Killing Me Softly

Boo Boo starting calling me Mommy a couple months ago. He had been chanting “mmmm ommmm, ommm, ommmm” for a while, but his first full-blown “mommy” was a bear hug on my heart.

But it can also be like a dagger.

A couple weeks ago we were on vacation. We went to Portland, Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo to visit family. It did not take Boo Boo long to adjust to West Coast time. He woke up in the middle of our night flight and expended enough energy as he squirmed around enough over the badlands of Dakota and the deserts of Nevada to fall asleep again in my sister’s car as well drove to her house from PDX at around midnight. Soon enough on some nights he was partying hard until 9 pm. 

By the time we were in California he was waking up later and later until one morning he woke up at 8:30. I drank my coffee in my Aunt’s yard in SLO and watched the marine layer slide down the coastal hills. It was unnerving how relaxing it was.  

Now that he’s back here, three hours ahead of time and without endless space to run around, his circadian rhythm is out of whack. For the first three nights he went to bed by 9 pm and woke up again by 11 pm, when we were ready to go to bed. 

This usually resulted in me and Jer-bear exchanging laden glances, with a silent debate ensuing. Do we cuddle him back to sleep? Is he actually awake or is he talking in his sleep? How long do we let him cry? 

Well, not that long apparently. 

While we were on vacation there were only a couple nights when Boo Boo woke up, but most of the time he was too tuckered out from his adventures to muster any midnight tears. The couple of times he did wake up we would race to the bedroom, scoop him up and cuddle him until he was comatose enough to be transferred to his pack-n-play (which happens to get the go-to crib that all of our amazing hosts managed to procure ahead of our visits). After all, it must be weird to wake up in the middle of the night in a place you’ve never seen before, and because you’re small and new to the world everything that’s big is even bigger, and everything that’s dark is even darker than it is if you’re a grown up. 

Now we are here. We need our sleep and so does Boo Boo. Sleep training is awful but effective. The sleep that you and your baby get after the few (for us, three) nights of torture make it worth it. I think “no pain no gain” is something that applies here.  

We first did sleep training when Boo Boo was almost eight months old, a few weeks before I went back to work. We tried the more tender methods, but they didn’t work. The “cry-it-out” method leaves no room for ifs, ands or buts, making it easier to be consistent. 

We made the mistake of taking him to bed with us. It was the easiest thing to do. At first he’d fall asleep, but eventually then one night he started acting like it was play time. Playing with our hair and scaling our prone bodies were his favorite things to do.  

Disciples of certain parenting philosophies decry the “cry-it-out” method. Certainly it would be a cruel thing to do for a really young infant, but the point in which Boo Boo learned enough about cause and effect and implement it to train us (if I cry enough I’ll get to hang out in bed with my parents) instead of us training him, was the point in which we knew he could handle it. And he did. The first night was the hardest. He cried for a solid 45 minutes before falling asleep, but after three nights he was sleeping the whole night through. 

And then went to Vermont! It threw him for a loop, as we expected it would. The first night we brought him into bed with us when he started crying. We were sharing the cabin with our friends. These weren’t just any friends. They were the friends who drove us to the hospital when I was in labor, who visited us the day Boo Boo was born, planned my baby shower, and made sure the fridge was stocked with food (specifically homemade paella and almond cake) when we got back from the hospital, and they deserved a good night’s sleep. But the next night, he woke up approximately ten times, and ten times we carried him back to bed with us. 

We apologized to our friends. 

“What crying?” They asked. “We didn’t hear anything!” 

That’s real friends, folks. And we wanted these friends to get some sleep, but we also warned them that it would get worse before it got better. 

“Whatever you have to do!” They said.

So we did nothing while we listened to Boo Boo cry nonstop for thirty minutes that night.The next night it was fifteen, then he slept his way through the next night–and so did everyone else in the cabin.  

Now that Boo Boo is older he has much more stamina. The first time we did sleep training he could not even crawl. Now he can stand in his crib and cry in our general direction, while staring at us and trying to grab our feet. He can scream, he can throw his binky, and can even muster a good fake-cry. But now he has something else in his arsenal.

When screaming and crying doesn’t work the last trick up his sleeve hooks to my heartstrings and yanks them towards his crib, where he is crying, staring at the door that, even in the dark, he knows opens up to the kitchen, where we are washing dishes and sweeping and have been trying to steel ourselves against this emotional onslaught, or debating in whispers (if he doesn’t hear us, will he forget we’re here?) whether or not to Go In, and if we do Go In, will we have the discipline to just pat him on the back? If we do pick him up and cuddle him will he wake up again, wanting more of the same? Will we be able to look at the tears running down his cheeks and the snot pooling around his binky and NOT bring him to our bed, where he will melt in our embrace and we’ll smell his head and feel his tufty hair against the cradle of our necks? 

“Mommy.”

It was a tiny voice. A plea, like a feather drifting over a vast ocean, or a butterfly fluttering over the 18 wheelers that hurl themselves down the BQE.

“Mommy.”

A voice stranded on a chunk of ice that is quickly melting. Jer-bear looks at me. Will I succumb?

“Mommy.”

How can the saddest little voice simultaneously sound like the voice of the creepiest wind-up dolls in the tackiest horror movies? Why did Hollywood do this? Why did they co-opt my son’s voice and use it in the bloodiest, goriest movies?

Jer-bear watched me as I paced around the apartment. Would I succumb? Should I succumb? And whom would I be succumbing to anyway? My child or my most basic instincts? In that moment there was nothing I wanted more than to swoop in, wipe the tears off Boo Boo’s face and hoist him into my arms. My heart was already in there, but something kept my feet planted to the floor. What would he learn if I ran in there? Surely something he already knows–that his mommy loves him, and that she’s a sucker. Conversely, what would he not learn by me going in there? 

But he didn’t get a chance to find out.

“Mommy,” he tried one more time before erupting into wails again. Jer-bear did not wait for me to decide what kind of teachable moment this was. 

Was I upset that it was Jer-bear who folded first? How much longer would it have taken for me to decide what to do? And how long would Boo Boo keep screaming? How long would have been too long?

There was not too much time to dwell on it because sooner rather than later Jer-bear came back out of the bedroom. But whatever bed time truce had been achieved was a frail one. Boo Boo started crying again as soon as Jer-bear shut the door. This time I did not wait. I would be the one to swoop in, come hell, high water or sleepless nights.