The worst part of lying awake in bed at 4:30 this morning listening to Mike's deep sleep breaths was not knowing if I'd done the right thing.
I'll bet we all have that one area of parenting that refuses to yield a clear course of action. No matter what we decide, we find ourselves wondering if we should have decided differently.
For me -- and this is not going to be a surprise to anyone who's read much about my parenting neuroses -- it's whether and how to sleep train. In particular, at 4:30 a.m. today it was whether I had made the right decision at 4:00 a.m. to practice a little Ferberizing.
Four o'clock in the morning is not the optimal time to be making decisions. It is, however, an excellent time to engage me in a battle of wills. If you want to lose. Not that Jake was the loser, of course. He is developing the important skill of being able to sleep alone. Even if he is also developing, the irrational part of me cries, a crushed sense of self.
Why It Was Time for a Sleep Showdown
I really wish Jake hadn't awakened this morning with a diaper full of poo. Because of that poo, his delighted grin and arms reaching for his mother did little to alleviate my fear that I had just perpetrated the grossest of abuses in letting him cry himself to sleep last night.
Bear in mind that the phrase "letting him cry himself to sleep" tells only the barest four minutes of the story. You don't go from the easy clockwork of baby cry, adults out of bed, Daddy to daybed, and Jake to bed with Mommy to stoically letting your little one cry without budging from your warm spot under the duvet.
No, last night began in typical fashion, with me lying on my bed with Jake at bedtime to help him fall asleep. The New York Times recently reported on a study concluding that if you hold your child to help him fall asleep, you are dooming him to a life spent tossing and turning at night. If so, it's already too late for Jake, and hopefully by the time he's a full blown insomniac he'll be too old to want to take it out on me.
Increasingly, bedtime in our home is a forty minute ordeal. I put on the baby sleep CD. It lulls me to drowsiness, with the unfortunate effect of leaving me even more unprepared for the sudden poke in my mouth. "Mou. Mou," Jake announces with a smile as I open my eyes.
"Yes, mouth," I say with a small smile of confirmation. "Now, go to sleep."
Jake is a cooperative guy, eager to get along. He sticks his thumb in his mouth and works at it diligently, his eyes open so wide I can see all the pristine baby white around each blue iris. He clambers on top of me and snuggles. He slides to the side and burrows into a pillow. He climbs back on me. He rolls to the other side and nearly off the bed. The sleep music CD plays on, unheeded.
"Jake, you need to sleep," I say firmly after ten minutes of increasingly enthusiastic tossing and turning. I sit up to drive the point home. This is not play with Mommy time. This is serious please, please let Mommy and Daddy have just a couple quiet hours together while you sleep time.
Jake sits up too, a big baby grin greeting the prospect of perhaps reading another book. I can see him looking around for one in the shadows.
"No, lie down," I say with a defeated sigh. I flop down to let him crawl over me again, telling myself that at any moment his breathing will slow and slur, and his thumb will gently fall from his open mouth.
And as I do so, I think long and hard about that New York Times article.
The Decision Is Made
I did not find it surprising, or even terribly disappointing, when Jake's cry awakened me at some undetermined hour of the night. He's had a cough that requires nighttime ministrations. Which, in our drug-averse household, means a bottle of juice and Mommy's arms.
Tired as I've been the past few days, I didn't even mind forcing myself awake some time later to take him back to his crib, a limp, beautiful being in my arms. Generally, this approach has worked for us. He wakes up perfectly happy in his crib in the morning and, once he's over his cough/cold/teething/pneumonia it doesn't much occur to him to disturb us in the middle of the night any more.
Except during the border nights like this one, when he's pretty much over the ailment that requires our attention and is mostly waking up because he's downright pissed to find himself banished yet again from the comfort of our bed.
Hence, the wail that awakened me at 3:30 last night was one of anger, not distress.
I heaved a sigh against my frustration and went to his room.
"I want you to sleep here," I said as gently as I could.
Jake jumped up and down and wailed to show me he understood but strongly disagreed.
"Fine," I barked. I picked him up and held him, bewildered, away from my body as I carried him across the hall and dropped him on the bed. "Good night," I fumed, and turned my back to him.
This is why I know my child is a genius. He has figured out that when I angrily turn my back on him in the middle of the night the best course of action is to settle for oh-so-gently touching Mommy's back with a lonely need for reassurance and sadly deal with what is no doubt a deflated triumph of the beds. It's hard, I'm sure, but better than crying for Mommy to hold you when it only makes her hiss at you to Go To Sleep Already!
Our real trouble came half an hour later, when I roused myself for the fourth time that night to carry him back to bed. And the thing I always fear happened -- he woke up the minute I lowered him into the crib.
This was when I decided it was time to sleep train. I spoke to him gently and explained why this was a good bed for him. I rubbed his back until he fell asleep. I told myself there were parents all over the world doing exactly the same thing right now, that I was not the only person leaning over a dark crib in my underwear at 4:00 in the morning. And, finally, I settled into my bed for two minutes before he woke up and we repeated the reassurances.
After a few rounds, I started letting him cry for a minute or two before going to him. Which I figured wasn't the worst thing in the world when I was spending at least five minutes each trip murmuring assurances to help him sleep.
Mike was back in our bed telling me I was doing the right thing when I let the cries go for three very, very, very long minutes. I started to head back to his room. Silence. I got back into bed. A wail. Silence. A whimper. Then . . . silence.
And there I lay, wide awake, wondering whether Jake was warm enough and if his throat hurt and whether he was dreaming about being orphaned on a cold mountaintop where mommies don't exist.
Surrender to Not Knowing
Jake's exceeding good cheer this morning was certainly a godsend, as was waking to a sunny room and a still sleeping child at 7:30. But surviving last night is far from the end of the story.
Now I have to decide whether to do it again. And at what point in the night -- when he first awakens, asking for juice? Only if he demands to come back to bed a second time? Should I change our bedtime ritual so he learns to start his night out without the comforting arms of Mommy or Daddy to lull him to sleep? And how do I figure out what's best for him, not just me, when there are new episodes of The Colbert Report to watch if only Mike and I could sit down to dinner before 9:00 for a change?
I like having a course of action. I've learned enough from my yoga practice to be prepared to change it as circumstances require. But I want to know what the plan is at this moment in time. It's like keeping a shopping list so I know I won't wander the aisles of the grocery store making impulse buys like ginger goat cheese and forgetting the oatmeal, leaving the three of us to forage for less satisfying breakfast choices.
Most of the time, having an idea of how I want to approach something lets me let it go. But if I'm not certain -- if, for example, I have no idea what I'm going to do when it comes time to put my boy to bed tonight -- it's pretty difficult to ignore my mind's chatter. Something as out of my hands as whether Jake will sleep through the night tonight is destroying my mindfulness.
This is the point where I need to surrender.
We all have our coping mechanisms, our ways of dealing with the fact that raising a child is hard, uncertain work and that it's not always easy to know what your heart is telling you to do. Of simply navigating the overwhelming demands of bills and 529 plans and remembering to pick up the dog poop before mowing the lawn. Our minds naturally chatter, we develop our own personal unreasonable fears as we grow, but every day we find ways to deal.
Eventually, though, your coping mechanisms reveal themselves to be just that -- a way of coping. You can't change the underlying circumstances -- what it is that gives rise to your fears, that causes your anger or sorrow, and that, yes, makes you lose sleep at night. The more you think "coping" means "changing," the less able to cope you will be. Because you'll keep doing what you do and expecting the change to happen outside of yourself. In the end, you won't change because you won't see the need to, and circumstances won't change because you don't have that power.
Surrender is the act of accepting that we can't change anything but ourselves -- and even changing ourselves happens only with surrender.
Western society places so much value on action that it's often really hard to resist the feeling that we should be doing something to ail what bugs us. Like it's all up to us. And like we can create a world in which we can live bugged free.
Surrender requires nothing more than letting go. It's a whole lot easier to let go when you acknowledge that holding on isn't going to make a difference -- except, possibly, in your sanity. In fact, you'll be the only one who knows you're letting go. Because the circumstances had no idea you were trying to change them. It was all in your head. So get your head out of it.
My work for today, then, is to accept that I can't render Jake's life trauma-free. Because that's really my goal when I obsess about sleep training or any other choices I make as his mother. I want to make the perfect choices because, in my mind, if I do so Jake will have a perfect life.
It's hard for me to say it, but Jake's life will not be perfect. Because life isn't. Either he will feel sad and angry because I am making him stay in his bed at night or he will he will feel sad and angry because I lose my patience when he is making it hard for me to sleep. Sometimes he will have a sore throat or a poopy diaper and I will let him cry because I just didn't know. Some day Jake will learn that his parents' relationship with each other is as important as their relationship with him, and that means that they need to sleep with each other and he needs to sleep alone.
Sad, yes. But, sad, or not, it's the truth. And when we surrender to the truth -- when we don't tell ourselves we can avoid sadness by manipulating the world around us -- we are free to focus on the happy things. Like Jake's smile for me this morning. Or what a good mood he's in when he sleeps through the night. Or how very, very deeply his mother loves him. So deeply that she spends too much time trying to make the right choices, even if there is no such thing.
Letting Go Even When It's Hard: Upavista Konasana (Seated Wide-Legged Forward Fold)
I've chosen a stretching asana that I found really difficult for a long time. It irked me that I could barely sit up straight with my legs in a wide straddle, much less fold forward. My inclination, of course, was to change this situation by folding forward even though it compromised the pose. Progress was not made.
The only way I was finally able to reach the floor in upavista konasana was by first surrendering to the fact that I couldn't. It works this way in every pose, just like in life. Surrender, let go of goals and courses of action, acknowledge what you can change and what you can't, and you may be surprised to find yourself where you wanted to be all along. Or maybe not, but somewhere that's probably just as good.
If there's another asana that fits the bill for you -- the one that makes you cringe every time the teacher utters it -- use it for the main purpose here. To surrender.
Upavista Konasana (Seated Wide-Legged Forward Fold) Instructions
1) Sit on your mat with your legs spread at about a 45 degree angle. Even if you can spread them wider, you will better avoid injury by sticking to 45 degrees. If you can not spread them that wide, accept your body's limitation and spread them as wide as you can without experiencing pain.
2) Place your hands next to your hips and perform a shoulder loop: to the front, up toward your ears, and down your back. Think of your shoulder blades as supporting your heart. Then draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart, helping it lift further.
3) If you find that you must lean back to support this position, or if you are still collapsing in your lower back and belly, sit on the very edge of a folded blanket (just your sitting bones, not your thighs, will rest on the blanket). This will help lengthen your lower back so you don't end up compressing it instead.
4) Point your toes strongly toward the ceiling. You will probably find yourself rotating your inner thighs subtly toward the floor to keep your toes pointing directly up instead of out to the side.
5) Stay here for 5-8 slow, long, deep breaths. You may even challenge yourself by lifting your heels off the floor. The rest of your legs remain on the floor.
6) If you feel able to do so without compromising your long spine or causing yourself pain, place your hands in front of you, about shoulder distance apart. Perform a shoulder loop and let your tailbone lengthen as your heart reaches forward.
7) You may stay here and breathe or slowly, consciously make your way closer to the floor. Each time you move, take a moment to inhale and draw your heart forward before lowering a few more inches with your exhale.
8) Don't try to change the outcome of this pose by losing the flex in your foot, collapsing your heart inward, letting your shoulders creep up toward your ears, or letting your belly pooch out. The only way you will change your shape in this pose is by surrendering to what your shape is in this moment.
Once you find your edge -- in upavista konasana or some other pose of your choosing -- see if you can maintain the position for 8-10 long, slow, deep breaths. Work on surrendering to the pose -- accepting it, letting your body open as it chooses, acknowledging that it is, yes, uncomfortable. Because sometimes being a mother, or just a person, is.
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