But it is.
It is, in fact, even worse when feeding your child in the middle of the night requires getting out of bed and warming up formula. Which was, at the time, a huge improvement over the first four months of Jake’s life, when feeding my child in the middle of the night required getting out of bed, warming up formula, putting it into a little bottle with tubes attached, taping those tubes to my nipples, queuing up the TiVo for a long feeding session, and, finally, letting my poor starving child eat.
But whichever way I did it — and even now, when a midnight feeding means nothing more onerous than sitting up and proffering a breast — it is not something even a parent wishes to do more than once a night. Even a first-time parent.
And so, after about a week (or was it, quite possibly, less?) of Jake’s every-two-hours nightly meet-and-greets, I reluctantly went online to find something that would tell me it was okay to sleep train.
What I found was one of those really useful discussion boards where you are sure to encounter other parents obsessing in much the same way you are. I found parents who expressed their deep guilt about sleep training and their even deeper gratitude that they did it. Parents who refused to bow their heads in shame at their decision to sleep train. Parents who swore that “Ferber-izing” — a more graduated less apparently cruel form of sleep training — was as kind and gentle as could be.
And so I did it.
I have some dim recollections of standing in the next room banging my forehead against the door jamb as Jake screamed, counting the seconds until I could run into the room and reassure him before retreating for another round of letting him “teach himself to go to sleep.” I recall the second of exactly two fights Mike and I had during our first year of parenthood over Mike deciding to sleep train Jake down to a nap when I was certain that what Jake needed wasn’t in fact a nap but for his father to take him out of the exersaucer and play with him while Mommy finished up a work project.
Sadly, what I do not remember is the night Jake actually responded to all this sleep training and slept through the night. Instead, my mind has chosen to retain a memory of when it all fell apart a few months later.
And so, in the end, I file Sleep Training Jake away in the drawer of a parent doing what it takes to keep her sane. I tell anyone who tries to engage me on the sleep training question — or, really, any of the big parenting debates — that I truly believe whatever choice a parent makes is really just what she needs to survive. That any choice will be fine for her child. As long as her child’s parent is sane and functioning and not continuing to toss and turn during the times she could actually be sleeping instead of trying to decide whether to sleep train.
And then, right before hitting six months, Lily starts begging for some sleep training of her own. And suddenly I’m not so “oh, whatever decision you make is fine” about it at all.
Two Wacky Nights (of Sleep Training)
It wasn’t that I set out to revisit Ferber and those nights of pacing while waiting for one minute to pass (enter room, reassure child you love her but do not pick her up, exit room); two minutes to pass (enter room, reassure child you love her but do not pick her up, exit room); five of the longest minutes of your life to pass (please, please, please cry yourself to sleep so I don’t have to keep going through this). It just sort of felt like I had no choice.
Generally, Lily goes right to sleep at either 7:15 or, if she feels like joining the rest of us for dinner, 8:15. If I’m not in my room nursing her by 8:30 she has been known to give me a well deserved piece of her mind.
But on this particular night, she settled in to nurse, drifted off, then did that infuriating thing where she rubs her eyes so hard she pops them wide open and herself wide awake.
“Shh,” I said, all maternal like. I cradled her reassuringly.
She bucked and looked toward the bedroom door in the hopes that it was open and there was something more interesting going on for her to watch in the hall.
“Lily,” I said firmly.
She bucked just as firmly back.
I put her down. She looked at me expectantly.
“It’s time to go to sleep,” I said. It was, in fact, nearly nine o’clock. I can’t really remember, but I’m pretty sure Jake was in bed by nine o’clock at this age.
Lily disagreed.
What was there left for me to do? I plopped her in her co-sleeper and went into the next room to work on the computer.
For quite a while all I heard was Lily chattering to herself, much as she does in the middle of the night when she wakes up and I turn my back to her. At those times, she is quite adept at talking herself back to sleep.
Not so this night. Instead, she began to cry.
I went in, did the comfort thing. She cried harder.
Back to the office I went. I did not count minutes. I did not, I should be ashamed to admit, obsess either. It wasn’t too hard to read emails because, to her detriment, Lily doesn’t tend to cry really loudly unless something is making her very angry. This whole sleep training thing wasn’t making her angry so much as confused.
And that, of course, is what finally got to me.
It’s not like Lily is up all night complaining about not being held. I can ignore her at 1:30 a.m. and she goes back to sleep. So, I asked myself, does she really need sleep training? Am I being the most ungrateful parent-who-sleeps ever? Do I deserve this poor, emotionally neglected second child?
As these thoughts overwhelmed me, I must have blacked out. Because the next thing I remember is cradling her in my arms and feeling like my heart was caught in a waffle iron at the sight of her lashes clumped together with tears.
And I’ll tell you what. It felt great to rock my baby to sleep, even though that’s the number one thing you’re not supposed to do if you want to teach your child to go to sleep by herself. But, hey, I told myself during our repeat performance the following night, she knows how to go to sleep by herself. She just chooses not to do it right now.
I’m happy to say I exhausted Lily so thoroughly over the weekend that she fell right back into her old, preferable habits. And that when I ignored her cries at 1:30 this morning (my cut-off for middle-of-the-night feeding being 3 a.m.) she slept until 6.
In other words, I may one day just have a child who sleep through the night. In her own crib. In a room other than mine.
And, yes, M, it looks like I will be able to give you the co-sleeper before you give birth in December.
My Consequent Sleep Training Advice
Here’s what nearly three years of sleep training and dithering about sleep training and not sleeping have taught me:
It doesn’t really matter what I do.
Yes, it’s easy for me to say this because my kids are generally pretty decent sleepers. Probably because Mike and I capitulate to our own sleep needs before forcing our children to do without us. Most mornings find Mike in Jake’s bed (especially when we hear the thump, thump, thump of his bare feet on the floorboards in the morning as he comes searching for the father he fully expects to find in bed with him, since that’s where his father is ninety percent of the time at five in the morning). Most nights find me still interrupting my sleep with a round of nursing.
So, yes, it is convenient to tell myself that some good, firm sleep training won’t make a difference. Because if I believe it will, I will have to decide whether it is worth it.
But I have found far more peace trusting in my own instincts and letting my children guide me. If I can live with their habits, then why should I try to change them?
Because, friends tell me, one day I won’t be able to live with those habits. One day five or ten years from now I will really, really, really want to spend a whole night sleeping, uninterrupted, in my own bed next to my own husband. And I will have no one to blame for the impossibility of this modest desire but myself.
But, see, I can always do the sleep training thing then. Maybe it will be more difficult. But probably not, since I will want it more.
In other words, there is so much to deal with in the present moment that I feel it is often better to deal with the future when it happens.
I’m not saying we should abdicate all responsibility. Stop saving for college. Let our children sit up all night watching Bob the Builder while eating cheese crackers.
But I do believe that we often think things must be done now — everything must be done now — when that’s not really the case.
Part of living in a culture of blackberries and Twitter and instant everything is rushing forward without any sense of priority. Why prioritize when you can do everything in a second or two and not think about it again? Or, okay, think about it in two seconds and then take care of it again. And, oh, yeah, just do a quick Facebook post. And send a text message. And …
We’re always preparing, as if all this preparation will make our lives easier down the road. But it never does because when we finally get to the time we were preparing for we start preparing for something else even further down the road. It is, by definition, endless.
Face it. You do not know what your children will be like in a year or two or five. You do not know what your career will be like or your life or the rosemary bush you planted in the backyard. Preparing for what you think they will be like is just another way of fooling yourself into thinking you are in control.
This is parenting we are talking about. You are not in control, as much as you might want to be.
So maybe, just maybe, we should give our children more credit, more space, more of a chance to follow their own habits until they cross the line to something no one should have to live with. Maybe I can cradle Lily as she is going to sleep in the evenings. Until she starts demanding that I cradle her every two hours all night. Maybe Mike can hop into bed with Jake when Jake has nightmares. And be certain that by the time Jake hits puberty this will no longer be an option.
Maybe, in other words, the trick lies in figuring out what is really going on right now and what is a fear of the future superimposed on the now by our overactive minds.
And, best of all, maybe when we find that focus on the now, let the future and thoughts of control and, yes, all the fears, go, we will discover an even sweeter joy in being with our heartwarmingly imperfect, enthusiastically oddball, beautiful, fun, eye-opening children.
Meditation, Baby
There is, quite simply, no better way to learn how to be in the moment than meditation. Asanas offer too many opportunities for motion, for reaching toward a future version of the pose, for striving toward perfection. Pranayama cleanses the body but can easily bypass the mind.
Meditation, however, brooks no cheating. Either you do it or you don’t. Either you give up in frustration when your mind skips ahead to the rest of your day — as it most certainly will because that’s part of the practice — or you calmly stop, return to where you are sitting, and see how long you can hold your mind at bay this time.
Even if just for a few precious seconds you gain a sense of clarity and rightness, it is a feeling you will carry with you for the rest of the day. And, yes, to the middle of the night when you are awakened by the pitter patter of little (or not so little) feet.