The Sleep Monster

I read frequently about my friends’ woes with their sleeping, or non-sleeping babies. They post updates about lack of sleep on facebook, and on their blogs, they detail their sleep woes in private notes and simple conversations. Even though we know that we aren’t alone in the battle to get our babies to sleep, it still throws us for a loop and causes us to judge ourselves as parents when our babies won’t sleep the way we want them to.

A change for the worse in Nora’s sleep pattern sometimes makes me feel like I am doing something wrong as her parent. I judge my parenting skills by her ability to sleep 11 straight hours. And I know this is ridiculous. Her sleep says nothing about my ability to teach her the important things in life. It says nothing about her future moral self, work ethic or intelligence (at least I don’t think it does). But every time she has a slip in her sleep, part of me feels like I’m failing at something. I don’t judge other parents’ ability by their babies sleep. I don’t think, “Oh, her baby is waking up too much, what a bad parent.” I don’t think, “She is such a better mother than me since her baby sleeps well.” I chalk it all up to luck. Why can’t I do that with Nora too? Why does it feel like a failure for myself when I judge it as luck in everyone else?

This past week Nora’s good sleep habits fell by the wayside. She was sick and I was rocking her to bed so she wouldn’t cough herself into a vomiting fit. So then, of course, she wanted me to rock her every night. And it started taking 40 minutes to put her to sleep. We tried to “retrain” her to sleep on her own. She just pulled the usual Nora vomit trick. Ken and I decided that cleaning up vomit was less pleasant then losing some of our evening time together for the time being, so I rocked on.

When I was away Friday evening, Ken got her to sleep with no rocking. When we were both out Saturday, my mom got her to sleep with no rocking. A pattern emerged. She likes to manipulate her mother. Probably because I’m pretty easy to manipulate.

So Ken is in there putting her to sleep. I put on her pjs and brushed her hair and then I left. And she cried a bit, but Ken gets her quiet and reads her story and sings her song. He says she shakes her head yes when he asks her if she wants to go to bed. And then she goes, no crying (maybe a little) and no vomit. I miss her bedtime. I miss rocking her a little as she dazes out. I miss putting her in her crib and seeing her stick her thumb peacefully in her mouth. I sit on the couch feeling a bit like a failure. But I know I’ll be back in there soon enough, since nothing in the sleep department seems to last too long – good or bad.

I’ll see her at 5:30 am. When she wakes up too early. And until I am a bit more caffeinated, I’ll sit in the rocker, feeling like I’ve done something wrong to deserve such an early awakening. But when I go out into the living room with her, I’ll log onto facebook and read about someone else who has to be up that early too. And we can all suffer together with the help of the Internet.