It is 10:55pm and my one year-old daughter has just, finally, fallen asleep. I know with relative certainty that she will be awake again, screaming, within an hour or so, and also that there will be nothing that I can do to remedy this situation; that burden falls entirely upon my heroic* wife. I hasten to add that that this injustice is of our daughter's choosing, not my own. She will accept nothing but her mother's unconditional company for hours on end. Invariably we end up with her in our bed, where she prefers to lie horizontally, ensuring that my wife and I are left with an inch or two each in which to seek comfort and sleep in vain. I usually endure a lot of kicking as well. But at least the screaming stops.
She has never been a good sleeper, but the situation escalated a few weeks ago when, like just about everybody else in the country, we all contracted a nice bit of norovirus. Cue a few days of spectacularly horrendous vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches, stomach cramps and general near death experience. Our youngest appeared at first to have suffered slightly less than the rest of us. But her affliction soon developed into a succession of nasty colds, made all the worse by the relentless period of molar growth upon which her mouth decided to embark at the same time. All of this, coupled with her being at just the right age to develop some separation anxiety, would be enough to make anybody struggle with their slumber. For our daughter the increased sleeplessness became a habit and is now a pattern, to which we have had no choice but to resign ourselves.
When our older daughter went through a similar phase, we solved it (with what only now seems like relative ease) by following the textbook to the letter: letting her scream it out, before learning to get herself to sleep, free from dependency on any parent-shaped psychological crutches. This is not so easy the second time around, because we feel duty-bound to minimise the screaming of our youngest in the interests of our eldest (who is actually remarkably good at sleeping through all this). So, ultimately, we relent every night, despite knowing that this is really prolonging the problem.
Our latest tactic is to remove her dummy on the grounds that it exacerbates her aforementioned dependency on psychological crutches. I believe I have discussed previously the growing need to go cold turkey on the dummy anyway, and people who know about these things say that it can be surprisingly helpful in solving the sleep problem. So far it has merely meant that, when she inevitably did awaken, it took my wife longer than ever to becalm her. Eventually she brought the little insomniac downstairs, where of course she cut off any recriminations at the pass by slipping immediately into her extremely cute daytime persona. Despite my best efforts I was delighted - having only recently arrived home from work and missed bedtime - to spend some time with her. Nevertheless, I am preparing myself for another night of being kicked in bed by those cute little feet.
Having said that, it's now midnight and she's still asleep.
I really must go to bed.
*I read a passage of David Foster Wallace's semi-autobiographical novel The Pale King yesterday, in which the protagonist describes an inspirational lecture he heard as a student. In this speech, true heroism is defined as persistence in the mundane, uncelebrated commitment to the detail of their duties displayed by all the quietly diligent people of the world. Apply this to parenting instead of accountancy and my wife is the greatest hero of them all.
No comments:
Post a Comment