Ironically, I recently posted a summary of a popular baby-sleep book on my “public” parenting blog— a posting inevitably saturated with opinion. Ironically, right about the time of that self-assured post, the baby’s nap and bedtime behavior turned bizarre.
The reason for this deviation from his prior perfection is difficult to guess. The baby has been sick; he could certainly be growing; he could be teething; all these can affect sleep. Perhaps these darkest days of winter, and the once-in-thirty-year snowdrifts piled outside, have derailed his tiny circadian clock.
Speculation aside, the fact is, the baby has ceased to be a happy napper. He now goes limp, arches his back, and complains at the very mention of the word. (We would be be bragging about this feat of language recognition if the circumstances were more pleasing.) In the bedroom, he cries, nurses for a few moments, and then breaks free. He scoots off, yelling, to explore the closet or escape out the door. When he’s finally really tired, but not able to sleep, he bounces and hammers a tune with his arms in the darkness. Baffled, I hold him in the darkness and feel my illusions of mastery slip away.
Probably any experienced parent has felt this. You think you know how your kids work, and you're right--until you don’t, and you aren't. Certainly, my own nine months of parenting do not an expert make. A few more years of parenting will earn me little authority. Even parenting multiple children of one’s own doesn't necessarily render one an expert where other people’s progeny are concerned. Kids are just too impermanent for that.
But does that stop us from having an opinion? Heck, no. Opinions are far too delicious. And even experts are not immune. Judith Warner, a NY Times columnist, recently owned up to this humbled-but-wiser phenomenon.
I was puzzled that Warner’s book, “Perfect Madness,” could be so disagreeable, while her columns are wise and perceptive. “Perfect Madness” seems to be grounded in a resentment of the constellation of ways that mothers and children are psychologically twined together. Warner argues that a civilized society ought discourage excessive interdependence and promote some boundaries. In some cases I could see her point—all parents ought to have high-quality childcare as an option. But I actually do believe, based on my own experience, that a mother and a tiny baby are one being in two bodies. Without claiming to know much beyond that, I sense the book is coming from a starker place.
I truly object to Warner’s dismissal of the spiritual aspects of parenting in “Perfect Madness.” For many women, having a baby and a young child strips you of your pride, of your imagined competence, of your sense of controlling anything in life. In Buddhist terms, the experience destroys some of the central conceits of the Self. In birthing and caring for my little boy, I recognize the ardent selflessness of my past monastic life applied to a concrete and valuable cause. The experience may occasionally be devastating, but it’s also healthy, and it ripens a person.
The riddle—of how I could find myself in such opposition to an author whose columns I treasure—was solved in Warner’s latest piece for the NY Times:
I find myself these days, to a surprising degree, dealing with the problem of enmeshment. This surprises me because not so long ago I wrote a book that was largely a polemic against enmeshment: against the boundary collapsing that I think is the signature characteristic of motherhood (and parenthood) in our time.
How different I was back in the period that led up to the writing of “Perfect Madness”…. I choked on the proud effusions of identity dissolution….I despised the cliché 'you can only be as happy as your least happy child.' What drivel this was, I thought. What self-indulgence. Wasn’t it a parent’s responsibility to remain whole in the face of a child’s unhappiness, the better to buoy him or her through difficult times?
And yet, with time, only the philosophy stayed intact. Emotionally, the boundaries steadily dissolved.
None of us are who we once were. Life, and parenthood, aren’t done with us ‘till they’re done. The Mama trap here is not in the ideas, in their correctness or incorrectness; the trap is in the assumption that we have arrived at the answer—the golden answer to everything—that has somehow eluded every other parent. We’re so thrilled by our own insight that we are unable to imagine that it might belie an intermediate or incomplete understanding. Because we are human, and because parenthood the first time around is such a desperate search for mastery in a new and unpredictable realm, this mistake happens, again and again. We humans excel at making data out of a trend in our own subjective experience, and then gaily telling everyone about our grand discovery.
With increasing clout comes the potential for increasing embarrassment. Unlike Judith Warner, I don’t have the pleasure of seeing our ideas published in hardcover. But then again, I don’t have to face the fact that countless hard copies of my obsolete opinion continue to circulate. At least a blog post can be deleted.
I do believe in one truth where parenting is concerned: You cannot force a person to eat, to sleep, or to toilet against their will.
I certainly cannot force my son to nap. The good advice in the book I reviewed is helpful: attune to your kid’s schedule; do the same routine before bed, and so forth. But there’s only so much you can do. My own mother missed this subtle fact, I think, when she browbeat the toddler me into staying in bed— not daring to come downstairs, no matter what—until the kitchen timer said it was time for Sesame Street. I spent a lot of time watching the timer and feeling distressed.
My recourse in this situation is the emotional enmeshment Judith Warner once scorned. I ask myself, How is the baby experiencing all this? What might be going on to make him so averse to napping? How can I make things more conducive to sleep? This is the quality of compassion, so revered in the Buddhist tradition: looking at the situation from the baby’s perspective.
Besides compassion, the other major quality to be cultivated Dharma path is wisdom. On a very practical and mundane level, you could say the wisdom of this situation lies in recalling what naps are actually for. Convenient though they may be, the baby’s naps are not for my benefit, but for his. He needs to grow, internally and externally; he needs to recharge his baby batteries. I may need to clean the house, or do some writing—I may crave a nap of my own—but really napping is for the baby, period. Remembering this may not change what I actually do, but it modifies the spirit behind my actions. That’s better for both of us, and it may even help my son. Being grumpy is bad for me, unkind to the baby, and it certainly doesn’t give him a warm snuggly naptime vibe.
On the concrete level, I’ve moved the baby’s pallet (that’s the technical term for a zabuton adorned with bedclothes) closer to our bed. And I’ve spaced our nap-attempts out, waiting three hours rather than two, before inviting my little guy to nap.
In response to these modifications, the baby doesn’t yell as much as he used to. He does toss and turn, which is cute, and all-too-familiar from my own experience. He is napping twice as long as normal, so he gets roughly the same amount of sleep per day as before.
And that’s my story. My opinon, even. For now: late December, 2008.
