A Year With the Bean: Sleeping (or not), Loving and Understanding

I am in the final week of my maternity leave. I still can’t believe it’s been a year since our Little Bean came into our lives. It feels like just yesterday I was calling my husband to say, "they want to assess me for induction - yes, now". I remember clear as day the dinner we had the night before our son was born, the phone call to say, "ok, we’re ready for you, come on in", and for many reasons I will never forget walking onto the L&D unit to see my friend waiting to be the nurse who would deliver my baby. I swear I’ve only just blinked. But I haven’t, he really is almost 366 days old (leap year). And I am not only amazed by how much he’s changed, grown and learned but how much he has taught me to change, grow and learn. So many things I didn’t think would happen, or I would agree to have happen, have. As you read this, I ask you to please not judge but only absorb my story. And bear with me. A year ago I myself might have judged; now I simply nod my head in knowing.

Sleep and Co-Sleep

The one aspect of child rearing that seems to have been all-consuming this past year is sleep. I feel like for ten and half of the last almost twelve months, all I have done is focus on this seemingly very basic skill. Some people in our circle think I've become too focused on it, that I've become a slave to my son's sleep schedule. Maybe. I will say I have been incredibly strict about his sleep, that it has taken precedence over everything else and yes, that means I have missed out on a lot this past year. But it has been an important and difficult skill to get him to learn and for that reason, we've made the sacrifices we have.

I’m amazed at how quickly the year has gone but in many respects it has gone by very slowly. The first four very sleep-deprived months seemed to drag as I held my breath waiting for that magical twelve week mark touted by everyone as ‘the time it starts to get easier’. You see, we were convinced we were going to have an easy baby as we’re both pretty easy going - but we ended up with colic. When you have a colicky babe who cries for two hours every night, and then will only nap when held during the day, you hold on to any string of hope there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. I tried so hard to savour every moment of when he was tiny, cherish every session of breastfeeding, every middle-of-the-night waking but the truth is I didn’t. I was so thrown by what parenthood really was for us and I was so exhausted. I looked at my friends who’s similarly aged babes would pass out on the floor and sleep the whole way through our visits and would feel both awe and jealousy. Why couldn’t my baby be easy like that? Why did he need so much of my attention to do something as simple as sleep? Eventually I came to accept that this was just who he was (his toothless grins helped) but it bothered me and I fought it for a very long time.

Probiotics helped the colic situation overnight - really. It was like a switch had been flipped and our baby was suddenly the happiest kid in the world. That was around the two month mark. Nights got easier so I felt I could focus on his naps. I embraced the luxury of holding my child while he slept for a while, as many of my like-minded hippy-mom friends encouraged. “They’re only small once” and given our 'one and done' policy, he was to be our only. However when he was around five months old I decided it was time to try and stop holding him for each of his three naps a day; I was weary from being in a darkened room for three to four hours a day. And I was still exhausted. But after trying everything I knew how, had the resources for and could stomach (I was staunchly against ‘crying it out’), I finally landed on co-sleeping. It was the only way I could get him to nap without holding him the entire time. Prior to becoming a parent, I was against co-sleeping. I thought it was weird and created attachment issues. But when you just need something to change so you can start to feel a bit more human, you will consider doing things you said you would never do. Or at least I consider them. Which leads me to the first big lesson parenthood has taught me - and it’s probably the biggest: DON’T judge, ever.

My husband and I moved our spare double mattress up from the basement and laid it on the floor in our son’s room next to the crib to help facilitate napping. Once I started laying down with him for his naps, two things happened: he started having more restful naps (though they were still greatly varied in length) and I started getting more sleep. Laying down with him forced me to catch up on my own sleep, thanks to a combination of the physical position of being flat in a dark room and the hormones released during breastfeeding. Yes, I breastfed him before sleep. I still do, 50% of the time. It’s the one thing that has consistently relaxed and focused him. He’s never taken a bottle so it’s been all me with the milk since birth. Which has meant I’ve needed to be present at least every few hours as well as for all efforts at sleep. There are no breaks. But that’s fine, I actually love everything about breastfeeding and will be very sad when the day comes for us to stop.

But back to sleep.

Naps were working better though as I said they were inconsistent in length. Nonetheless, I felt we were making headway. Nights were not too bad, we were still up a couple of times a night but I expected that given he was exclusively breastfed. Then somewhere around five months our wheels started to wobble - at six months they just right came off. They say babies usually start sleeping better once they start solid foods, and for that reason I was looking forward to the next step. Unfortunately the opposite was true for our little one; not long after starting solids around his six month birthday, sleeping got worse. We waited a bit for things to settle down, for his little stomach to get used to new foods. I took him to the doctor to make sure nothing was wrong. After a fair amount of adjustment time it was clear the sleeping issue wasn’t food related, and it was just getting worse. Instead of putting our son down for bed and not hearing from him for at least three to four hours, he was now waking up between twenty to thirty minutes after going down and was requiring resettling every thirty to forty minutes for a minimum of the next three hours. It got to the point I was consistently sleeping for the night on the mattress in his room - a) I was tired of falling asleep in the nursing chair after going in for the umpteenth time to settle him down, and b) some nights he would only settle if I laid next to him. Again, I was exhausted. And so began our unexpected night-time co-sleeping arrangement.

Co-Sleep and Cry-It-Out

The mattress on the floor actually worked wonders for our night sleep. Both my son and I were able to get close to eight hours of minimally interrupted sleep every night and my husband was less disturbed by both the monitor going off and me being up and down all night. Aside from my back being sore from the ultra stiff mattress, the only thing that didn’t work was the fact my husband and I were seeing less and less of each other. More often than not I needed to lay down with our son shortly after finishing my dinner in order to get him to settle down - and then I was down for the night. My husband and I were no longer sharing a bedroom and we were no longer sharing time alone together. Initially we were willing to live with the arrangement since we figured it would be short lived. Then co-sleeping stopped working. 

Two months into our co-sleeping arrangement, something changed. My son became incredibly restless and would toss, turn and want to nurse all night long. We backslid to getting sleep in forty minute intervals again. I let it go for a few nights thinking it was a phase but after a week and a half, I broke down. I was again exhausted and now was no longer functioning. I was short and snappy with my husband, I was short and snappy with my son. Months of poor sleep and feelings of isolation were causing me to withdraw from social interactions and putting me very close to the edge of a serious post-pardum depression. My husband was concerned to the point he asked me to consider something he knew went against every fibre of my being: exercise a form of sleep training, a form of ‘crying it out’. At first I shut the conversation down: absolutely not, I’m not doing that to my child, I don’t believe in it, how could you even ask me?? But after much discussion and a lot of heartbreaking soul-searching it became clear that for my own health we needed to do something. My gentle methods were not working for us and I couldn't care for our son if I was not able to function. So I grudgingly did my research, found a method I could stomach, and set up a schedule to start a more aggressive form of ‘sleep training’.

I was very skeptical that this would work and voiced that opinion multiple times. The night we started I was crying even before we began, while I was reading my son his bedtime story. To my surprise, he settled to sleep faster than I expected though not without a lot of protest. To be clear, our goal was never and HAS never been to force him to sleep through the night. He will do that in his own time. We simply needed to get longer stretches of sleep between wakings - forty minutes wasn’t cutting it. Amazingly, by our fourth night, I put my son down awake but drowsy and he fell asleep within minutes for close to seven hours. I was shocked. I had had no confidence that the method would work but it did. And he didn’t seem to hate us when he woke up in the mornings. In fact, he was happier than ever.

Once nights got better, I decided it was time to start moving away from co-sleeping for naps. I loved napping with Little Bean, and still do, but it was not a practical arrangement given my return to work was looming on the horizon. Over a period of months I have been able to wean him away from sleeping next to me and towards sleeping in his crib on his own. It has not been easy. It again has been exhausting. Our night-time method did not work on his day-time sleep; I pulled the pin after seven nap attempts. Through other methods we’ve finally made it to the point I can get him sleepy, lay him down and he naps. Actually naps. It took us until he was eleven months old but we finally are experiencing long, luxurious lengths of day-time sleep. It’s bittersweet.

Our sleeping escapades have taught me another big lesson in parenthood: Keep my knees bent with respect to my parenting style. Any expectation I had for my kind of parenting style went out the window once he was born and especially once sleep became an issue; sleep deprivation did that (and I spent twelve years working night shifts). I learned that I can function on incredibly little sleep but only for a time. I didn’t believe in attachment parenting going into this, nor did I believe in crying it out, and here I am on the other side of our first year having practiced and come to believe in both. There are certain situations where both work. Above all, I have learned to look at my child and adapt my methods to who he is.

Love and Other Stuff

Becoming a parent has made me more philosophical. People who know me well will question how that is possible. But truly, I have, and its a direct result of having lots of quiet time alone with my son at all hours of the day and night. Around the time he was a week old, I had what some may call an epiphany. My husband and I had endured three miscarriages in the year leading up to the conception of our Little Bean. It was the hardest year of my life. I questioned repeatedly why we were meant to suffer that time as we did, what the lesson was we were to learn. One morning not long after he was born, a little light shone on the question I had been asking for over a year and a half. As I stared down at his little face, all content after yet another feeding, I realized that each one of our losses served to open another corner of my heart, to grow it's capacity to love this little man more than I thought was possible. I thought I knew my capacity for love but I had sorely underestimated it. For all the pain those losses provided, they paved the way for an unending, exhausting, exhilarating joy and I can honestly finally say I am thankful for what we have gone through. I suppose in a sense parenthood has made me more willing to open my heart and mind to what the universe is teaching me. There is a positive lesson in everything we experience; we may not understand it for a long time but the lesson is there if we really look and remain open.

I have discovered I have more patience that I ever thought was possible. Becoming a mother has opened new paths of tolerance in my brain and personality that I never knew existed. I’ve HAD to become more tolerant, I’ve HAD to become more patient. I have the mental capacity to understand and process my surroundings and emotions, and I need to set an example for my son as he learns life. Amazingly, most days it’s not as hard as I thought it would be to take a deep breath and ‘try again’. Its helpful that my son is incredibly cute and the expressions of wonder and excitement on his face as he experiences things for the first time make it easier to get through the more trying days. On the really tough days I just remind myself that however tired and frustrated I may be, he’s likely experiencing those things tenfold being that he’s new to the world. And it gets easier.

Parenting has also taught me to lower my expectations. No, I haven’t stopped brushing my teeth (entirely) and I do still shower and clean my house (on occasion). What I mean is I no longer expect myself to be Super Mom. I no longer expect to be able to get five errands done in a day in addition to cleaning the house and cooking a gourmet meal before 7pm every night. Two errands would earn me a gold star these days. And I’m okay with that. I had expectations before he was born that I would be out on the town with him daily, going to the mall and on playdates, socializing with my fellow mat-leavers and having my so-called ‘shit’ together. I had expectations that he would just sleep in the car or on the go and that life would kind of carry on ‘as usual’. None of that has happened. The reality of it is, I’m working a full-time job even if I don’t go to the hospital every day. And this job doesn’t have paid breaks. In fact, there are no breaks.  And I’m still okay with that. At the end of the day, our welfare and happiness is my ONLY job and expectation; if he’s dressed, fed, clean, sleeping and happy, if I am dressed, fed, clean, sleeping and happy, then the day is a win and anything else that gets done on top of that is a bonus. Perhaps that equates to actually raising my expectations. Maybe I am still Super Mom.

Understanding and Believing

"The hardest thing I’ve ever done". I had heard that from everyone who had gone before me into the land of parenthood and I believed them. But I had to do it to understand it. I’ve come to know that believing and understanding are two very different things. Parenting is hard, really really hard. That I now understand. It has tested me mentally and physically beyond anything I could have comprehended before going into it. I believed I was ready for it and I wasn’t. Neither my husband nor I were. But there’s no going back once you’re in it, you just have to swim. And really, if you were to put the question to either of us, it’s unlikely we would say we’d have done something differently. Certainly, looking back on this past year there are choices that I made that probably could have been made better but if we changed any of it we wouldn’t be where we are today, with a happy and healthy little boy who is the joy of our lives and the lives of many around us. We’re exactly where we need to be because of those choices and where we are is pretty amazing. This past year really has taught me the meaning of “Nothing Worth Having Comes Easy". From trying to conceive, to trying to stay conceived, through birthing and raising, none of it has been easy. But it has been well beyond worth it. I whole heartedly believe and understand that now. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.