IT HAS BEEN dark and quiet for five minutes now. The three of us are in bed. "Mama," Caleb whispers. "I want a drink of water."
"No," I whisper back. "It's time for sleeping, babe."
Silence for a moment.
"A sip tinier than a peanut," he whispers.
I don't say anything. I am faking my own sleep.
"A sip tinier than a peanut," he repeats.
Silently, I will him to please forget the water and fall asleep so Brandon and I can indulge in a little marital hanging out.
"Tinier than a peanut. Tinier than a peanut. Tinier than a peanut."
I sigh. I sit up and hand him the glass.
He lies down again. Part of the trick of getting him unconscious is knowing the nuances of his wiggling. Crazy, over-the-top wiggling gets him a stern warning to "be quiet, be still, and just relax." There is another kind of wiggling that gets him the same warning but in a softer tone. Somewhere down the wiggling food chain, there is normal shifting: if I say something during this period, it'll just prolong the getting to sleep. Later there is stillness; the hard part is figuring out whether the stillness means he's asleep or just almost asleep. Right now, Caleb shifts normally. I hear him scratching his legs. The sheets scritch; he bonks into Brandon and Brandon softly says, "Ow."
I almost never fall asleep when Caleb does. I'm a grown-up after all, and it hardly seems fair that I'd have to call it a day by nine o'clock at night. I lie there waiting. In body, I'm the picture of stillness, but mentally I'm busy with my thoughts, a litter of sharp-teethed puppies in need of constant monitoring. Somebody should go to the grocery store. I wonder if the city is going to fix the sewage system problem. I need to e-mail and make sure Debie got that review copy. Breathe in. Did I deposit my paycheck in the savings or checking? I wonder how big the magazine circulation can actually get. Breathe out. I should call Grandma and Grandpap tomorrow. Breathe in. I should make an appointment for a physical. I have a mole on my face--I never used to have a mole on my face. Is it possible that I always have had a mole on face but never noticed it?
Caleb is finally still. I count to sixty. I get out of bed, and quickly--but not too quickly--flee the bedroom.
Downstairs, I wait for Brandon, but he never makes it down. I read a magazine. I watch The Daily Show, and I go to bed. The next morning the clock radio goes off--why, hello back at you, Lionel Richie!--and my first thought is, as always, Maybe I'll take a nap today. The nap rarely happens, but there's no denying that if I allowed myself to, I could fall asleep pretty easily at any given minute.
I did not intend to be in this situation. Funnily enough, we started this thing--called The Family Bed, or Co-Sleeping, or Bed Sharing, or Sleep Sharing, or The Chronic Experience of Waking Up to a Child's Feet Pressed to the Small of Your Back--in an effort for me to get more sleep. I love the sleep: sleeping in, falling asleep, dreaming, cozying down under the blankets, pushing the pillows so they're just so, relaxing, each muscle limp, each thought drifting out of the waking mind.
It will come as no surprise then, that Caleb's springing onto the nighttime scene in 1998 cramped my sleeping style. I became cranky. I looked terrible. But, worst, I was afraid that I--a natural non-athlete, a stumbler, an oftentimes breaker of precious objects--would drop him in my sleep-deprived haze. I remember once nodding off in the armchair and startling awake with him in my arms. He probably wasn't falling, but I clutched him quick and tight--whoamygod!--and woke him up.
Luckily, I discovered that my bosoms could accommodate nursing while I dozed on my side in bed, a practice that's promoted by pediatrician William "Attachment Parenting" Sears. I slept, Caleb ate, Brandon did what he could to be a good helper. That's what we did pretty much until Caleb was thirteen months old and I took back possession of the breasts.
Many parenting experts warn that once you let your child start sleeping in your bed, you're asking for a world of trouble: The children simply will not leave. In my case, these experts are right. We've tried, with varying degrees of success, to get Caleb to conk out in his own bed. But, like mercury spilled from a broken thermometer, our family may diverge but will always meld back together in one bed. Our attempts to kick him out have been earnest but fairly short-lived. In hindsight, the situation never warranted an all-out mission. That is, perhaps until now.
In addition to the daytime tiredness, there have been some nighttime disturbances. I've started sleepwalking with alarming frequency. I have a hunch that it may be connected to the co-sleeping, and it makes sense to me that co-sleeping with a wiggly fifty-pound kid can't be helping my sleep.
I'm going to get Caleb to try to sleep in his own bed.
After school one day, Caleb and I hunker down over some books in the living room. For him: his journal and a stack of Brandon's old comic books. For me: a pile of parenting advice books I bought when he was a baby.
I'd been to Barnes & Noble this morning and confirmed what I'd suspected: In the world of parenting advice, there are a ton of books from pregnancy through toddlerhood and then again for the teen and "tween" years, but experts offer precious little for the parent of an almost-seven-year-old (unless the seven-year-old happens to have special needs). I never took these books to heart the first time I cracked them open--most of them suffer from an unfortunate double whammy of bad prose and alarmist attitude--but this time, from the safe remove of seven years, I'm taking a tour through Parenting Expert Land.
I have to confess something here: I've built a modest career on being an anti–parenting expert, in a way. The philosophy of Brain, Child is that mothers know their kids better than experts. Generally, we mothers have the common sense to take care of business. It's not as if every issue of the magazine is devoted to bashing an expert (we hardly mention them at all), but Stephanie and I have little interest in hearing what mothers "should" do. Stephanie has good, solid principles motivating her. Me, I think I just have a bad attitude regarding authority and, as a young mother, did not like to be told what to do.
So, sitting here, I pry my heart open to receive, as the religious would say.
Caleb adds a little flourish to one of his pages. "Do you want to read my journal?" he asks me.
"You know, you don't have to show me it," I tell him. "It can be private."
"It is," he says. "Only you and Daddy can look at it."
"In that case, I'd love to read it," I say. He hands me the journal. I'm not at liberty to divulge what I saw, but I can tell you that, although it made me smile, reading Caleb's journal gives me absolutely no insight into what he's thinking. Which, come to think of it, might be how these books can proliferate like they do. Look up "parent" on Amazon, and you find more than thirty-five hundred books offering you insight into the mystery that is your child.
The books in front of me span the whole philosophical spectrum. For kicks, I leaf through Baby Wise: Book Two, part of a series of childcare manuals penned by Christian-conservative civilian Gary Ezzo and Christian-conservative doctor Robert Bucknam. They hail from the heart of spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child country, and they're very big on the "dangers" of child-centered parenting. The Babywise sleep advice? Ezzo and Bucknam don't even mention co-sleeping. It's not surprising given that the book is about "moral training," which includes things like teaching a five-month-old "high chair manners" and self-control.
Most of the books on the stack in front of me fall somewhere in the middle of the parenting philosophy spectrum. You have your American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), your authors of the What to Expect series, your T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Richard Ferber of Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems (a book so popular, "Ferberizing" became a modern parents' verb) also falls into this category. The AAP is the most authoritative, and the others here are well-respected, although all have their own quirks--the What to Expect authors show a certain fussiness regarding diet, for example, and Brazelton has become known for his laissez faire attitude towards potty training (and shilling for a diaper company). Ultimately, what these experts offer is mainstream, Main Street advice.
The AAP on sleep arrangements: "Once the [bedtime] story is over and you've said your goodnights, don't let him stall further, and don't let him talk you into staying with him until he falls asleep. He needs to get used to doing this on his own."
Finally, I get to Dr. William Sears, who writes with his registered-nurse wife Martha. I sigh and steel myself. I come to Sears with some baggage, yet I'm also pinning my hopes on him.
While Ezzo and Bucknam feel that no parent should have to kowtow to a baby's whims (it "attacks" the marital relationship), Sears is all about the kowtowing because, he says, it makes for an "attached" parent and child--and attachment is what you really want. So he's all for nursing on demand, wearing the baby in a sling, co-sleeping. In the evolution of parenting advice, Sears sprung up as an alternative to the mainstream doctors, who were then preaching formula feeding and letting babies cry it out, practices that felt counter-intuitive to some mothers. (Incidentally, these mothers include women of all political stripes.) But by the time Caleb was born, Sears's program, also called "attachment parenting," had become just as dogma-hardened as the mainstream parenting advice, particularly among the well-educated crowd.
A big part of me wants to like Bill and Martha Sears--many of their methods dovetail nicely with my inclinations anyway--but I just can't. There's a certain tone.
Anyway, I open The Baby Book and find that Sears not only says that sleep sharing is okay but provides (anecdotal) evidence that sleep sharing helps babies sleep better and longer, generally makes them "thrive," and even prevents sudden infant death syndrome (a.k.a. SIDS, the acronym that strikes fear in the heart of every parent with an infant.) Sears makes a gesture at reassuring parents who choose not to co-sleep, but it's clear that he thinks it's the cat's pajamas of sleeping arrangements. Looking for a solution here, I'm vulnerable and I find it difficult not to pat myself on the back.
Which is why, when I get to page 316, I let out an audible gasp, so noisy that Caleb looks up from his journal and asks me if I'm okay. I am. It's just that I had never noticed this before: "When the time comes, your baby will wean from your bed just like all the other weanings."
Why, Dr. Sears--that's just not true.
The editors have placed an illustration of an empty queen-sized bed with a smaller mattress at the foot of the bed. In the smaller bed lie a boy toddler and a female person--whether that person is girl child (the toddler's sister?) or simply a girlish-looking woman, I can't tell you. But they are sleep-weaning. I cannot believe I went all this time and never even heard the phrase.
I shut the book and place it on the stack of all the other parenting books. I'm thrown. I'd planned to pore through and find at least a mention of our situation. But no mentions lie in this particular stack of books. I'll have to figure something else out. I lean back and rub my eyes.
"Are you crying?" Caleb asks.
"No," I say. "Hey … do you know what I was just reading?"
"No," he says.
"I was reading this book that says that parents can teach their kids how to sleep in their own beds." Not altogether true, but maybe a good introduction to the idea?
Caleb frowns. "That's mean," he says.
"What's mean?"
"Those writers are mean. You're not supposed to tell people what to do!" He falls against the couch dramatically.
Under other circumstances, I'd totally agree.
The next day I find myself at AskDrSears.com, a website for all things attachment parenting: lots of co-sleeping, breastfeeding, wearing the baby, something called "father nursing," a practice of extended cuddling that Sears himself took up after the birth of his sixth child (he has eight altogether) and that he chronicles with fairly drippy prose.
Finally I find what I'm looking for in a Q&A. Someone out there has a six-year-old and a two-year-old who sleep in the bed with her and her mate. Sears replies that while bed-sharing is a godsend for those parents who need to "reconnect" with their infants (i.e., employed parents), it can be tough, especially if there's more than one kid:
One way to deal with overcrowding in the family bed is to put a futon or mattress on the floor in your room. Encourage your six-year-old to sleep in this "special bed", allowing him the security of feeling close to you at night but getting him used to sleeping alone.
The idea is that eventually, you move the futon into the child's own room.
I e-mail the page to Brandon with the note: So … want to try a "special bed" for Caleb.
Within three minutes, I get back: Yes.
This screwing around with the nighttime routine cannot be taken lightly. One afternoon, I evaluate the bedrooms, going so far as to whip out a tape measure. There's not a whole lot of space at the foot of our bed or anywhere else in our bedroom, but I can move the laundry baskets off to the side by the bathroom, or maybe in the closet. I'll drag Caleb's mattress in our bedroom. Maybe, I think, I'll buy some snazzy new sheets and a fleece blanket for him. He loves a fleece blanket.
I let Brandon in on the blueprints for getting Caleb in his own bed.
Then one night after we read a chapter from Teen Titans: Cyborg, Come Home!, I say to Caleb in an excited voice, "How would you like to start sleeping by yourself?" I expect grumbling, but I plan to counter with all the wonderful things that await him: A new bed! A headboard! Heck, maybe some fresh paint!
"I am never ever going to sleep in my own room," he says flatly. He stretches out on our bed.
Brandon and I look at each other. Uh oh. "Why?" I ask.
"It's boring there," Caleb says.
I straighten the covers. "How can it be boring in there? We're sleeping. Sleeping means that you're not even awake. Sleeping isn't supposed to be exciting."
"If I was in my room by myself, there wouldn't be anyone to cuddle with." Caleb rolls over and buries his face in the pillow.
Well. I don't know what to say. I stand there poised to click off the lamp, and I look at this almost-seven-year-old boy, slightly embarrassed that he verbalized how much he likes to fall asleep cuddling with his parents, splayed face-down in the middle of my bed. His dark blonde hair needs cut, his limbs are tanned, his hands lightly callused. This is the body of a big boy. I don't have very much little-kid time left with him at all.
I have become, I realize, the proverbial old woman in the grocery store who instructs new mothers--tired, frazzled, cranky new mothers--to enjoy it, but I can't help it. I feel like I have finally reached that part of Caleb's childhood where I can enjoy it. The embarrassment, the face in the pillow, is my warning: This will not last much longer. Two, three years maybe.
Am I a sucker? It depends what you think children are.
The Babywise people operate under the impression that kids are inherently self-centered, manipulative and amoral. "The ultimate objective of parenting in a free society is a moral one," Ezzo and Bucknam write. "When you rightly train the heart of a child, you lay down a solid foundation for the other disciplines of life." In other words, every parent faces the challenge of taking a wild creature and molding her into a rational, disciplined, moral person. By Babywise standards, I'm pretty much the stupid girl who got taken in by some bad poetry and a bottle of cheap red. Cuddling, I imagine them scoffing behind their aviator-style glasses (because--for real, now--all the crazy Christian conservative types wear the aviator-style glasses). That's the oldest trick in the book.
The mainstream experts--the folks at the AAP, the delicious-sounding T. Berry, the What to Expect crowd--like the idea of independence. In that sense, they're the quintessential American advice-givers: like all Americans, Caleb should be preparing to get on his horse and go it alone, Lone Ranger-style. Certain allowances can be made for his age, and it doesn't happen naturally, but parental eyes should be on the prize of getting a functioning member of society out the door. By all means, attach, bond with the kid--but, you know, not in a weird way. So by mainstream standards, I've also failed. I should have made like Cher and simply told him that we all sleep alone.
And Sears. To him, children are these natural wonderful creatures, not unlike a coral reef. My job was simply not to mess Caleb up and to foster enough attachment to me that the boy would want to go to bed by himself. He'd feel that secure. "Between two and three years, most children accept weaning from your bed," Sears writes. "[A] child's needs that are filled early will eventually go away; a child's needs that are not filled leave an empty space that can come back later as anxieties." Caleb doesn't feel secure enough to sleep alone, apparently. So, yes. I've failed again.
If Sears had been the first person to tell me about co-sleeping, I might feel bad about failing. But the truth is, I did not get this co-sleeping idea from him, or any of the academics studying ethnopediatrics, a field that looks to anthropology, sociology and evolutionary biology for evidence of the validity of non-Western types of parenting. I got it from Steel City, baby: home of the Terrible Towel, the pronoun yoons, and, at least in my family history, the sort of wages that couldn't afford everyone their own bed. My sisters and I grew up middle class (kind of, mostly), but there were some generational holdovers in the parenting. The co-sleeping being one of them.
"What's up with me?" I ask my mother on the phone the next night. "Why would I give up so easily?"
"Maybe you don't think that Caleb being in your bed is so bad," she says. "I don't think it is. Your sister slept with me until she was nine."
And Jill, age twenty-two, can sleep by herself just fine, I think.
"Kathy [my aunt] and I shared a bed. We lived in the foundation"--meaning, the cinderblock foundation of my grandparents' current ranch-style home, a foundation that's incredibly small by any standards, much less for a family of six--"and there wasn't any other choice."
My mother, a first-grade teacher, is no stranger to theories regarding children, but on this issue, I can hear her impatience with the hand-wringing. What she means when she brings up the foundation and Jill is that this is a non-issue. You want your kid in the bed, fine. You don't, fine. The sleep issue has no psychological ramifications at this point. For Caleb anyway.
"Yeah, but what about the sleepwalking?" I ask. Someone broke into a few houses in my neighborhood recently, and, given my nighttime rambling, my first thought was that maybe I did it. Maybe the sleeping me likes to burgle. Maybe the sleeping me was jonesing for some cash, iPods, and camcorders.
"I don't know," she says. "Are you sure the sleepwalking is related to Caleb being in your bed? Why would you start sleepwalking now and not any other time during the seven years he's been there?"
"I'm not sure," I say. "I don't know."
The problem with the self-help, I'm beginning to see, is that although I call what I'm doing "experiments," my life is a big unscientific jumble. I can't separate out the co-sleeping from everything else that may or may not be causing happiness. There are no controls.
Just like that, I abort my sleeping-alone plans. I can't do it. I don't want to do it. I can hack it a little longer, I think, sleepy days be damned.
I switch off the light and slide in next to Caleb. "Good night, family," I say.
"Good night," Brandon says.
"Good night," Caleb says. Downstairs, we hear our dog Luna rattle her crate.
"I like cuddling with you, too," I whisper to Caleb.
"Do you know what ten and ten and ten is?" he whispers back.
"Thirty. Now go to sleep."
"Okay," he says. We are a people who like to have the last word.
Reprinted from Practically Perfect in Every Way by Jennifer Niesslein with permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA). ©Jennifer Niesslein, 2007.
