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2005-09-07 - 11.48pm previous entry next entry
Sleep. Not an upbeat entry.
Thanks for the notes and guestbook messages :)
I am feeling half-hearted about writing an entry tonight, but I have things to talk about and so I guess I'll get into it. Or Arthur will wake and I won't finish it.
I should talk about Arthur's sleep. It has been weighing heavy on my mind lately, so yeah I should offload here, since this is the place for it! Thank you so much Heather for the links and support over our shared sleep issues! Heather just had HUGE success at last in helping her baby boy, Camden, to sleep through the night. Somewhere under the surface I feel envious, but actually I am so glad for them and proud of them too! It is a hard hard thing when you have a baby who wakes all night and will not naturally sleep well. Heather gave me some places to read up on ideas (and opinions) on sleep "training" and stuff, so I have had those kicking around in my head for a few days. But in the previous week I had already been thinking about some stuff related to Arthur's sleep.
I think I already mentioned this, but lately Arthur is getting full before he falls asleep when I nurse him "to sleep" for his naps in the day time. Not every time, but sometimes. I have started to see that he needs to know how to get to sleep by himself once he is full, because he doesn't really seem to know how else to fall asleep, without using the breast as a pacifier. Now, I am absolutely HAPPY to be a human pacifier! I just want to say that. I read so many posts on breastfeeding forums where there are mothers who just aren't happy to feel like a human pacifier all the time. I can really understand their feelings and their reasoning! But I just wanted to say that I don't ever get that. I LOVE the fact that Arthur "uses" me at any and every opportunity for comfort, sleep, closeness with me, food, etc. I get tired of all the interruptions to my sleep, but I NEVER get tired of nursing him, even at night. Nursing him at night and being woken at night are two seperate things to me. I hate being woken when I'm tired out! I LOVE nursing my sweetpea in the dark in our snuggly bed when he's all warm and sleepy. Love it love it love it.
At night he usually nurses back to sleep really fast, and if he's full, he just rolls over and nuzzles his head into the bed over and over with his little chin up, making little munchy movements with his mouth. It's the cutest thing to watch! Anyway that seems to be his way of settling when he's almost asleep, and he goes off without a problem. I think it helps him that he had already been asleep and hadn't really woken up fully to nurse in the first place. But in the day, he will be super sleepy while he's nursing, then when he's full he takes himself off the breast, and then - oh dear! - he's awake, and his sleep-aid has stopped! If he could then fall asleep by himself it would be good, because until now he has been rolling over, crawling around the bed, and pulling up to stand against me (lying down next to him) in the bed. So of course, tired or not, he wakes right up, and then he is tired and cranky after a while (despite being very cheerful and playful at that moment) or else I have to rock him to sleep or something, or let him play a while and then nurse him a bit more.
So last week, or actually I think it was at least a couple of weeks ago, when this happened one time at his afternoon nap, I decided to try putting the travel cot up and popping him in there to see if he would burn his energy off and then lie down and sleep. I wasn't managing too well with him crawling everywhere, and he got angry and upset if I kept on laying him down again every time he got up. So I tried the travel cot. He cruised round and round and round in there for a long time, babbling and squawking and being generally cheerful. Sometimes he sat down and then got right up again. I lay down by the side of it and stayed quiet and still.
Of course, it didn't work. He got tired of doing that after a while, and then got really upset that I wasn't taking him out and helping him to sleep. When I just lay there and waited some more, he got soooo hysterical. I did not like the fact that the cot seperated him from me anyway, so I gave it up. I had to nurse him just to calm him down, he was so upset even when I took him out and cuddled him, poor thing. He really has never ever known any sort of seperation from me, even with me in the same room. It doesn't seem fair to him to start that now.
Soooo I thought if only I could be lying right there next to him, physically in contact with him, and available to him - as "there" as I could possibly be - surely that would be a better setting to try to let him find sleep on his own, since I knew he would not be happy about it. So last week I noticed that when he is in the top corner of our mattress on the floor (the part against the corner of the room, so with walls on two sides of the mattress), and I lie next to him, I can bend my legs at 90 degrees to my torso and thus "fence" him in, so he can't crawl around or off the bed. He can pull up on me or the walls, but that's fine if he wants to do that for a while. I figured I could just wait and stay still and quiet, and let him just play with me RIGHT there, and see if he would settle down when he got tired enough, since he would not be crying for me to go to him.
Well he pulled up and bounced and stuff for a while, and then got upset and tired. He cried more and more, and both times that I tried it last week, he eventually threw himself backwards when sitting and hit his head on the wall. Poor baby! He sometimes does this throwing backwards or falling forwards thing when he is doing his "despair" crying - which, by the way, he only does if I am trying to make him sleep by himself or maybe some other horrible thing like cleaning him after he eats! ;) So I always scoop him up and cuddle and kiss him when he hurts himself, and I always nurse him for comfort. I will never stop doing that. I will always offer him the breast for comfort if he is hurt or upset, as long as breastfeeding continues. Both times, he fell asleep (exhausted from the whole ordeal) on the breast.
Then I read up on crying and sleep and "modified" versions of that, and decided I would try being strong and waiting until he actually fell asleep the next time he got full before falling asleep at a daytime nap. I still planned to nurse him if he hurt himself, but I was going to watch out to try and stop him falling against the wall. I figured I would watch the clock and try and wait it out, even if he cried a lot, to see if he really COULD actually go to sleep by himself in the end.
So yesterday morning he took an hour's sleep from falling asleep on the breast. After his lunch I cuddled him close and told him that if he got full when it was naptime, Mummy would try to help him fall asleep by himself. I told him it would not be easy and he would probably cry a lot, but that I knew he could do it all by himself. I told him I would never leave him and that I would be right there with him. I told him I would nurse him if he got terribly upset and I would not let him cry himself sick. I told him how sorry I was for how upset he was going to be about it. I just felt bad already.
He started acting sleepy around 1pm so I took him up to bed. I nursed him and he got full and started getting up and doing stuff around 1.15. I got my legs in place so he was "contained" (!!), and then waited. He spent ages just cruising the length of my body and back again, over and over. He did his cute new thing he does, which is jumping! He bounces and bounces with both feet at once until they both leave the bed! He had lots of fun doing that. I felt like a total heel with him so happy and carefree and totally not expecting me to then act all cold and steely and do nothing to help him get cosy and sleepy when he expected and needed me to.
So then he got tired, and started rubbing his eyes and getting grisly. I stayed put. He didn't lie down, just sat, fell forward to crawling, flopped to his tummy, pushed to sitting, over and over. Sometimes he pulled up and cruised a bit but seemed very unhappy and kept sitting down and crying. I just waited.
By 1.30pm - it doesn't sound long, but it was a LONG time with him crying and not being happy - he was totally distraught about the situation. He would either sit and cry while pushing his face about with his hands, or throw himself forwards and lie face down on the bed sobbing and crying. He never lay flat, always with his knees bent under him, ready to push himself up again. He sweated his hair wet to the tips. He soaked the sheet with tears and sweat. He sobbed and sobbed and coughed and gasped and choked and screeched and wailed. This is the state he had reached by 1.30. I put my hand on his back a lot and sometimes I would say to him, "It's okay Arthur, Mummy's here. You can do it." And stuff like that. But he seemed to get more upset sometimes when I touched him, so I didn't do it all the time. I just didn't know what to do with myself.
I continued to wait like I said I would, even with him that upset. I felt like everything I had been reading told me I needed to stay strong, especially on the first time. He stayed in this state of total hysteria for 20 minutes. TWENTY minutes. Think about 30 seconds, no, TEN seconds of a baby crying like that. If you have that scary and horrible picture in your mind, now multiply the length of time by 120. It was endless and unbearable. I can�t even begin to describe how I felt. I can�t even imagine how my poor love was feeling. He cried like I have never ever heard him cry before. Even when he had the plaster put on his legs 4 months ago, it didn�t reach this level. And that was just awful back then. He cried soooooo much. I cried with him. His cries pierced me right to the core. They made every fibre in my being want to curl up and die if I couldn�t rescue my child and make him stop crying like that. And yet I lay there like a lump of unfeeling flesh and watched my little boy suffer. I do believe he was suffering, because how could a child cry like that and NOT be suffering in some way? His cries were raspy and hoarse by now, and his breathing was a complete spasm of sobs. Once or twice he raised his face from the bed, eyes closed, wailing and sobbing, as though he was writhing with the awfulness of it all. You should have seen his face then. He looked like his heart was broken. Utterly broken. I have never even seen him look like that before, ever.
When he coughed and gagged like he would throw up, I picked him up and held him close on my lap till he was just sobbing and not crying, because I promised I would not let him cry till he was sick. Of course the moment I lay him back down he was right back where he was when I went to pick him up. But I picked him up another two times when he got gaggy. After that I pressed the lullaby tune on his cuddly toy that he has in the bed, because I was hoping that would distract him from the crying and sobbing and help him calm down without waking up too much. We usually play that to him while we get him ready for bed, so I hoped it would be soothing. He did stop crying immediately that he heard it, and he was lying down in his �despair� pose so I hoped he might just doze off. But once the song finished he was sobbing and gasping and raspy-crying again. I pressed that button a few times. Then I waited a couple more minutes. I was about to give in and nurse him, even knowing that it would make the whole traumatic half-hour or so completely pointless, when all of a sudden he went quiet. He had his eyes closed. I held my breath. He opened his mouth (but not his eyes) and started crying again. After a few seconds it stopped again. Then started. Then stopped. And he was out. Completely and utterly exhausted from the horrible thing I put him through. He still had his knees drawn up under him, and his face was fully into the mattress, but he was able to breathe somehow.
That was at 1.50pm. He just went totally unconscious. Even though he was so utterly asleep, he did not stop sobbing violently for a full TEN minutes after he fell asleep. I watched the clock. Ten minutes, even in his sleep. After that the sobbing stopped and I stayed watching him for another ten minutes before I gently pulled his knees from under him, and his arms too, which were balled up under his chest. He turned his face slightly to the side and I left him to sleep. He didn�t move for two hours. I didn�t even want to leave his side, but in the end I tore myself away. I went downstairs and ate half a tub of banoffee ice cream whilst watching some daytime rubbish on TV. Urgh. I went up to check on him like every five minutes. I know this is the stupidest thing ever, but something in me was scared that he would die or something. Like I made him so distraught and exhausted that he might die if I didn�t check that he was okay. He might never recover. Yes, I am stupid. But there you go. It�s just how I was feeling at the time.
But part of me thought, if I can cope with that for another two days then he will be almost there, and will have learnt the �valuable� lesson of falling asleep by himself! Yay! A very small part of me, that is. The other 90% of me (or so) was just so broken by the whole experience. How on earth can it be right to make my baby go through something like this so that he will sleep?! He CAN sleep without any trouble, if I nurse him or rock him. He is happy with that. I am mostly happy with that. I worry that he is just never going to sleep by himself, and I desperately need more sleep than I ever get, and sometimes I find it hard to always be on demand over his sleep. But those are smaller issues compared with Arthur being contented and happy. I know if I �sleep train� him then he will come out the other side, sleep like an angel and be back to his smiley happy self, AND probably benefit from better quality sleep or more sleep in general. So those are the pros. But the cons are just too harsh. I can�t do it. I just can�t do it. I waver between feeling wretched that this means I am letting my son down because I am not able/willing to put in the hard yards to get him through this so he can sleep better, and feeling wretched that I am putting him through something that is so obviously upsetting to him, regardless of the outcome.
One thing I realised on reflection, while he slept, was that crying it out is Crying It Out. I made my precious love Cry It Out. And I feel so awful and ashamed and just�. like crap for it, because I am so so so so strongly against CIO. I said I never would and I did. I realised that CIO is very simply black and white. There is no grey area to CIO. I keep reading about stuff called �a modified version of CIO� or encountering mothers saying, �Oh I wouldn�t call it CIO as such�� But right now with all my raw feelings about the whole thing, such ideas/comments make me feel so angry, because it�s such a pile of crap. There is no such thing as �modified� CIO (allegedly what I did with Arthur). Those terms are just to make people feel better about making their babies CIO. I think people say those things because �real� CIO involves just leaving the baby behind a closed door and walking away and letting them cry till they lose consciousness. That�s just mean CIO. Slightly less mean CIO is being more available while the baby cries itself into loss of consciousness. But that�s all the difference there is. Mean or slightly less mean. It�s still CIO. Arthur cried until he fell asleep. It makes no difference whether I was there or not (except that it would have been doubly upsetting to him had I NOT been there) � he still cried till he fell asleep. He cried for the duration of the time. He Cried. It Out.
I wanted (and tried) to believe I had been courageously and lovingly �teaching� Arthur some marvellous important life-lesson that would benefit him immeasurably. That�s what I was led to believe I was doing. I�m so angry, because THAT�S total crap too. I know the slogan � �CIO WORKS!!� Sure it works. But that�s not the point, is it? I know what the results would be around the corner. Sleep, for all concerned. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like it was soooo selfish. Does Arthur care how he falls asleep? Does he lack for anything, or FEEL he does, sleep-wise? I know he could get better sleep, but he is always bright and bubbly and cheerful, and rarely seems sleep-deprived. Would he go, �Wow Mummy, I�m SO glad you made me see that I needed to fall asleep without your closeness or comfort!�? Would he NEVER learn to fall asleep by himself, in time for starting school, when it would be more of a relevant issue? Of course not. So, who benefits? Me, that�s who. It all boiled down to ME. And while I do need to address my own needs for sleep and sanity (!!), it just doesn�t seem fair to cause Arthur unhappiness and trauma for my own comfort and benefit.
Ugh.
I�m sorry. I know that there are probably plenty of people who read this diary who have had their little one(s) cry it out in some form or other, and I know all my raw feelings that I have spilled out here might aggravate those people, since they seem accusative of everybody who does let their babies CIO. I didn�t mean to do that. I am just so upset and angry, from a personal point of view. I don�t mean to shout about other people�s choices. I don�t understand when it is RIGHT to CIO, I just can�t understand it, but that�s just me. That�s all it is � I don�t understand, so I am in no position to say anybody is doing it wrong or right. All I know is, for me, I just did it way way waaaaaaay wrong. Or at least it felt that way. And I am angry because once AGAIN I let myself listen to mothering society at large and question my actions and think that maybe I should try it the way everybody else does it. I hate how I keep doing that. I never want to do that. Most of the ways �everybody else� does it just don�t seem right to me (that is, FOR me) anyways.
I�m not saying CIO mummies are wrong. I just�. Ugh. I�m so sorry. I know I just probably upset a lot of people. I�m just spouting feelings. I�m sorry.
I feel like crap. I feel like using worse words than crap. I was feeling good about myself as a mother for a long time now, and then I feel like I made the biggest mistake. And now I have a permanent blotch of crappiness on my mummying record. Arthur will not remember it, I know. He woke two hours later, very wobbly and tired, obviously physically affected by such an exhausting and upsetting ordeal, but you can not IMAGINE how close I held him and how many kisses I planted on his cheeks and forehead and hair and ears and fingers and arms and toes and just any part that I could reach while I held him close in my arms for the time it took him to wake up properly. I just wanted to keep telling him how sorry I was. He was his normal self after a while, but he cried that evening at bedtime when I went to put the breast away that he�d drained and get the other one out. It was as though he expected me to leave him to it again, and it upset him immediately.
I could not take any joy whatsoever in the fact that he slept for two hours. It was no consolation at all. It was just a reminder of what I had put him through. I read a comment on CIO that said something like, �So many mothers are against CIO. Not many of them are still against it once they�ve tried it!� Well I think I will be the exception. Thinking of that comment made me wonder if I would feel better if we came through it and the sleep around here was wonderful again. I think I would be glad that he was sleeping well, and very glad to be getting sleep again myself. But I also think I would always regret what I had to do to bring that about. Actually REGRET it. And surely that�s not good? Today Arthur nursed to sleep quickly for his morning nap, and he stayed asleep all by himself (despite stirring 3 times) for nearly an hour and a half. I dreaded � DREADED � the afternoon nap. I felt actually scared of it. What if he didn�t nurse to sleep? Even with all my awful feelings about yesterday, I had still planned to try and be consistent and do it again today if he didn�t nurse to sleep. I figured, it could just be today and tomorrow and then he/we could be over that hurdle. But I was scared silly about doing it again. Thankfully he did nurse to sleep quickly as he was tired out. He only slept 30 minutes, and I think he could have used some more sleep when he woke, but I didn�t have the heart to try to MAKE him get back to sleep when he woke and smiled at me.
Am I just the wussiest mother ever, or what? I don�t know if Arthur is �ready� for this or not. Should he be? Should he even HAVE to be ready for something this horrible? How would I know when he IS ready, if there is such a thing? I thought he was. Why don�t I know anything about anything? I figured I would not even go NEAR trying to do this at night yet, because I don�t yet want to withhold any night milk from him, and also I simply don�t want to stop nursing him to sleep at night when he wants to. I enjoy it. He enjoys it. I am knackered but I don�t care to put an end to something so special just yet. So I thought if I could get him to learn to sleep by himself for day naps, maybe he would nap better and ALSO be more able to resettle himself when he wakes at night � that would be great! But yuck. The whole thing has been terrible so far.
I am not going to be one of those wussy mothers who can�t even bear to discipline her child. I don�t mind discipline, or tears or tantrums at my persistence over whatever the issue is. But this is different. This seemed like needlessly upsetting my precious little love. I just can�t do it, I can�t. But where does that leave me. I feel very insecure suddenly, about my abilities. No, not abilities� what is the word I�m looking for? My choices? My instincts? Something like that. I don�t know what is right and what is wrong. I feel like my mothering instincts got switched off and I am all lost in a fog wondering what is the right thing to do for my son, and that just sucks so much because if anyone should know these things, it�s me. And I just don�t any more. Why don�t I? Why has this one little experience made everything feel up in the air?
Ugh. I had other things to talk about today but I just haven�t got anything left right now. I forgot to post this photo a week or so ago:
He�s just so precious to me. I could never bear to hurt him, ever. I feel like I have. I feel like a voodoo doll or something, like, stick pins in my child and *I* feel the pain. I hurt him, I hurt me. If I hurt him, I WANT to hurt me, somehow. Like I would feel better for it, like I deserve it. I was never prepared for love at this level. It�s so wonderful but it makes life so�. on-the-edge. Risky. Painful. Incredibly wonderful. Scary. I�m here doing it and I wouldn�t change it for ANYTHING, but I�m suddenly terrified to mess up and do something wrong by my little one. I know all parents make mistakes, but I feel like Arthur is too precious to risk a mistake, even one. I know that�s not a healthy mindset. I need to work on that.
I love him so much. He is waking. I'm going to nurse him. With absolute joy and thanksgiving, I am going to nurse my baby boy. And then I'm going to bed, about 3 inches from him.
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