On Expectations

I feel like before I begin, I should start by telling you the real truth of our situation. Now, I know that when I tell you this, some of you are not going to have any sympathy for us regarding the story that follows. In fact, some of you may never be friends with me again. But I know I should be honest about the situation to keep things in perspective. With you. With myself. Okay, here it goes. Here is our little secret.

Our babies almost always sleep for 11-12 hours each night, usually uninterrupted.

It's okay. You can take a minute to process that. I'll wait.

Sticking with me? No? Fine. You were never my friend to begin with. Bah!

Now, they don't always sleep so well. We do have bad nights. Last night was a rough one, and we were both up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night trying to sort it out. Naps are another story and are often interrupted in favor of screaming. But for the most part, almost every night, our children sleep from 7:30pm to 7am.

How did this happen? We did what some people would call "sleep training" and some people refer to as "Ferberizing" and some other people call "teaching your children to self-soothe" and still other people refer to as "crying it out." People who are really opposed to these strategies often don't really know that much about them. It doesn't mean you never respond to your child's crying. It doesn't mean you don't check on them in the middle of the night or leave them sitting in filthy diapers or whatever. For us, it mostly just means that we have to do a couple of things. One, recognize that sleeping well is as important for our children's growth as eating. And the second is accepting that crying is how babies communicate, and sometimes all a baby is communicating is, "I'm having trouble falling sleep! This sucks!"

Believe it or not, we didn't actually set out to let our children "cry it out." We're kind of spiritualists in the sense that our attitude was that we wanted to go into parenthood without too many expectations about how our children would behave and who they would be. We wanted to find out who they were and learn to live with them just like we would anyone else in our lives rather than shoving our own needs and expectations down their throats. (This excludes basic discipline, mind you, before anyone thinks I'm the kind of mother who will let my child throw a temper tantrum uninterrupted in the middle of the grocery store.) It turns out our babies are people who need sleep and act really strung out and grumpy without it. And it also turns out they are people who neither wanted nor needed us to help them with that. The latter we are still struggling with. Because even when we thought we didn't, we had expectations.

We bought a rocking chair. We expected to be rocking babies in it. We pictured ourselves cuddling with fussy, sleepy babies late at night, rocking them, soothing them back to sleep. We pictured babies who would be so in need of love and affection that they would find nothing more comforting than being allowed to climb into bed with us in the middle of the night. But these were not to be our babies. From the very beginning and even now, any attempts to soothe our children when they are fussing themselves to sleep end in disaster. All we do is make it worse. All we do is make them scream louder and longer and harder. And yet it is so, so hard not to go in. What if they are hurt? What if they are sick? What if they are on fire? What if they have been mysteriously decapitated in the middle of the night and their heads are just rolling around by themselves on the floor? What if they have, literally, screamed their heads off?

We both had this idea that being permitted to sleep in your parents' bed when you are sick or scared or having a hard time sleeping is comforting. I remember very clearly the first (and second and third and fourth) time I tried to bring Yona into our bed when she couldn't sleep. The minute I sat down on the bed her screaming went from loud to louder. In Addis Ababa, when the children slept in our bed because there was no alternative, they were miserable and cried most of the night. Cribs seemed to provide them with some sort of comfort. They were familiar, I suppose. In the past few weeks, we have managed to convince our children that our bed is at least a fun place to play if not sleep, so we still hope that one day there will be Sunday morning cuddles at least. It's not that we have any goal of creating a "family bed"--totally not our thing--but we keep looking for ways to soothe our children when they are having trouble sleeping. Like maybe there's this magic thing we haven't discovered yet.

Only I think we know what the magic thing is. The magic thing is that when they are working through sleeping issues, we need to stay the fuck out of it. And the real problem is that we're having trouble letting go of our expectations. We do not have the kinds of babies who enjoy being rocked and cuddled in the middle of the night. We do not have the kinds of babies who want one more story or one more drink of water. We do not have the kinds of babies who want a different toy or to climb into our bed. We do not have babies who prefer to nap in the stroller or car seat or in our arms. We have babies who have been in an institution for most of their lives, and they have each developed their ways of coping with frustration, and those ways do not presently involve the parents they have only recently acquired. We have babies who seem to find both comfort and distress within the bars of their crib. And at this point I think there's little we can do about that but give them time and space to work through it. We need to let go of our expectations. We need to accept that our children are who they are, and that we cannot control every single aspect of their lives.

Expectations are tricky things. They are present even when you think they are not, and letting go of them is a constant challenge. Even if we manage to let go of the idea of rocking our babies to sleep, there will be some other secret expectation we didn't realize we had. The truth is that I think we're lucky to be going through this now. We know parents who have taken years or even decades to figure out that their children are, in fact, independent beings. It's a hard lesson, and I'm sure we'll need a refresher numerous times throughout our lives.