The Blog That Never Sleeps

So last night I left a LENGTHY comment on Dooce's site. The subject was sleep.  I have a lot to say about children and sleep. I think I'll say some more!

I've written about the little angel's sleeping habits on this blog approximately one bazillion times. The most recent discussion that I remember was here.  However, I made a New Year's resolution this year to NOT TALK ABOUT HOW I NEVER SLEEP, and so I have made a Herculean effort not to bore you with any more of the wah-wah-I-just-walked-into-a-wall commentary that has plagued me yea these last seven months.

It wasn't always like this.  You see, we Ferberized.  Yes, and as everyone knows, once you Ferberize, you never have to do it again. Life is then perfect.

Bullshit.

For a while, it worked. The little angel ate every three hours when she was first born until I stopped breastfeeding at seven weeks.  You see, I was a wee bit tired after seven weeks of not getting more than two hours of consecutive sleep. Like, ever.  You should've seen her, though - she grew like a weed.

We Ferberized her for the first time when she was about four months old.  And it worked!  It worked about as well as quitting smoking has done for me.  It works for a few months to a few years, but inevitably, there is some wee setback that threatens the whole damn healthy house of cards and takes a supreme act of will to resist toppling altogether in a huge cloud of whatthefuck.

So yes, the Ferberizing didn't really make it through Christmas break.  When we were ready to try again, she was about eight months old. This began a series of five ear infections in a row and five rounds of full-spectrum antibiotics.  Between the ear pain, the teething pain and the rats that visited her at night to gnaw her perfect toebuds (she claims - I'll never believe it), she was NOT HAVING THE SLEEP.  We tried, oh, we tried!  I read every book!  We finally decided that since this was not working anyway, maybe we should wean her off the paci while we were behind.

I had just seen the episode of Supernanny where the four-year-old has the paci and stays up ALL NIGHT LONG when Supernanny takes it away.  I feared this consequence of too-long-paci-love.

Hee hee, ho ho - if I ever have another child, he or she will be hanging his or her paci around the rear-view mirror of the family car and sporting invisible braces until the child is 34.  Taking away the paci equaled seven months of the worst hell I have ever faced.

Each night, she would wake up. She would cry.  She would scream.  We got the white-noise machine.  We tried four different types of nightlights.  We Ferberized for three weeks.  One night she actually was awake for four hours, screaming.  SCREAMING LIKE THE HOUNDS OF HELL HAD STOLEN HER SOUL.

I'm not one of the mommies who can't hack the screaming. What I can't hack is the not sleeping.  She got her naps in at daycare.  I had to work all day.  So did my beloved.  Where were our naps? We cried, we sobbed, we read 90 more sleep books.  We tried Weissbluth, we tried others.  My beloved refused to co-sleep even when I begged for it when she was nineteen months old.  He was adamant.  I said fine, I'm sleeping with her on the couch.  FOREVER.

So for a while, if she woke up after three a.m., she got to come down on the couch with us.  We stretched this to four a.m.  After this past Christmas, when she was about twenty-odd months old, we got her the big-girl bed.  What the hell?  She wasn't sleeping anyway.

Around the holidays, I started getting really depressed. I was crying up to two hours a day while I scoured the Internet for a clue as to how to get my daughter to FUCKING SLEEP.  I felt like a complete failure of a mother. And the worst part?  I started irrationally thinking she was somehow doing it on purpose to torture me.  Probably because my pediatrician's nurse accused me of being wrapped around her toddler finger when I called for a child psychologist's phone number.

I called the child psychologist. I consulted the head of the Emerald City.  I considered taking her out of Waddler B.  We kept working with her.

One night from two to four a.m., I sat on a stool in her room. Every time she got out of bed, I would put her back in.  She cried and screamed the entire time. I finally got her to the place where she would at least stay in bed. I promised her I would lay down on the floor until she fell asleep if she would stay in bed. 

One might say I had "won."

But see?  That's where we go wrong in these sleeping battles.  They become a battle of wills, or at least all of the literature will try to convince you that it's that way.  And me?  I don't need more challenges.  I was already deranged.  I went and saw a psychiatrist, who listened to my deranged crying and told me she thought the prolonged sleep deprivation was giving me a chemical imbalance.  She offered anxiety medication. I took her up on it.

About a month into the medication, I still wasn't sleeping, but I was feeling a little better about it.  I started feeling stupid for making such a battle out of the whole thing. I even felt good enough about myself that I decided the hell with the kid, I was going to sleep. Even if that meant on the floor of her room. 

And so we did.  My beloved and I would take turns getting up when she awoke, walking in her room, handing her the sippy cup of water and wordlessly lying down on the floor beside her toddler bed.  Both of us have been known to fall asleep there upwards of four hours, but usually we get up after twenty minutes or so and come back to bed.  Our bed.  Our blissful, adult bed.

I'm not criticizing the Sears fans or the attachment parents.  I begged for this relief.  And I love, blessed Jesus do I LOVE cuddling with the little angel.  I love the little noises that she makes when she sleeps. I love how she wraps her arms around my arm and stuffs her toes between my knees.  She is the perfect size for spooning.  She is like a little kitten in my arms.

But my beloved?  He wants to sleep with me.  And so, I decided not to do it.  Because folks, if you're going to share your bed with dogs, cats, children or extra adults, the other person in the bed better be down with it, you know?

So this was our compromise.  For some reason, the less attached I became to whether or not she was sleeping, the more she slept.  I don't know if it was the toddler bed, the sticker chart, the promise of getting to wear blinky shoes if she slept (this started a shoe fetish, though), the constant praise for sleeping, the reminders of the importance of sleep or time, but her sticker chart in March was more full than not. 

We're very proud of her.

And you know what?  I'm very proud of me.  It was hard for me to let go of that need to WIN. That need to bend my child's behavior to my will. It seems like so much of the parenting advice and literature and television is trained to getting us parents to always be Large and In Charge.  Heavens to Betsy, no, I don't want to raise a spoiled brat, but I also don't want my tendency toward obsessive Type A behavior to be what my little angel remembers about her childhood.  In some ways, I'm very proud of myself that we struck this little compromise where neither of us exactly won.

And all of us, most of the time, are sleeping.  Her decision, not mine.