The Epic Nap Battle

Ahh, naps. New mothers long for them, babies resist them. We could all use more of them. And this past week, my eight-month-old son and I engaged in several nap battles that can only be described as epic.

Most of the time, my little blonde munchkin goes down for a nap without too much difficulty. Most of the time. But when I need him to sleep, when I really, really need him to sleep, he will resist defeat like a prize fighter.

It goes like this. It’s his regular naptime, and he is yawning and obviously tired. I nurse him, give him a cuddle and a lullaby, and put him in his crib. The curtains are drawn, the white noise is playing, and he is awake but sleepy. This is textbook nap routine perfection. I give him a kiss and go downstairs to make my lunch. He coos and plays for a while. If he were a perfect baby, he would just drift off into a pleasant sleep. But he isn’t, and he doesn’t. He starts to cry. I set down my fork and trudge up the stairs. Replace the soother. Pat the bum. Shhh, shhh, shhh. He closes his eyes and falls asleep. I walk away

I have just taken a mouthful of salad when he starts to cry. I wait. Is he serious, or just whimpering? The cries escalate to wails. He’s serious. I drag myself back up the stairs. Replace the soother, pat the bum, shhh, shhh, shhh. This pattern repeats, three, four, five times. Well, at least the stair runs are giving me some exercise.

Now the cries have escalated into full-scale screaming. I lean into the crib to wrap my arms around his little body without picking him up. My entire torso is in the crib now, the crib rails jammed into my stomach, my cheek pressed against his tiny face so I can shush into his ear. This is a truly painful feat, made possible by contortions that even my yoga teacher would protest. He calms down. My back starts to spasm. His eyes close and I wait, hoping this is the end, wondering how I’m going to extract myself from the crib.

He wails.

I give in and pick him up – tactical error number one. Maybe now he is tired enough to nurse, or maybe a lullaby will work. But as soon as I pick him up, the little stinker breaks into a beaming smile and tries to do a back flip off my lap. Score one for the baby. Mommy has been tricked. He opens his mouth in a wide grin and attempts to eat my nose.

Shhh, shhh, shhh, baby. It’s nap time, baby. Time to sleep, baby.

I try to cuddle him in the rocking chair. He tries to eat my face. He starts to giggle, so I start to giggle – tactical error number two. If I laugh, this battle is over. I try to look stern. I give him my best “mommy is very serious” face. I must convince him that this is not playtime. I put him back in the crib.

He wails.

Replace the soother. Pat the bum. Shhh, shhh, shhh. Repeat.

At this point, you are probably all wondering why I don’t just give up. But no, my friends, this tired mommy never gives up. Because I know that he is exhausted, and I know that if he doesn’t get his afternoon nap, we will all have a terrible sleep that night. And I know that if he doesn’t nap, then I can’t nap. So I dig deep. I persevere. Soother in. Pat the bum. Repeat.

Finally, finally, he gives in and falls asleep. I lean into the crib for five excruciating minutes, my body bent at a 45-degree angle, one hand on his back, the other on his head. I’m afraid to move. Is he really asleep? He is. I silently rejoice. I might even do a victory dance, but my back has seized up. I look at my watch and realize that this particular nap battle has taken an entire hour. My soup is cold, my salad is wilted, and wet laundry is fermenting in the washer. But I won. And that’s what matters.

I collapse into my own bed, desperate for a nap after all that stair climbing and bum patting.

I am just drifting off to sleep when he wakes up.

The funny (and not-so-funny) thing about sleep

The first few weeks are easy. Well, perhaps not easy, but the first few weeks are at least bathed in the shock and awe and bliss of having a new little person in your life. Waking up every two hours might not even seem that bad at first. Sometimes you may even stay awake just to watch your child sleep.

Then reality sets in.

Your husband goes back to work. The stockpile of meals in the freezer runs out. Your family returns to their lives (or to the other side of the country, in my case). Your house becomes a mess. You become a mess. Weeks or even months after the birth, your little one still won’t sleep for more than two or three hours at a time. And you slowly start to lose your mind.

People joke about it, especially if they’ve never had kids, or when it’s far enough in the past that they forget how bad it really was. But when you are in the thick of it, sleep deprivation is anything but funny. Well, maybe it is, but only in that delirious, wild-eyed way that makes you switch from laughing to crying and back again before anyone can even hand you a tissue. There is a reason why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. It makes you weepy, irrational and can even cause temporary insanity. Trust me on this one.

When you are talking to your childless friends about how tired you are, and they say “Oh, I know how you feel, I was out last night until 3am”, you may just want to kill them. A random stranger in the supermarket asks how you are, and you dissolve into a puddle of tears. Or you find yourself shooting daggers at your blissfully sleeping husband as you get up for the fifth time that night. When he innocently asks in the morning if the baby “slept through the night”, you barely suppress the urge to throw your coffee cup at him.

But perhaps the most bitter pill to swallow is when your friends, who also have new babies, tell you that their little ones are already sleeping seven or eight hour stretches. While you might be happy for them, you are also unbearably jealous. I thought I must be doing something wrong -- if other babies could sleep, why couldn’t mine? I cut out dairy for a month, then soy, hoping that would help. It didn’t. I tried using only cotton sleepers. I tried different diapers, different soothers, different blankets, different swaddlers, different mobiles, different nightlights. Nothing worked. I even spent an inflated $35 on a “miracle blanket” that looks like a baby strait jacket, hoping that would help. It didn’t. I quit drinking coffee to see if that was the issue. It wasn’t. (But that horrible experiment introduced a whole new set of problems. Caffeine, apparently, makes me a better person.)

But it gets better. Honestly, it does. My baby is nearly eight months old now, and he is finally sleeping straight through the night. Most of the time. He wakes up at 5:30am ready to play, but at least he’s not waking up every two hours like he used to. I’ll take what I can get.

Now that I am getting six to seven hours of uninterrupted sleep on most nights, I am a new person. I can think again. I’ve started reading the newspaper and political magazines. I’m trying to brush up on my Spanish. I’ve even started to creep out of my state of denial to think about working once again. Now, when I get six hours of sleep instead of seven, I catch myself complaining that I’m tired. Not long ago, I would have paid some serious cash to get even five hours of sleep. How quickly we forget.

Sleep makes us all better mothers. Now if only our babies knew that.

Emerging from the Fog

Hello world!

This blog is seven months overdue, but somewhere in the haze of perpetually interrupted sleep, unending dirty diapers, a million loads of laundry, gallons of coffee and slobbery avocado kisses, I stopped writing.

But that ends today. I am emerging from the world of baby purees, strollercize and lullabies to sit down at my laptop once again.

The aim of this blog is to focus on moms (and moms-to-be) who are active, educated, motivated ... and conflicted. Yes, conflicted. My friends and I all want to stay home with our kids. But we all have law degrees or master's degrees or even PhD's. Most of us speak more than one language. We have impressive resumes, we have loads of job prospects. In short, we are a group of highly ambitious women. And we don't want to go back to work.

It's not just the childcare issue, though that is part of it. Good quality childcare is hard to find and does not come cheap. But many of us do not want to leave our babies with someone else, especially when we don't even particularly like our jobs. Perhaps it would be different if I were dying to get back to work. I, however, dread returning to my desk. Aside from the sleep deprivation, I love my new life on maternity leave. I have time to work out, to cook, to play with my baby, to scrapbook, to visit my friends... it's not a bad life. The problem is, my little family cannot really pay the bills on one salary. The other problem is, my brain is atrophying.

I have received the baby lobotomy. I used to read several different news sources every single day, several times a day. Now I'm lucky if I even glance at the local paper. I read recipe books instead of The Economist. I get excited about food processors. Really, I do. To my horror, I met a woman from Spain the other day and I could barely string two sentences together. This from someone who studied Spanish for years and traveled to Colombia and interviewed street kids about their experiences. I feel very far-removed from that woman, even though it was me. Once upon a time. Before baby.

But there is no use mourning the woman I once was. That woman slept regularly, was stretch-mark free and had all the time in the world to focus on herself. That woman is gone forever, and that's ok. I have a beautiful child and plan to have more. What I need to do is find a new balance between mommy-me and me. I still have ambitions, I still have dreams. How do they fit in with being a mother? That is what I need to figure out, amidst the avocado kisses.