Tired Momma

I had a text from a young mom a few days ago, asking me about some health issues. We agreed to meet in town the next day for a face-to-face. Her chief complaint was what she called mood swings, suddenly flying off the handle with her kids. We talked about thyroid and candida, my two pet peeves, and I found myself zeroing in on the latter. I had her fill out a questionnaire, the results of which certainly seemed to indicate that she has a problem with overgrowth of this opportunistic yeast/fungus; so we talked about a strategy to begin to tackle this issue.

But underneath it all seemed to lie a more foundational problem: this poor mother was terribly sleep-deprived. Her youngest child is just seven months old. He has got into a routine where he naps off and on, all day long; then at 1:00 a.m., he wakes up to be taken into his parents’ bed to nurse. After that he’s wide awake for the next four hours—and so are the parents.

I hesitated to express any opinions or advice, as I am trying to learn to not answer questions that I haven’t even been asked. But I certainly went home thinking about it. I recollected the time when Ben, my first baby, was seven months old and Greg and I drove out to my parents’ place in B.C. to celebrate Christmas with them. Ben and I were still on the schedule we’d been on ever since he was born: awake at 1:00 a.m. to nurse, fuss, burp, and sooth, to finally settle him once more shortly before he awoke again at 4:00 a.m. to start the process all over again. My father, a doctor, was concerned about how little sleep I was getting, and he talked to my husband about it. Greg didn’t say anything to me until after we had returned to Wetaskiwin.

“I didn’t say this to Nancy,” Dad had apparently told Greg, “because I don’t think she would hear it from me, but I tell all my moms by this age to make their babies sleep through the night.”

Greg thought we should try it. I was dubious, but I was also, as “a good Christian wife,” of the conviction that I should follow my husband’s lead, and that God would see to it that Greg was given the necessary wisdom if I honoured God’s chain of authority.

The plan was that when Ben woke in the night, we would let him cry himself back to sleep. It was kind of brutal, that first night. Mother-instinct had me yearning to comfort my unhappy baby. But I stuck to the plan, with my husband’s sleepy encouragement. The crying went on and on—for an hour. And then suddenly, all was amazingly quiet. He didn’t wake up again that night.

The second night was almost as bad; Baby cried nearly as long. And then the third night, he slept through. We never looked back. As our other children came along, we were much firmer in our direction with things like this. We saw that I could do a much better job of mothering all day long if I didn’t mother all night as well. I don’t recall exactly when we began to give Baby Lindsay the “opportunity” to learn to sleep through the night; probably at around six months. Melissa began to sleep through the night of her own volition when she was only ten days old! Rachel was more typical, like Ben and Lindsay, but she had to fall into line here too, even though in every other way she was not a fall-in-line kind of girl.

As I pondered the young mom I had just been talking to, I wondered if my experience and advice would be helpful to her or if my methods would be considered out of date. That would be a pity though. One hates to see every generation trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Wisdom, gleaned from God’s truths, has no expiry date. There is no new thing under the sun. God says the older women are to teach the younger, among other things, how to love their children.

I sent a text to my daughter-in-law Margaret. “Hey, what would you suggest to the mother of a seven-month-old, who’s not getting any sleep because Baby naps off and on all day and then comes to bed to nurse in the middle of the night and then is wide awake and keeps them awake for four hours at a stretch?”

She answered: “Brian started doing this when he was a baby, so I kept him up as long as I could during the day, even when he was grumpy and tired. I shortened his naps during the day as well. When it was bedtime I fed him a lot! And he slept longer; then he also would wake up once a night and go right back to sleep.”

Then I consulted with Google as well, searching “self-soothing techniques baby.” I gleaned here that between four and six months of age is a good time to begin allowing Baby to learn this important skill. If he is eating some solids by this point, it will help carry him through the night. I know this was the case with Baby Ben.

Some schools of thought are dead-set against any kind of self-soothing. “My baby needs me. He will be more secure, more confident that we will always be there for him, if we pick him up every time he cries.” The mother has needs, too, that are fulfilled in the short term by this philosophy. She feels powerfully affirmed as a mother when her baby needs her and when she can and does meet that need. But if she is up all night trying to assuage the immediate whims of her baby, what is the trade-off, the price to be paid during the day, when she is so exhausted that she flips into a rage with the baby and the other children, or slides into a depression, just because life becomes so overwhelming?

Also, if she gives in and caters to every whimper, assuring him subliminally that she will always be there for him, she is teaching him other things that don’t work well in the years to come. This is what he is learning: “The world revolves around me. Every need I have should be fulfilled, right now. Mom and Dad will always make sure that life is not too hard for me.” (Some of us spend most of our lives trying to unlearn these things.)

Most parents would be quick to agree that they don’t want their child entering adulthood still swaddled in this kind of immaturity; the question is, when should the harsh truth be allowed to come upon them? Well, it begins when Baby is expelled from the womb, and from there the journey of independence begins, however slowly.

Baby must learn, along with the rest of us: The world does not revolve around me. Not every need I have is going to be met when I think it should. Life is hard, and nobody can shield me from that raw fact.

It will be up to the individual parents to decide as a couple what their philosophy is, but perhaps it helps to realize that no matter when you begin this separation process, it’s going to be painful, to the child, and to the parents—most especially to the mother. Her emotions will shape her philosophy as long as she allows them to do so.

It helps tremendously for her to learn to look to her husband for guidance here, to offer him the respect of taking to heart what he says, and to pray for him—and believe—that God will impart the wisdom he needs. By all means, she should pray for wisdom for herself as well, but there is another dynamic, a force to be reckoned with, when she learns to fit herself into God’s design in the wife-husband relationship.