I had forgotten what it feels like to have a baby who can sleep through any disruption as long as my skin is 1″ from her face. If I move away from her, she wakes up within minutes. I do not know how other people get their babies to sleep alone. I suspect those folks have a higher tolerance for screaming than I have.
I do not let my babies scream for a minute longer than I am doing other work with my hands. Then I snatch them back up again. Most tasks I simply do one handed in this stage.
I do not speak of this because I am trying to play Mommy Wars. There are many ways to raise children and many reasons to make the choices a person makes. I make the choices I make because I am trying to reset *my* internal clock and I am trying to change the patterns that have been set in my family for generations. This is not about what someone else should or shouldn’t do. This is about learning to set aside my hypervigilance. This is about learning to calm down the panic I have lived with for decades.
Hearing my baby scream is one of the most activating sounds of my life. When I respond to it easily, naturally, instantly my body feels better. My body feels the full effects of, “You are safe now and it’s ok to take care of problems. You don’t have to ignore something. You don’t have to pretend the scary/overwhelming/bad thing isn’t happening. It’s ok to react and soothe. Nothing bad will happen.”
I don’t do all of this because it is “best for my baby” (although I do think it is good for her) I do it because I am selfish and I want this satiation and safety in my body.
It is hard dealing with how mentally bored I am. I hit the end of pregnancy and my brain was all, “OK! Disability period is over! Move around! What the fuck! Why are you sitting, motherfucker!??!?!” But I want to give this period of time to my baby so bad that I will learn to deal with almost any amount of frustration.
I just said it wasn’t for baby it was for me. Then I said I will give it to baby. I’m inconsistent. It’s complicated.
I want to have given this to baby so that I have given it to myself. I want to have had this period in our development. I want our relationship to have had this period of being instantly taken care of because I want her to have the same internal sense of “My needs matter” that my older children have.
My big kids really do have this basic safety and happiness that comes from knowing that even as they don’t get all of their wants they have never had a need go unmet. It has not happened.
I want that for my new daughter, too.
Do you know why my children are so convinced that their needs are of utmost importance? Because from the day of their births I have set myself aside to look at them. Is this the most psychologically healthy way to raise children? Oh I assume not. But it’s what I’m doing. Because it is healthier than what I experienced and giving “better than I got” is what most parents can do. We can’t be perfect. We can’t hit the ideal. But if we can give better than we got… that’s kind of shooting the moon, isn’t it?