Sleepies

We’re taking part in a big longitudinal adoption study, The Early Growth and Development study. It’s interesting for me from a geeky research perspective. This kind of social research is really hard and I get to watch the watchers and think about how valid I think the results will be. My orientation is anthropological, and I instinctively reject this sort of staged human research, but, at the same time, the amount of dollars and the invasiveness of doing participant-observation on this many adoptive families makes that option absurd. We have our first of three 2-hour home visits on the 16th—5 days before we move. Ha! Not the most representative time to observe Izzy in her natural environment.

To prepare for the visit both Pidi and I have to fill out some really long dot-questionnaires¹. I finally used yesterday afternoon’s naptime to plunge in. I hate multiple choice questions. I know, especially given the recent rash of pop-culture versions recently seen on FB, that lots of people enjoy multiple choice quizzes that tell you who you are, but I hate ’em. The instructions assure you that the questions can be answered “yes” or “no” or ranked by one of many scales, but my mental answers are never quite so tidy. Take this one:

I don’t care very much whether other people like me or the way I do things. True or False

Well, I do care whether people like me, but I often seem to do things that people think are strange or don’t like. And I keep doing them, even though it makes people cranky. Then there are the plain weird questions:

I am usually able to get other people to believe me, even when I know that what I am saying is exaggerated or untrue. True or False

Now, here, you have to wonder, if this is T for someone, wouldn’t they say F, just to fuck with the questioner? I mean, that seems to be the implication of the question, that you are the kind of person who has tested this proposition and therefore knows whether people believe you when you’re full of shit, right? I am generally able to get people to believe me, but I credit that to the fact that I am pretty much always saying something true, to the best of my knowledge.

You can see how this sort of thing can bog me down. This questionnaire has 51 pages, and a lot of different styles of question, most of them a bit blunt-instrument, in my estimation. In the Parenting section, there’s this gem:

When my child does something I don’t like, I insult my child, say mean things, or call my child names. The scale ranges from “never or rarely” to “Most of the time.”

Ok, so this question reminds me of applying for a job at McDonald’s when I was 16. My mom had decided that it was time I learned responsibility, and that I needed to get a job. I honestly have no idea why I decided to apply to McDonald’s, but that’s being a teenager for you². They had a little personality assessment included in the application, and one of the questions I remember was “If your manager asks you to sweep the lobby area, what would you say?” And it had some absurd choices, like “I’d tell him to go take a leap,” or “I’d discuss the merits of sweeping the lobby,” or “I’d say yes, sir, right away sir.” Now, c’mon. Who gets that kind of question wrong? Oh—and the Early Child Development Study questionnaire assures you constantly that there’s no wrong answer. I s’pose not, but jesus, if you are answering “Most of the time” to being verbally abusive to your newly adopted child, something’s wrong, and it predates which circle you’re filling in here. Sigh. I digress. But that’s why I have a blog.

I started this post thinking about Izzy’s sleep patterns, or lack thereof. I was reflecting that the questionnaire asks gazillions of questions, but only 14 of them have to do with sleep. But sleep is about the only area where I would say things are less than rosy with our dear one. And the questions don’t really reflect that. I mean, she’s not afraid of sleeping in the dark, falls asleep within twenty minutes, goes to bed at the same time each night, doesn’t resist going to bed at bedtime, doesn’t need a special object (um, unless you include mom or dad in this “object” category), etc.

The thing she doesn’t do, which seems to be something she’s supposed to be able to do, is to fall asleep on her own, after being put awake into her crib. Izzy falls asleep on me or poppa. Perhaps, though, I should back up a bit, in the interest of completism.

Izzy was entrusted to us by Leda when Izzy was three weeks old. Three weeks and three days, to be precise. I had read about swaddling, and knew about it from the general crunchy-mama lit. An internet papa-friend of Pidi’s had highly recommended Swaddle Designs swaddling blankets, and we’d bought a couple, for take 1. They make beautiful swaddling blankets that aim right at the hipster-consumerist targets on our chests. We got one in so-last-year-now, but very of-the-moment-then blue flannel with brown polka dots and stitching, as well as a plain mint green one.

The first night with Izzy, new parent-panic-101 night, I think we tried our first swaddle about midway through the night. I had the Happiest Baby on the Block book with us, which fortunately had a how-to illustration, and we managed a weak swaddle. Weak was enough for the little bean, though, and she settled happily in to it. It was great. She still woke up regularly for feedings, but she didn’t thrash herself into wakefulness in between feedings—and thrash she did, any time we tried going without the swaddle.

With some bumps and grinds along the way, that was the way we rode til Iz was around seven months old. For the most part she’d do 3–4 hour stretches, and Pidi and I would switch off, each getting up for every other one. As we passed the six month mark things started getting a little sketchier, since Iz was getting a lot more active, and starting to be less complacent about the swaddle. She’d go in happily at bed time, but middle of the night swaddles were becoming a little more aerobic for mama and poppa than you really want at 2.30a.m.

Finally, at around seven months she said “no more” pretty clearly one night. You could maybe get the swaddle on her, but in about 2 seconds flat she’d be out, blinking at you mildly, as if to say, “huh, that all you got?” So, then—now—we’ve all got to figure out what the heck one does to put a baby to sleep without a swaddle.

Bedtime itself is pretty no-hassle. We’ve got a good routine, and a regular bed time. After putting on her night dipe, snuggling with Good Night Moon, and having a bottle, she falls asleep in five or ten minutes. When I put her into her crib she rolls onto her belly, sticks her little butt in the air, drags her flannel blankie over her head and commences to snore.

But the pattern for the rest of the night is, for the most part, no pattern. Some nights it’s up every three hours, others it’s every hour to hour and a half. The really choppy nights started with the advent of teeth. It’s no fun. But it’s not every night. Last night went like this: she went down at 7, woke at 10, and I was up with her for about an hour; then she woke at 12.30 and I was up with her til 1.30³; then, wonder of wonders, she slept through til about 6.30! That’s the longest continuous stretch of sleep I’ve had in a very very long time. The thing is, of course, that even when the Pidi gets up, I notice her crying and him getting up and then coming back to bed. So it’s only when she doesn’t get up at all that I really sleep through. It was heaven. Truly.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing that I can compare to sleep deprivation of this sort. Nothing else in my experience has ever inspired in me crazier thoughts, more obsessive scheming, more insecurity about whether I’m doing it right. I was thinking about this last night while gingerly straightening from the 30 degree bend I had assumed to calm her thrashing body. This involved pushing up from the mattress, hoping the bed springs wouldn’t creak, and that I wouldn’t feel her leg thrust out in preparation for rolling onto her back. That she wouldn’t, one more time—as in the three previous attempts I’d made to put her down in the last hour—spring suddenly into full, waking action, flipping over, flapping her arms and legs and babbling sweetly and alertly. As I stood above her, thinking that maybe I had finally finally finally settled her, but waiting vigilantly for signs of explosion, I laughed to myself with the realization that if I had any doubts left that I don’t have a god, they are settled now, because if I was gonna pray, that is when I’d do it. I’d make a deal with just about anybody after an hour plus of trying to settle her, if they could actually get her to sleep. But there ain’t nobody but us, Izzy and me. Hangin’ with the glider and the crib, the street lights and the drunks walking to their cars at 2am.

Unfortunately, though—and this is what this post is really about—in my darkest moments, there are a bunch of others crammed in that room with us. All the voices of authority who state confidently the way babies should be sleeping at one age or another. And all the grandparents who tell you how they did it. And all the parents who ask how you’re sleeping, as if you might answer something other than “not enough.” In the wee, tiredest hours of the morning, they make me doubt what I do, and wonder whether if I was a better parent I’d be able to create the perfect environment for Izzy to be sleeping through the night already.

In my center, when I look at Izzy, I see all sorts of reasons that she would have some trouble sleeping solidly.

First and foremost, we’re primates. She’s a warmth-seeking, highly social being, who wants to touch and cuddle and hear the blood of another coursing through their heart by her ear. To feel the breathing in and out of her mother, and to know that she is safe and not-alone. When Izzy came to us, we started out with a family bed, and Izzy slept with us for the first couple months or so. I think this was a really important thing for all of us. Izzy had been wrenched from her birthmother, with whom she’d spent not only her time becoming in the womb, but her first three weeks out in this big overwhelming world. There is no way I’d have made her sleep alone, and that time helped us all bond with each other.

But after the first couple months, Pidi and I decided that we really needed our grown-up snuggle time at night to help nurture us, and keep our own relationship strong. Though we loved Izzy being in our bed, we knew that we were starting to suffer without our sleep time contact. So after talking to our pediatrician and our counselor and each other, Izzy went into her own cradle. Her cradle was at the foot of our bed at first, and then she went into her own room at around five and a half months.

Now, most nights, she comes into our bed by morning. She usually wakes at around 5 and we bundle her up and snuggle her between us to sneak another couple of hours of sleep in. We all enjoy that time—especially the slow silly waking up. Izzy awakens first, and starts talking to herself quietly. Then she starts tapping us in the face to gently—and then less gently, depending on how hard asleep we are!—suggest we should wake up too, and play.

I know in my heart that Izzy would be absolutely happiest sleeping with us all night, if sleep were the only metric in her life (as it sometimes feels like it is becoming in ours!). But sleep isn’t the only thing, and Pidi and my overall relationship quality is a big factor in Izzy’s world. For the long-term, and for each day, it’s better for us to have a little just-us space and time.

Beyond whether she sleeps alone or with us, the rate at which she is growing and learning have to make for restless nights. Her sponge-brain and active little body soak up everything she can grasp and see and hear every waking moment of the day. She’s learned, in just the last month alone, to crawl and pull-up and, almost, to clap. And she can’t turn off so well, just because it’s nighttime. When I think of every time I’ve been in a situation with a steep learning curve—a challenging new job, a research project, a new love affair—I dream about what I’m learning, often waking in the midst of a dream of doing some task over and over again⁴. And it’s clear that Izzy is rehearsing during the night. Often I’ll walk in the room and she is doing her newest thing: waving, sitting up, or, lately, pulling herself to stand at the end of her crib, looking straight at me as I walk in the room.

She’s also still a skinny little stick, drinking two to three bottles over the course of the night, even though she’s been eating solids for months. It’s like her activity level keeps outpacing her eating. And now she’s getting teeth. She’s not a big complainer on the tooth front, but her most restless nights have preceded the grand entrance of each of her beautiful new teeth, now sharp and glinting in the middle of her formerly toothless, pink gums.

It’s a lot to make a girl restless all told.

There’s a story about me when I was a baby that my mom has told to me countless times for as long as I can remember. My mom actually told it again just the other day. It goes like this: I learned pretty early how to climb out of my crib, and would crawl down the stairs to go visit with my parents after bedtime. My mother would play with me for a while and then put me back to bed. When I couldn’t get out, I would cry, and my mom would go to me. At some point, my dad insisted that she not go to me, that I “cry it out” in today’s parlance. She did, though it tortured her, and after that night I stopped crying and just slept.

Now, as a parent, it is clear that there is some condensation of time and sequence here, but the gist is undoubtedly, knowing my parents, true. They were both raised with that great American tradition of protestant sternness, a tradition that seems to be the most powerful influence on childrearing instruction to this day, attachment parenting’s rise notwithstanding. And this story has been a constant refrain in my head as I wander the thicket of baby sleep literature and methodology. I wonder to myself whether I am spoiling her, whether she’ll ever learn to fall asleep on her own.

But I can’t do the cry it out thing. I have no doubt that it works. But I don’t see that it did me a lot of good on a character-structure level. The message I got from that experience, and from being raised with the underlying philosophy behind it, was that “you’re on your own, kid.” I want to make clear that I don’t think I was neglected or unloved, by any stretch. But what my parents knew to do—and what they knew from their own childhoods—was that kids needed to learn to stand on their own as soon as they possibly could. It would prepare them for the hard world ahead of them. And, too, it would take some of the burden of parenting off of the parents.

The result of this, for me, is that I am incredibly self-reliant. This has many advantages. But in the extreme form it took in me, it also becomes a liability. It makes it harder for me to ask for help (I don’t believe it will be forthcoming); to make connections with others (if you can’t depend on people what’s the point?); and, in general, to have trouble trusting. I have spent and will continue to spend a lot of energy unlearning those qualities. I’ve come a long way. If I hadn’t I never would have made the decision to have a child.

And when I hold Izzy in my arms, I know that I will never be able to let her cry it out. I am going to keep the burden of parenting to myself and to Pidi, and let her continue to trust that when she calls, mama or papa will come. Again, and again, and again. That’s the deal. That’s my commitment. Sleepless nights and all.

Footnotes

 ¹ To be filled out in ballpoint pen, of all things. Fortunately they send you a couple with the paperwork. At first I thought, “Gee, thanks, a crappy ballpoint pen,” but then noticed the instructions to use said pen to fill out the questionnaire.

 ² Yes, I got the job, and was a stellar Fry Girl for several months, rapidly moving up to Counter Girl. Though it seemed like forever, I think I lasted about six months.

 ³ Me going to her two times in a row was accidental—it was Pidi’s turn, but sometimes one of us hears her in our sleep, gets up, and goes to her room pretty much on automatic. Several times I have gotten up, put my robe on, walked to her room, opened the door and almost had a heart attack because someone was standing over her crib—Pidi. I hadn’t even have noticed he wasn’t lying next to me when I got up.

 ⁴ In another journey through Pottergrrl’s spotted work-history, my most vivid example of this phenomena is when I had dropped out of college, kicked myself out of my mom’s house, and gotten my first real job. Real in the sense that it had to pay my rent and bills. The job I found was as a clerk in the lingerie department of a local department store chain. I got promoted to department coordinator, and was responsible for taking inventory. This was before barcodes and scanners, and involved putting every single item in order by color and size, and then counting them. Next time you are in a lingerie department, really take in how many individual panties, half slips, full-slips, camisoles, bras, girdles, garter belts, bustiers, tap pants, and various other minor items there are, in how many different colors and styles. A single color of a single style of bra in the full size range is 27 pieces of merchandise. There are generally two or three in each size package, meaning up to 81 on the floor. Sale tables were the worst, as customers would come to a neatly-ordered table and assume, apparently, that the best method for finding their size was not to read the tags, figure out the order, and go to their size. No, what most did was, more or less, to pick up as many as they could grasp, toss them into the air, and then hope their size landed on top. Seriously. During my first inventory, I spent many nights sizing rack after rack of bras in my sleep…

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