Sleeping Like a Baby v. Sleeping Like a Child
My elder son, now-5yo Drake, was not a sleepy baby. Newborns are supposed to sleep around the clock; he didn’t. Drake was alert all the time. He slept rarely, and for short intervals. He didn’t sleep through the night until he got his own room at just over a year old. It was, as many can imagine or empathize, a source of stress.
I followed all the advice for Drake: bedtime ritual, warm bath, dark bedroom. Yet for the first six to eight months, I couldn’t put him in bed unless he was asleep. Even then, as I gingerly laid him in his co-sleeper, then his crib, I’d slowly back away, muscles tensed in a combination of fear and hope. About half the time, he’d start to cry and I’d have to go through the whole comforting/singing spiel again. So whenever I saw a movie or television scene of a parent going into a child’s room, stroking their head, and talking to them, I started to rant. That was ridiculous, unrealistic, romanticizing, etc. etc. Kids didn’t sleep that soundly. There was a reason someone advised, “Never wake a sleeping baby.”
When I heard Colin Powell’s comment upon hearing that President Bush was “sleeping like a baby” on the eve of war with Iraq. I laughed. Finally, someone had got it right.
I’m sleeping like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up, screaming.
But then, as so often happens, things changed. Around age two, Drake started napping for hours at a time, and sleeping soundly at night. With now-3yo Guppy it happened even sooner. I even sometimes find myself in the reverse dilemma from Drake’s infancy: I have to wake them, and it’s not easy.
I’ve made my peace, then, with the sappy parental bedtime scenes. I’ve had a few of my own. I _can_ go into their room, remove the books from the beds, kiss their heads, and pull up the sheets. When they’re lying there, abandoned in sleep with rosy cheeks, it’s easy to forgive a lot of the tumult of the day that went before.
Until the next day, that is, when the screaming and the hollering and the “MOM!”ing and the neediness starts all over again. But I’ve got most of a good night’s sleep to help me weather it.