eight month anxiety

on our way to the shore
Originally uploaded by Julia Wickes

On Memorial Day we went to Lake Michigan with some friends. The day was hot and genuinely summery, the first occasion so far this year to warrant the use of sunscreen. Lake Michigan is about an hour from where we live, and since there were seven of us, we took two cars, and separated by gender. As we drove to the lake alongside the guys' car, you could almost feel the ridiculousness emanating from within, especially when we stopped for gas, and Rob burst out of the store using a bottle of diet coke as, I think, a microphone, and danced around the parking lot with exaggerated gestures as if performing on stage. Naturally, things were more serious and mature in the ladies' car, where we spent almost the entire hour talking about more weighty issues such as childhood education-- our own and that of our children, and/or future children (didn't I say weighty?). The choices are: public, private, home school, public, private, home school. We went around the circle several times. Home school is always so quickly dismissed for obvious reasons, but then revisited and reconsidered when the ills of public and private are enumerated. Beth and I were able to testify to the myriad ways we were failed and dumped upon by public school, but then Sarah chimed in with her bitterness toward her private education. On the other hand, she now teaches seventh grade at a public school, and also contributed a handful of grisly statistics about pregnancy rates and sexual activity among fifth graders.

The further we went into this conversation, the more I started feeling something nasty in the pit of my being. Esme, the tiny thing, was asleep and silent and practically non-existent in the car, her little body encased in her rear facing car seat, out of sight, almost out of mind, except that I was now obsessing over her future as a kindergartener. I started remembering the fact that one day I'll have to make a decision about her schooling. I remember how much I hated elementary school, and felt lost in the shuffle of large classrooms and burned out teachers. Only, when you're a child, you cannot reason with yourself that the student-to-teacher ratio is the reason why your day at school feels long and loveless. On the other hand, home schooling has never seemed like a viable possibility for me. Private schools, depending on finances, may or may not even be an option, and anyway, they have their own set of huge problems. Basically, childhood is problematic all around, and the idea that I am responsible for making these decisions for a child makes me tremble sometimes. I don't want to protect her in an artificial bubble, but I don't want to throw her to the wolves either.

Now I'm thinking, though, that maybe us girls were being ridiculous too, because we were discussing something so concrete as if it was theoretical. I mean, everyone has a different experience of school. My oldest sister, for example, went through the same schools as I did, and loved them. She had tons of friends, and was always really involved with extracurricular activities, worked as a cashier at the grocery store in the afternoons, and basically breezed through with none of the sulkiness that I suffered in reaction to the torture of each grade level. Same parents, same upbringing, same schools, different experience. I don't know how to make sense of this. I might not know how to make sense of it for Esme either.

Esme is hitting a new stage right now in which she isn't so sure about letting just anyone hold her. She screamed when our friend John picked her up, probably because of his dark beard, when in the past she has always been very friendly with him. My mom said that, in her child development classes years ago, this was called eight month anxiety. I was glad to put a name to it, and it's nice and neat when your child behaves according to the book (she just turned eight months old). I suppose the tension and differentiation between family, friends, self, and strangers is finally beginning for her, and will keep on evolving in some form for the rest of her life.

I finally concluded that the only thing I can really do as Esme's mom is just give myself to her, and to our whole family, in the details of our lives together. I'm trying to do that now, every day, and hoping that, in the end, it will help protect her and bolster her against all of the potential disappointments, dangers, and turmoils that wait for her at her terrible but necessary future school.

standing, suddenly

Originally uploaded by Julia Wickes

Recently I've settled on the notion that it is time to buy Esme a proper high chair. She's finally started eating baby food, and I usually sit down with her on the floor and put her in the bumbo chair or the plastic, portable booster seat to feed her, but this is getting old, and I'd like her to be at the table. After looking around online at the Target and Babies R Us websites, then Craig's List, and finally ebay, I was dismayed that high chairs are expensive. Well, that is to say, the middle of the line model is around sixty dollars, and, of course, the fashionable variety that won't look like a fisher price eye sore in your home cost around $180. I hope I'm not the only one who thinks that's a lot of money for a high chair.

This is all by way of explaining why my Saturday began early at the Little Flower Catholic Church rummage sale. And I did in fact find an acceptable, circa 1985 high chair, as well as a floor lamp, a jean jacket, art frames, a small cooler, and a chocolate chip cookie at the baked goods table. I didn't spend more than eighteen dollars altogether. It was a drizzly and balmy today, around sixty degrees, overcast. Esme didn't come with me to the rummage sale. In fact, as it turned out, Jeff spent a lot of time with Esme today, even taking her with him to the library, and keeping an eye on her while she played with her toys in the living room. This gave me time to rearrange pictures on our apartment walls, make hummus, clean and disinfect the used high chair, and write some long overdue e-mails.

I'm so used to being connected to Esme most of the day, and I think she has grown to feel entitled to my constant attention, so this might be why she was inexplicably fussy on and off all day today, for no other apparent reason. She'd forget about me, laugh and play, then see me come into the room and cry and try to cling to my ankles. For this reason, I think, she resisted her naps today in an uncharacteristic way, in order to pull me back into her room for some more rocking. Only, clearly she didn't want to be soothed, but wanted to squirm on my lap, and bend backward in order to get an interesting upside down view of things, and so forth, so I finally just put her into her crib for better or for worse, knowing she was tired. Then, I made a phone call that I'd been trying to make for a few hours. Then, while I was on the phone, our neighbors, who just got back from Paris, knocked on our door to give us chocolate as a souvenir from their trip. In the midst of all of this adult chatting, cries began issuing forth from Esme's room, and she sounded so very awake, so I went to see her and there she was, for the first time, standing up in her crib. I was so excited about this new development that I told Jeff and our neighbors to come look at her standing up. It turned into a social time in her room, which blew her nap, of course, but I didn't care.

As I look over my blog, I often feel strangely about the fact that the entire thing isn't centered on Esme, and the everyday details of all the time I spend with her. A baby's first year is so full of change, it feels as though, if I don't document every detail, very regularly, it's all going to pass and be forgotten. I fear boring anyone outside of our family with details of her development, but then I realize that I need a record of them, or I'll forget. Already, I forget what she was like at three months. What I mean is: I remember the fact that her head and torso would flop to one side if we propped her up in her baby swing, but I don't remember what it was like to go through the day with this floppy little baby, or the details of how we passed the time with her in that three month-old condition, and what we could, at that time, ascertain about her personality. I look at her newborn pictures, and it's the same person as she is now. But she wasn't smiling then, or giggling, or saying mama and dada, or trying to roll off the changing table with a determined, independent grimace on her face. But each of these things has been added one by one to her personhood at some point, on some day, like magic, when they were not present the day before, and I may or may not have documented their appearance in writing.

Well, today, May 26, 2007, at approximately one in the afternoon, Esme, at the age of eight months, one week, stood up in her crib for the very first time.

postscript: the teenage voldemort

This is a short addendum to my last post about high school. I figured out why I was thinking about teenage individualism. Jeff and I are re-reading the sixth Harry Potter together in preparation for number seven, which is slated for July (hooray, hooray, hooray!). In volume six, J.K. Rowling reveals the origins of Lord Voldemort-- his childhood as an orphan and auspicious teenage years at Hogwarts. Rowling depicts Voldemort's adult wickedness as rooted in an extreme individualism which started budding even at the orphanage, where he shunned friends and began cherishing the idea of himself as special. His self-obsession grows and culminates, according to Dumbledore, when he sheds the name "Tom Riddle," because it is too common. He gathers followers around him, but never friends, because he is a loner in the extreme. As far as I can tell, Rowling gets an A+ for this insight. I won't start moralizing over it, because I'm sure that there are already entire books already devoted to either affirming or debunking the moral integrity of Harry Potter, and I'm just not going to go there. All I can say is that I heart J.K. Rowling.

one percent of the population is still pretty common

fake deer on porch of abandoned house
Originally uploaded by Julia Wickes.

The kids who sat next to me in my classes in high school were the kind of kids who spent their childhood watching Saturday Night Live with their permissive, post-hippy parents. They were smart, satirical, and worldly, and I felt like I might as well have been Pollyanna in braids sitting among them. Forming a backdrop to my classes with these dry, apathetic geniuses, were cinder block buildings, racial tension, fist fights, greasy pizza slices being peddled at lunch time, yellow school buses roaring with hot, dirty exhaust, and, let's see, various cliques such as the skinheads, the black and maroon-haired drama club members in then-vogue striped tights and chinese slippers, and the so-called and much-abused preps, who might also be described as precursers to frat-boys and sorority girls at the state universities they would go on to attend.

It's no wonder that my cache of high school survival tactics involved finding a stone bench on which to read The Once and Future King during lunch, keeping my mouth shut most of the time in class, and convincing myself that there had been a mistake, and I was meant to be born in another century, on another continent, which might vary depending on which book I was currently reading. On the one hand, I internalized the ugliness surrounding me and toughened myself to match it. The sarcasm and satire was not lost on me, and I wasn't going to let anyone think it was. But on the other hand, I was constantly trying to separate myself from it by nursing the dream of my own, more refined, individuality, which made it hard for me to relate to people socially, and truly join in. Plus, I was such an incredibly moralistic teenager. It was a bad combination.

I'm not sure why I'm writing about this. I'm not describing it well either, but I don't know how else to describe it, because my high school predicament still seems complicated, even now. But that said, I now realize that this way of getting through adolescence probably is pretty common, even though it feels, to the person experiencing it, like unique suffering. And now I realize that it was in these four torturous years of high school that my strong dream of my own individuality was formed, a dream of myself that really has done me no favors. I remember that one of my high school teachers administered the Meyers-Brigg personality test, and I was so proud and giddy to discover that my personality type was only one percent of the population. That explained a lot, I thought haughtily. It took getting the crap [by that I mean silliness] knocked out of me at seminary by very good teachers, marrying the more level-headed Jeff, and probably just living through my twenties, which are almost over (oh, the reality), but I think I may finally be delivered from the more extreme aspects of this dream of myself as above the ordinary circumstances of my particular time and place.

there is no such thing as natural beauty

I really hate movies and modern novels that romanticize the south, particularly ones that feature cardboard cutout caricatures with poorly imitated southern drawls. Yuck. Even so, I've always liked Steel Magnolias, which I think is a well-done movie all around. In it, Dolly Parton plays a hairdresser named Trudy, but (let's all just admit) is really playing Dolly Parton. There are so many wonderful lines in this movie, which centers around a group of women who all get their hair and nails done at Trudy's beauty shop. I thought about it because we're in Tennessee right now visiting Jeff's family, and my mother-in-law paid for me to get a pedicure at a local salon here, where her best friend cuts hair, and in which lots of local ladies apparently go regularly, as far as I could observe while sitting in the foot-soaker throne. There's a part in Steel Magnolias where Trudy draws aside her newly hired beautician and shares the cardinal rule of her salon: there is no such thing as natural beauty. I've always wavered back and forth on the low to high-maintenance continuum, depending on my surroundings. In high school, it was fine to be grungy (as in Seattle) and I was. In college, I moved up the low to high maintenance continuum just a notch, because suddenly I was surrounded by future business women of America, who woke up at 6:30 a.m. to prepare their visage. My natural tendency is to shun unnatural alterations to my appearance, and I always had a natural distrust of make-up, but I can certainly be persuaded to wear it, and have been persuaded, sometimes aggressively. I won't even talk about living in New York, and being escorted to a Lancome counter in Lord and Taylor by a friend who was trying to help me out. Now that I'm in the Midwest though, I've slid back down a few notches toward grungy again, and I have to say, it feels good.

Jeff and I come back to his hometown of Cleveland (not Ohio--Tennessee) several times a year from our northern outpost. I haven't lived in the south since 1999, when I graduated from college and went timidly northward. The rest is a long and not-that-interesting story, but basically, I haven't managed to get back, which reminds me of the title of that Thomas Wolf novel, which I haven't read, You Can't Go Home Again, except that my story lacks conflict, drama, descriptive language, climax, denouement, or really anything that makes a story interesting. It's just the way the chips have fallen, and I'm not tortured over it, although resettling in different regions does take some adjustment, and I still undergo a little bit of shock and bemusement each time I travel back and forth. Sometimes I forget that there is any difference between the different regions of the United States, and that the real differences are only the stuff of the pre-globalism regional writers, like Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and so on, not the present-day wannabe regional writers, who worship regional differences and blow them all out of proportion, and desperately want to be identified with said regional differences. But then I actually travel and am reminded that human beings really do have a tendency to settle into territorial pockets, and behave in a way that bears the imprint of those who live nearby. Even television and Starbucks cannot change this, and I am no exception: I have been influenced and changed by the regions, subcultures, and company I've kept, each time I resettle. When I come into the Southern Baptist culture of Jeff's family, I feel myself unwittingly altering myself yet again to please and blend in (would I have dared to get daisies painted on my toenails anywhere else?). I'm beginning to think that not only is there no such thing as natural beauty, but there is no such thing as natural, at least for me.

a small town misunderstanding

art
Originally uploaded by Julia Wickes.

My friend Dawn and I drove to Michigan today in search of a small town that might yield some interesting photos. We found one and parked at a place called Tastee Twirl to get ice cream and trek through the main downtown strip. I immediately felt a tension when I got out my camera in the Tastee Twirl, as if the locals were eying us with reserve. After we exited into the open air, we discussed how it often feels awkward to pull out a camera and take photos of strangers, as if you're belittling or objectifying them, giving them a message that their appearance and the setting in which they make their life is a curiosity. I'm no good at taking photos of people anyway, so I just stick to static scenes and objects.

There were plenty of static scenes in this town on this Mother's Day Sunday: no pedestrians and almost no cars. We trekked through a silent downtown, passing many vacant buildings, peering into windows and down alleys, scanning for something we could frame with our viewfinders. I might have been more affected by the loneliness of the town or even oppressed by the silence, except that the day was perfectly beautiful, seventy degrees, sunny, blue, and green, so it was hard to indulge my usual melancholy projections. Plus, Dawn is the most indefatigable optimist I know, and tends to neutralize this melancholy tendency of mine and draw out my more adventurous side. We looped around, through a sunny, spacious graveyard, and back through the main boulevard on the opposite side.

Just when we were about to call it a day and return to our car in the Tastee Twirl parking lot, Dawn caught sight of an interesting upstairs window in another abandoned house. We started pointing our cameras in its direction when an engine rumbled up behind us in the dirt driveway. An angry man shouted from the driver's seat, asking us what we were doing. Dawn cheerfully told him that we were taking pictures of things we thought were pretty. He said that was a lie; we were taking a picture of a busted window and why didn't we get the hell out here. He ground the gears of his car and pulled out, headed a block down the street, then turned around and slowly came back toward us as we made our way to our car. He was watching us, making sure we were promptly returning to wherever we had come from.

I'm not sure why this disturbed me so much, and colored the entire experience of our afternoon in this small town with a creepy vibe. When someone is that aggressive, angry, and hostile, it is natural to feel rather trampled down, and I tend to internalize negative human encounters like this perhaps more than is healthy or realistic, so here I am, still dwelling on the contorted hate in this man's face and feeling icky. But the worst part of all to me, was that he accused us of lying, because it made me see that our simple attempt to find beauty as we walked through this town was not comprehensible or even remotely valid to this man, and in fact sounded like a very pathetic lie to cover up something else. But what? Trespassing? Voyeurism? Exploitation? What could he have thought was our motive? I looked back on my pictures and felt that maybe we had done something wrong without intending to. Did we cross a line in the name of art? Peer into one too many vacant windows in a small town where we didn't belong? I'm still too rattled to resolve my feelings about this bizarre ending to our afternoon. It takes effort for me to overcome the sense of being a silly spectacle when I stop and flash my camera in public, but I continually try to get over those feelings for the sake of a worthwhile photo (I can't even bring myself to say "for the sake of art"). But maybe I should be more circumspect after all.

i'm not worried

Psalm23
Originally uploaded by Julia Wickes.

I was looking at some of the photos I took last summer, including this one. Vito's establishment has since changed its name to Vito's Head 2 Toe, with a pink high heel shoe carefully painted beneath the words. I liked Psalm 23 Hair Care better. It really hit me hard today that summer has arrived again-- the dusty heat, sun beating on gravel, blacktop parking lots, and crunched up glass. My face was red after coming in from a walk and jeans are suddenly too hot and inflexible to be my daily uniform anymore. This instigates the annual summer clothing crisis, no less poignant now that it's actually been two years since I had a non-maternity summer wardrobe, and none of those clothes seem to sit right on me anymore.

Also, I think my freckles are beginning to fly back from wherever they migrate to in the winter time, each year their plume looking a little less youthful. This July, I'll turn thirty.

I am still so happy to be staying right where we are for the next five years (God willing, of course), but worry comes to me in the summer. Financing for students is not set up to account for students with family, really, so there's this feeling that you are walking a plank with alligators swimming beneath as the spring semester ends. I'm not working like I was last summer, which was a great comfort...then. Plus, it would make a lot of sense for us to buy a house in this area, and we're looking into it, but it looks like we'll have to wait until the fall, when we can sit down with a banker and look alright on paper. Continuing to rent just feels foolish, but we may be stuck in our apartment for the time being, and I may just have to admit that, as usual, I don't know what is best for us and I can't foresee anything at all, because if I could, I'd be God, after all.

I've made a firm decision to not worry. I wised up a few years ago and took this tactic in the face of worse-seeming times, and obviously, things worked out, because here we are, just fine.

forcing the queen of sleep

I have a sizable extended family on my mom's side. There were eight of us grandchildren who grew up together in Orlando, and we played together fairly regularly, often playing board games like Aggravation, Operation, Parcheesi, Sorry, and Clue, and cards as well, particularly the game of Hearts. I think Hearts is the game in which the queen of spades is worth thirteen points, and you don't want to get stuck with her, because points are bad. At some point, everyone gangs up on whoever has the queen and leads with low spades in order to force her out, so that whoever is holding her has to "eat" the points. My ruthless boy cousins had a chant that went: "Force the queen, force the queen, force the queen," each word punctuated with equal emphasis. It felt terrible to be the one stuck with the queen in your hand, assailed by the barbaric force that only juvenile boys can levy.

I started thinking about this chant today in regard to Esme, who I sometimes think of as my little queen of sleep. But that needs to be qualified. While she's been a regular daytime napper from her earliest age, she still (at 7.5 months) does not sleep through the night. I want to put this in all capitals to express the way it resounds inside of my haggard, sleep-deprived brain and body: SHE DOES NOT SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT. This means that for seven and a half months, I have not slept through the night either. Sometimes I manage to feel o.k. with this if the wakings are few and brief and if I can get in at least one solid sleep cycle; other times I just feel saturated with fatigue.

Night feedings are within the range of normal needs for a baby under nine months. Some babies are able to sleep all night very early but some still require night feedings. Since Esme is still not very interested in solid foods (she halfway dribbles out most of what I try to give her) but exclusively nurses, I'm guessing she just needs those nighttime calories. Plus, now that she is so curious and aware of everything happening around her during the day, nighttime feedings, when all is quiet, dark, and sleepy, tend to be her best and fullest.

While I was still pregnant, I was warned about the fragmented sleep of motherhood from multiple friends. I didn't really know what to do with this information except to just keep it in mind and hope for the best. I've never been one of those people who adores sleep, so I wasn't very alarmed (ah--the naivete!). I like to be awake, doing things, and participating in life, and, according to my mom, I've been this way since infancy. By pre-school or kindergarten, I was already a veteran non-napper, and never fell asleep during the scheduled nap times. I've always feared that if I fell asleep, I might miss something interesting or exciting. One time, when I was about ten years old, an alligator somehow made his home in our residential lake; animal control people had to come and hunt it late into the night and they happened to trap it right in our backyard, of all places, at two in the morning. Everyone in my family woke up and witnessed it except me, who slept through it. When my sisters told me about it in the morning I was crushed! As the youngest member of my family, I wanted to keep up with my big sisters, and they were probably always rallying around me and keeping me wakeful and stimulated anyway. And not to be down on my mom, because I know she was a very attentive mother when I was small, but she is probably the most unscheduled person I know, so there was not even the smallest chance that I was put on any kind of structured sleep routine--or any other kind of routine--growing up.

Before Esme's arrival, I got pulled unwillingly into the widespread parental squabbles about sleep training. Actually, before I was even thinking about getting pregnant, I was riding the train back from the Chicago when a grandmother sitting next to me began to unload her troubled mind, and I felt obliged to listen. She had just come back from a frenzied weekend of watching her two grandsons in Chicago. Her daughter, the boys' mother, had read the book Babywise and was implementing it religiously. Mind you, I had never heard of this famous/infamous book at this point. But I got an earful about Babywise that day, and this woman was mad enough to spit nails about what she felt it was doing to her youngest grandson, who she claimed was an extremely frustrated child.

I didn't really think about it again or look into books like Babywise until I was actually pregnant, and only then it was because I got a few such books as gifts. Plus, I have to admit that I was curious about what all the controversy was about. I thought that I would make it through motherhood by relying on intuition alone (again, so naive), not how-to books. But one trusted friend sent me Marc Weissbluth's Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child and I cracked it open. It was in reading this (which, in my assessment, is a lot more nuanced and sound than Babywise, which I found to be rather pedantic and annoying) that really gave me the most insight into the topic of sleep. The author won my trust through his in-depth explanation of childhood sleep needs and the formation of good sleep habits, all backed very methodically with real-life evidence and anecdotes from parents who had found themselves in difficult dilemmas in this area. More than thinking about the baby who was at that time growing inside of me, I thought about myself, a poor sleeper. One insight into my childhood after another opened up before me, and without going into all the details, I saw the root of my crappy sleep habits there. There are around seventy-five adult sleep disorders, I've now learned, and I think I've identified mine. I never learned to fall asleep as a child or to retreat into sleep willingly, and my overtired childhood turned into an overtired adolescence. Because since adolescence I've routinely pushed my bedtime later and later, I've reset my internal clock, and now I can't fall asleep early even when I desperately want to. Once I recovered from this epiphany and accepted that this is something I'm probably going to struggle with for the rest of my life, I privately resolved to help my baby develop good sleep habits so she wouldn't bear this kind of burden when she grows up.

As banal as it sounds, I now consider putting Esme on a daytime nap routine one of the biggest accomplishments of my life. I wasn't born with the routine gene, and my childhood gave me no precedent for how to do this. I had to actually write down her sleeping patterns and check and re-check Weissbluth, and after this extremely out-of-character effort on my part, Esme fell fairly easily into a beautiful routine. I couldn't believe that this napping creature was genetically related to me, the insomniac non-napper.

Daytime sleep remains smooth and painless, but nighttime sleep has been more difficult. After a few half-hearted efforts to get Esme to sleep for longer stretches, I gave up and decided not to push my luck. I didn't want the burden of deciding which cries in the night were out of need and which were out of want. I decided to simplify the matter by just responding to every cry. And anyway, I enjoy rocking my baby and cuddling her in the night.

Lately though, it's gotten to be too much. My own disordered sleep habits, which I used to get away with as a free agent, have become a major handicap now that a baby is a part of this equation. Sometimes but rarely does my insomniac bedtime harmonize with Esme's wakings. She seems to wake about an hour after I might have normally fallen asleep, and this causes me to delay my bedtime even further, because, why bother going to bed at midnight if I'll just be woken up an hour later? Then she usually wakes again when I'm in the deepest state of sleep, sometime between 3:30 and 5:00 a.m. I stumble into her room and sweep her into the rocking chair with me for a feeding. I've actually been so sleepy during this time, that I've fallen asleep with her in my lap and woken up not knowing how long we had both been sitting there.

Another issue is that we've inconsistently co-slept with Esme since her birth, on and off. I oscillate between a desire to have her close and cuddle, to feeling protective of my own space on the mattress. If I'm exhausted late at night, I'll sometimes bring her into the bed for her feeding and leave her there for the remainder of the night, just because it's easier than making those few steps back to her crib to put her back down. When it comes to babies, inconsistency is bad news, and from what I've heard and read, co-sleeping has to be consistent in order to really work. I think I've been sending Esme mixed messages at night.

Then there's been the whole fiasco of trying to follow Marc Weissbluth's advice for nighttime sleep, which requires me to be led by the head, not the heart, which is almost impossible for someone like me. I definitely fall into the category of parents who find it almost intolerable to let my baby cry-- ever. So while I've tried following Weissbluth's advice at various stages, I inevitably regress, because it's just too hard, and go back to responding to every cry. According to Weissbluth this leads to a night waking habit, and boy does Esme have a night waking habit. He says that babies cycle through light stages of sleep every hour or so, sometimes crying out during the light stage but not rousing fully. If you establish a precedent by going to them, consoling, replacing a pacifier, or feeding during these times, then the baby will learn to push herself to wakefulness for the pleasure of your company, rather than drifting easily back into deep sleep. It also seems that the more attentive I am to her wakings, the more frequent they become, until it becomes intolerable. I reached a breaking point the night before last, and woke up feeling miserable and unable to face the tasks of the day, even the simple task of just sitting on the floor with Esme while she plays and making sure she doesn't put a choking hazard in her mouth, which is the bare minimum of babysitting. I want to lie down and close my eyes while she plays around me, and the house chores go undone. I've finally decided that this is an unsustainable way to live. With the exception of two feedings per night, I think I have no choice but to let Esme cry sometimes. I write this knowing that there are parents who are very much against this in all circumstances, and I actually wouldn't argue with those parents. I sympathize with that side of the debate.

But for me, it just isn't working out. I need to be my best during the daytime hours, and that requires getting at least five hours of sleep per night-- not an unreasonable aspiration, after all.

Basically, my point is that having a baby has really forced my hand, so to speak, in this whole area of sleep. I've had to face my own dysfunctional relationship with sleep, develop a proper respect for it (which I'm still working on) and make difficult decisions about Esme's sleep habits too. I've had to admit that my wonderful, ever-prized intuition is actually unreliable and mixed up in some areas, and needs advice from more informed voices. If my intuition were calling the shots, both Esme and I would be doomed. I would be getting ever more haggard and mentally muddled while she would be getting more over-stimulated and over-tired, missing out on the sleep which is so important for her growth at this crucial time, and never learning that sleep is a wonderful place to be, maybe more wonderful than her mother's arms. The most encouraging thing for me though, is that Esme is a brand new human being, far more supple than me. I really do see her growing into an adult with healthy sleep habits as a reward for my efforts, including the emotional effort it has taken to allow her to cry a few times. The real comfort in this situation, is that Weissbluth has been right: very quickly, the crying ends, and is replaced with sleep. It does not take very many nights of "training" for a baby to learn to sleep better, and then crying is no longer an issue. And of course, I still plan on exercising my own judgment if I think there might be a valid reason for her cry, such as a chilly room, or whatever (this is where you are supposed to reassure yourself that I'm not a terrible mother).

At least in this one area, my hope is that Esme will miss inheriting and repeating one of my dysfunctional traits. I can't yet speak about all the others.