Sunday Confessional by Elizabeth Dodson

I have a confession.  This motherhood thing is kicking my ass.

I have a nearly 9 month old daughter.  She has been crawling for a couple months, standing for about equally as long, cruising and now often tests her balance out to see if she can stand alone.  She also attempts to climb anything I let her test out.  And I do let her test out everything – even if I have to stand behind her with my hands secretly circling her waist, waiting to catch her if she falls.  People tell me I’m in trouble – I’m going to have an early walker.  I will really have my hands full then.

But, this is not the motherhood that is kicking my ass.  I don’t find it difficult to “keep up” with the baby.  Her incessant adventurous spirit and curiosity energizes me.

No, what is kicking my ass is the mom guilt.  It’s not self-imposed either.  Or maybe it is.  I’m talking about the mom guilt that comes from the wealth of information available to us parents today.  Thank you, World Wide Web.  No matter what I do, I can find at least four articles by “experts” telling me I’m failing as a parent and I’m ruining my child.

My daughter slept through the night early – from 2 ½ months of age.  When I say she slept through the night, I mean she slept a 3 hour block, I fed her when I went to bed, and she slept a full eight hours before I woke her in the morning.  That’s right, I woke her, to keep her on schedule.  The first few nights I was cautious to believe she was sleeping through the night and thought it might just be a fluke.  I also worried she was sick or something was wrong – why was she sleeping so well?!  Of course, this is what I had been wishing for since we brought her home from the hospital but now that I finally had it, it was difficult to just relax and enjoy.  But after a few weeks of the same consistent sleep schedule, I felt confident this was it.  My baby was sleeping through the night.  I think I was a bit more than confident.  Maybe even a bit arrogant.  I had a sleep schedule for my baby and it worked.  She was sleeping through the night.  It really wasn’t that hard.  All these other parents who struggle so much with sleep and can’t be bothered with schedules – well, I understood why they had so many sleep problems.  I really thought I had it all figured out.  I was a bit smug about it, really.  We even made it through the four-month sleep regression.  She was still sleeping through the night.  We had a night or two where she woke up after the first time we put her down and wouldn’t settle, so I wore her, but she still went to bed when we did and slept the full eight hours.  There were one or two mornings here and there when she woke up early, but usually she’d go to bed by 7pm, get a dream feed at 10p and go back to sleep until I woke her at 7am.

Then she turned six months.  I thought she hit a growth spurt.  She probably did.  She woke several times a night to eat and mostly went right back to sleep.  After a few days she went back to sleeping through the night again.  But at 6.5 months we went on a road trip.  I tried to keep her schedule as much as possible, driving 7-8 hours in a car every day.  Something changed drastically with her sleep.  She took much longer to get to sleep now and wouldn’t let us put her down.  As soon as she was put down in the pack n play, she’d awake and start kicking and screaming.  So we moved to co-sleeping/family bed for the duration of the vacation.  During this time she also fed frequently throughout the night.  I chalked it up to being distracted during the day and not feeding properly and felt confident everything would all go back to “normal” once we returned home.

It didn’t.

This was our new normal.  She was fine with being put down in her crib at her 7pm bedtime as usual, but once I fed her at 10pm she would not go down anywhere other than next to me.  And she was not sleeping eight hours anymore.  She would awake every 2-3 hours throughout the night.  She mostly just wanted to eat.  Very rarely would she awake, eat and not go right back to sleep.

But suddenly I questioned everything.  I must be doing something wrong.  My baby once slept through the night, so obviously she should still be sleeping through the night.  What did I mess up?  What do I need to change?

I started reading everything I could get my hands on.  I came up with all of the following:

1. I failed from the beginning to teach my baby to sleep properly and now she’ll never be able to put herself to sleep unless I sleep train. It’s the only option to let my baby get the sleep she needs and deserves.
2. My baby doesn’t need to nurse throughout the night anymore and by letting her sleep next to me and do so, I am creating bad habits and I’ll never get her out of my bed now.
3. My baby needs to nurse so much more now because my milk is drying up and she’s starving so I should just start feeding her formula
4. I’m letting my baby use me as a pacifier and now she’ll never be able to “self sooth”

There were more, but these were the top causes of my mom guilt.  And, I’ll admit I even read thoroughly into the sleep training and chose the “no tears” way to teach her to put herself to sleep.  It didn’t work.  If she was at all awake, she would scream and get hysterical (as in the cortisol-producing type hysterical) within seconds of me putting her down.  I stressed more.

But then I started to use some of my logic.  Maybe it was the lack of sleep and overload of guilt, but I felt like I needed to make myself feel like I was actually doing something right.  While most of the above absolutes have some aspect that makes sense to me, they don’t completely explain my situation.  #1 explained my baby didn’t know how to put herself to sleep and so now every time she stirred in the middle of the night she required me to put her back to sleep.  This simply isn’t true though.  She often has in the past put herself to sleep and usually does go back to sleep on her own when she stirs.  However, when she’s hungry she does not.  She wants to eat and as soon as she is fed, she will happily go back to sleep.  #2 is just funny to me now.  How does anyone know if my baby needs to eat or not?  My baby knows.  I trust that now.  I trust that whether it is hunger or fear or pain or anything else she is feeling, she very much needs me at those times she reaches for me.  And I don’t believe I am creating anything other than trust and confidence to teach her that I am here for her when she needs me.

#3 may never go away until she really weans.  I feel I’ll forever be in a state of stress over my supply – whether I have oversupply and I’m causing her to only get the watery and sugary milk, or it’s low supply and she’s starving, or worse I’m drying up and I won’t be able to breastfeed her at all.  I’m trying to trust in my body because it really has proven to be a pretty amazing structure of work so far.  And I can’t believe #4 could even be suggested about a baby.  She’s a baby!  She shouldn’t have to “self sooth”.  That’s why she has parents.  That’s part of my job as mom, as I see it.

I’m a first time mom.  I stressed so much and was so anxious about giving birth, that I think I forgot to worry about the actual parenting part.  I really was a little shell-shocked when I brought my baby home.  I still am sometimes.  But I’m realizing that when I trust myself and my instincts I do make the decisions that are best for me and my baby.  That doesn’t mean they are the best decisions, period.  Every baby is different, just like every mom is different.  There is no absolute answer for any of this.  Just like my baby girl is exploring and needs room to make mistakes or fall sometimes so she can learn, I need the same thing.  I am rejecting the “experts” who tell me I’m failing and letting go of this mom guilt so I can enjoy this time learning from this beautiful soul I helped create.