What If Practicing Compassion Toward Yourself Means Not Being Compassionate Toward Your Child?

I did it for the first time last night.

Never, in Jake’s three-plus years or Lily’s one have I even considered letting my baby cry him or herself to sleep.

Last night I did.  I let Lily cry herself hoarse and shaking for a good forty-five minutes.

And you know what?  It didn’t work.

It’s My Sleep Too

There was a time when I had some dim faith in sleep training.

When Jake was five months old I made an angst-ridden decision to “Ferberize” him — letting him cry for one minute before going into the room and placing a reassuring hand on his back before leaving and letting him cry for an agonizing two minutes before letting him know Mommy is here and loves him and then letting him cry for five long minutes during which I would generally stand with my forehead pressed against the wall crying myself and . . .  thank goodness Jake rarely made it past five minutes.

And then we moved to Asheville and started letting him fall asleep in our bed and all that Ferberizing was for naught.

Since then, I’ve reasoned that it’s not the worst thing to have your child need to hold you in the middle of the night.  Besides, Lily hardly ever needs to sleep with me.   And anyhow when she’s two she’ll get a queen-sized bed like Jake and I can just go sleep with her when she starts crying.  At some point, I figure, neither kid will want a parent in their bed.  Maybe not until they’re fifteen or so, but I can wait.

This is all easy enough to say when Mike is the one who gets in Jake’s bed with every midnight “Moooommmmy!” while I piggishly stretch out across the length of our king-sized bed for an excellent night of rest because Lily hardly ever wakes me up.

It’s just that in the past week … she has.

At first I’d take her into bed with me and hold her close, growing angry only when she refused to let me, oh, lie down.  “I’m not sitting up with you all night,” I’d mutter through clenched teeth, even though I would have if I thought she had an ear infection.

But, really, it turned out, she just wanted a bottle.

I resisted this concept as well, still indoctrinated with all the “experts” who make me think that if I give my one-year-old a bottle in the middle of the night now I will spend the next eighteen years fixing her pancakes at three a.m.

But then it occurred to me that maybe Lily is hungry.  Maybe she is experiencing a growth spurt.  Maybe she needs a few more teeth so she can eat all the solids she needs because really who can be sustained on a mixture of milk and formula and maybe it will be frustrating waiting for that time but it won’t be forever.

In fact, Saturday night when she woke up I took her downstairs, gave her a bottle, and plopped her back into her crib wide awake.  And she went to sleep like a little angel.

So last night I figured I’d do the same thing.  Down the stairs carrying her like a football and telling her in a firm but not angry voice that I do not like this new trend.  Putting her on the floor while I make the bottle and then sitting across from her holding the bottle far from my body while I feed her just to make sure the whole experience does not become the sort of warm, fuzzy comfort that would prompt her to decide to make it a nightly ritual.

Into her crib she went with no complaint.  Into my bed I went.  And not ten minutes later the crying started.

I let it go for a while, having learned to distinguish between the, “Arrah!” of trying to get herself comfortable and the “Waaaaahhhaaaaahhhaaaaahhhaaa!” of, “Get in here right now!”

At which point, I grabbed her rather less gently than I had twenty minutes earlier and shoved some teething tablets in her mouth.  Once again, not a complaint from her.  In fact, so docilely did she slide off the pillow on which I had propped her for maximum tablet-shoving-in-mouth ease  that I figured she’d be right back to sleep as soon as I returned her to her crib.

Which she was for ten or fifteen minutes.

And then she began to holler.

It all gets a little fuzzy at this point, but I’m pretty sure I went to her one more time, held her up high, and took a good whiff of her nether regions just to make sure all those dates she ate earlier hadn’t done their job with lamentable timing.

Smelling nothing, I put Lily back in her crib, gave her what was calculated to feel like a caring rub on her back, walked out, and closed the door behind me.

The cry-it-out-method had begun.

The experiment lasted at least forty-five minutes.  During which time, I am weirdly proud to say, I came close to sleep.  Or at least the kind of resting your body that you think might make it possible for you to make it through the coming day without pitching forward into your rice and beans at dinner.

There were, in fact, a few times when I thought it had worked.  A few minutes of what sounded to my exhausted ears like exhausted sleep.  Until she awoke again and bellowed some more.

She screamed herself so hoarse she broke into a coughing fit.  She reached new levels of dog-frequency.  She rattled the sides of her crib.  And, meanwhile, I refused to think of those times I remember crying like that for my parents, as certain as I’d ever been of anything in my life that they had abandoned me forever.  I didn’t let myself travel to the place where I could convince myself she would flip the switch from constant Mommy adoration to never again trusting me to be there when she needs me.

But, finally, something in me suggested that maybe what she needed at this point really was a nice hug from her mom.

Only by the time I walked the few yards from my room to hers the nice hug from Mom had evaporated into the ether.  Instead, I picked her up and hissed something about how This Has to Stop.

It did, but only because I was holding her.

Which was just fine, except that the last thing I felt like doing was letting her sleep on top of me and the last thing she was going to settle for, having fought so hard for so long, was sleeping next to me.  Even though we tried it for a very long time.  And even though I tried to make sleeping on top of me as uncomfortable as it could possibly be.

In fact, having her sleep on top of me — having her WIN — really made me angry.  So angry that I just couldn’t have it.

Which — Mike if you are reading this — is why you found me standing in Jake’s room holding Lily out while her little legs kicked in the air as I rasped in a voice that would give anyone nightmares, “You can have her now.”

What Doesn’t Work and What Does

There are those who might suggest that what I did wrong was ever going to get her.  That my hard-earned forty-five minutes of wailing would have ended eventually and that now all I’ve taught her is to keep crying because I will come eventually.

Here’s why I know that is wrong.

First, as happy and easy as Lily is most of the time, when she gets angry the girl gets angry.  And last night she was angry.

Second, her whole little body was shaking when I finally got her, suggesting that she was in fact feeling abandoned.  And since I still remember that feeling myself I know I cannot make her go through it one more time.  So, really, it wasn’t my going to get her that ruined her for future sleep training.  It was my parents.

Third, when I changed her this morning, I found that Lily’s jammies were soaked and her diaper overflowing.  Which told me that all that crying wasn’t about wanting to sleep with Mommy after all.  All that crying was first about being wet and cold and uncomfortable and only secondarily about needing Mommy when Mommy failed to come to Lily’s call of being wet and cold and uncomfortable.

This discovery, by the way, could very well have undone me for good.

But here’s the thing.  I didn’t know Lily was wet.  I was doing my best.  And even when she was crying and I was almost sleeping I managed, in a rare feat of my parenting life, not to second-guess my instinct.

“What about compassion?” I thought to myself as I drifted somewhere near sleep while my daughter screamed for me in the next room.  “What about ahimsa?  This isn’t exactly non-harming, is it?”

But then I thought about how it’s important to feel compassion and to practice ahimsa toward yourself as well as toward others.  In Mommy mode this means you really do not have to pretend you don’t have needs in order to meet your child’s.

Only this is where I run out of answers.  Because what happens when practicing compassion toward yourself seems like the least compassionate thing you can do for your child?

This, I think, is where we have to locate our trust.  We have to trust ourselves to know when what we need is not, in fact, hurting our child.  That Lily will not remember her night in a year or a month or probably even tonight, though I hope she retains enough of it to think twice before she wakes me up at three thirty again.

We can get ourselves so tied up in knots about what it means to be a good and fair person, how to be kind toward others.  But sometimes what we need doesn’t seem to be what is best for everyone else.

It seems to me that most people to fall on one side or the other — the person who is able to take care of herself without feeling guilty about all the other people she isn’t taking care of versus the woman with whom I am much more familiar who is so busy making sure everyone else is having fun at her wedding that she never gets a chance to dance with her new husband.

There is a balance there, I feel sure of it.  There is a way to practice compassion toward yourself while still being compassionate toward others.  Even when that other is your one-year-old who is depriving you of anything that could even remotely be considered sleep.

Do I have the magic formula for how to achieve this balance?  Of course not.  But I do have that one suggestion:  trust.

Trust means going where your heart tells you to go.  It means not second-guessing yourself when something in you tells you tonight is the night to try the cry-it-out method.  It means shutting off the familiar voice of self-doubt that sounds so authentic only because it has been with you for so long.

And it means — in circumstances such as those in which I find myself right now, nearly too tired to type, wanting to blame myself for my daughter’s wet diaper, replaying her crying as I left her at daycare this morning even though I really, really needed to do so — giving yourself a break.

Because sometimes that’s all that compassion means.

Supta Baddha Konasana (Reclining Bound Angle) — A Restorative for Restoration

Here’s what I’d like to say I’m going to do the minute I am done writing this:  supta baddha konasana, or reclining bound angle pose.

It’s not just that anything with the word “reclining” in it is sounding pretty good right now.

It’s that we can all use a restorative pose, especially after an exhausting weekend of first birthday parties and middle-of-the-night hungry girls and the toddler room at the Health Adventure.

I offer this particular restorative pose because it includes the opportunity to let your hips open, thus releasing past emotions, stuck ideas — the sort of stuff that makes it so confusing trying to figure out just what compassion is.

Supta Baddha Konasana Instructions