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No Rest for the Wicked
It's springtime and everyone is measuring everything from hemlines to waistlines to pollen counts to how many hours the baby will sleep. While walking my (shamefully) lively terrier this morning, I tried to count the hours I had slept and figure if I really had any right to be so bleary. By my loopy calculations I should have been feeling reasonably reasonable.
But then I ran into my neighbor whose daughter is a few weeks younger than my kid, and I had to stop deceiving myself. She looked great, terrifically chipper, and didn't seem to have any difficulty focusing her eyes, (I had forgotten to put on my glasses). We did the usual early-morning-how's-your-baby, and how's-YOUR-baby roundelay and it was then she revealed that her tiny child is Sleeping Through the Night. She's actually doing better than that. What doctors call "sleeping through the night" is a puny five-hour stretch. The baby down the hall can happily check out for ten hours.
In her defense, my neighbor confessed this with some embarrassment. There are some invisible points of new-parent etiquette, I’m learning. Bragging about your kid's ability to sleep is not quite as irritating as calling him or her a genius, unless you happen to be talking to someone who hasn't spent five consecutive hours unconscious since her second trimester. (I'll venture out on a limb here and say that it is bad form to gloat as a general matter, whether or not one has a kid.) Still, I practically drooled at the thought of ten hours of sleep and this made me an instant object of pity. My neighbor very kindly suggested I talk to her baby nurse, who has the singular talent of figuring out how to get babies on schedules. I am grateful for her generosity, willing to admit defeat- my missing short-term memory makes that all too obvious anyway- but I hesitate to knock on her door.
What gives me pause is that, while I don't subscribe to any particular theory of childrearing, I'm a contrarian. If I seek out the baby nurse's help, what will happen if I don't like her suggestions? Will I wind up in the uncomfortable position of having to account for my truancy while feeling silly for not having given her plan a shot? (My social awkwardness extends beyond my neighbor. Have you met many baby nurses? They are remarkable people, but I am wildly intimidated by their easy answers and extreme competence- and at the same time, I can't help but disagree with them.)
The sleep problem brings up the worst of a parent's insecurities. Everything you do is questionable. If one is an Attachment Parent (which, for the record, I am not) one has taken this route because of powerful beliefs that many people find strange and problematic. If one chooses to let one's children Cry it Out, one feels hideous for letting the baby cry in the first place and has to face criticism that one is cruel from the outside. Sleep is so fundamental and without it we are so irrational, it can't help but inspire extreme attitudes and extreme ideas. No one appreciates that slimy vague feeling of being jet-lagged, and I find my most hysterical paranoid mind-spins happen during the pre-dawn hours when Felix is eating or fussing and I'm thinking darkly about my career or the Ebola outbreak in Angola. Sometimes I have lacerating arguments in my mind with people who have annoyed me through the ages, and the other night I started making lists of all the different services that are available 24 hours a day in New York City. (I comfort myself with the thought that when I am up with Felix at three or four in the morning, pastry chefs and donut bakers in every borough are also awake, turning out delicious creations.) Sleep is an element that occurs so naturally, it is hard to imagine it is anything that needs to be taught.
Ah but it is, and every single book about babies has a primer on how you can educate your infant in the gentle art of snoozing. Everyone, in fact, has an opinion about this. A woman in a store I visited the other day watched Felix flail his thumb towards his mouth and said he was learning how to "self-soothe," a term that gets tossed around a lot when you're not sleeping. It doesn't look particularly soothing. It looks like he's doing an impression of the scene in Alien when the monster attaches itself to John Hurt's face. If he is figuring out how to calm himself, more power to him; a large portion of my acquaintance could use a refresher course.
I think I do need to encourage Felix to sleep and this means there will have to be a little more separation that I have previously allowed. This is an experiment, and I can always call a "do over" if it fails, but I do think exhaustion isn't pretty for anyone. Tomorrow I will move Felix's crib from my bedroom and into his room (a friend actually cautioned me that it is much easier to do this before he's too savvy about his surroundings). Perhaps with this slight distance between us, he and I can become reacquainted with sleep. I won't lie. I am frightened of this, but I tell myself that I won't be losing my son, I won't be out of his reach, and I certainly won't miss those ruminations on glazed crullers and hemorrhagic fever.
posted by Elise at 6:40 PM
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