Personal Reflections

Rixa, over at Stand and Deliver is hosting a writing competition with the topic being: “Becoming a parent, becoming transformed.”

I thought this would be a good exercise for me and jotted it down one evening. Its not great – but I didn’t want to spend hours revising it, so I entered the raw product. Here it is:

“Becoming a parent, Becoming transformed”

With rosy ideas of having my own gorgeous baby asleep in her crib as I tiptoed out back to my evening of romance with my husband, I visited a friend with a new baby. This friend had managed to get her tiny daughter to sleep, and had joined us in the lounge only to hear the baby start wailing down the hall. Up she leapt and rushed down the hall to settle her. This happened several times throughout the evening. I rolled my eyes with all the know-how and self-importance of the childless and declared to my husband that “that baby would never learn to self settle if its mama kept coming at its every cry” and they were “making a rod for their own backs”. Oh how I wish I could go back in time and give myself a slap in the face!

Fast forward several years and I am the confused mother of baby girl. My baby is apparently “greedy” for wanting to feed more frequently than 3hrly. She is “manipulating us” for wanting help to fall asleep. We “might roll on top of her” when I finally listen to my instincts and take her to bed with me at 4 weeks of age, where, incidentally we both sleep better than we have since her birth. These are all things which were said to me as a vulnerable, new mother.

My darling baby, who took such comfort and delight in the safety of my arms and at my breast. According to the health visitors, friends and most mainstream baby books I was supposed to ignore her cues, watch the clock to see when to feed her, put her down in a cot to “talk” (code word for cry) herself to sleep and generally force her into a façade of independence from an age where clearly, independence is as ridiculous as asking a fish to ride a bicycle. The thing was – there were so many cases where this “worked”. Babies would adapt to their 4hr schedule. They would sleep all night from a young age. I struggled to continue parenting in the way I wanted to while faced with the possibility of getting a good nights’ sleep if I would only leave her to cry in a dark room for several nights in a row.

I turned to the computer. As a trained health professional I am interested in the evidence; the real truth about outcomes, based on scientific research. Increasingly I found more and more research to support that forced independence from a young age does not produce the best long term outcomes. Yes, some babies would give up hope of a parent returning, and learn to keep quiet all night long, but the stress hormones remained high in their brains. Yes, some babies would adapt to 4hr feeding schedules, but many also were hospitalized for failure to thrive on these strict routines. I found many more articles and studies to support listening to a babies cues, and responding to their needs promptly. Paradoxically it took hard nosed science to convince me to listen to my inbuilt, natural, mama-instinct. Sad but true.

I am now a confident mother of a 9month old. We bed-share, I breastfeed her on demand, and I believe in the value of her cries. Contrary to popular baby rearing books I haven’t got a “rod in my back” nor am burnt out and longsuffering in the face of meeting my “manipulative” daughter’s needs. On a bad night she will still wake two hourly to feed but I feel well rested in the mornings as she is only ever an arms reach away. I can tend to her needs whilst still half asleep. Despite my many hours of reading books and hunting the internet I only have one sentence of advice for anyone with a new baby. Feed her when she’s hungry and help her to sleep when she’s tired. It’s really that simple!