It Will Not Define Me
Three weeks ago my three year old, who had been mostly dry at night for six months, started to wet the bed every night. Some nights it was more than once. It started while my husband was away of course and by four nights in I was exhausted and mystified. What on earth was going on? Was he missing his Daddy or was there something else? Something like maybe the essential oils that I had started to diffuse in his room at bedtime to help him to settle and sleep? The bedwetting had started a few nights after I had started with the oils and it was too much of a coincidence so I started to research and dig. Was the blend I was using too strong for him? Was it knocking him out so much that he was losing the control he usually had of his bladder or could one component of the blend I was using be affecting his bladder? I diluted further, I diffused for shorter periods of time, I removed two of the components so it was a simpler blend, I asked several people for their opinions, I tried everything I could think of while washing sheets and pyjamas every morning.
More than one person (including my husband) suggested I buy some pull ups and enjoy the fact that he was consistently sleeping soundly for the first time in his life. I didn’t even let the idea settle in my mind, I fought it off like it was attacking me, I swatted them all away like flies. How could they have misinterpreted my questions so badly? I wasn’t asking for toilet training advice, I was trying to get to the bottom of why this was happening. Why he had all of a sudden regressed when he had been going so well. I continued my fight for three long weeks. For twenty-one nights I went to bed anticipating the waking but hoping it would be the night that things would turn around. On twenty-one consecutive mornings I woke between 430 and 5am to urine soaked sheets and clothes and bitter disappointment. As the days and nights went on I got more tired and more frustrated until the holidays arrived. We had planned a weekend away at a local eco resort and while we were there my husband and I got up and took Mr 3 to the toilet five times in one night. I woke in the morning and realized we were losing the plot and the fight. The day we got back to town I wrote the words I had been avoiding on my shopping list. Pull ups.
The first night we put his Monsters Inc ‘night time pants’ on he fell asleep before 7pm. As we got ourselves ready for bed a couple of hours later we discussed whether we should put him on the toilet in his sleep like usual or just let him be. We decided to leave him and I felt this huge sense of relief. I could get into bed and not worry about whether he would wake up, whether he would be wet, whether I would have to strip his bed once or twice through the night. It didn’t matter. At 330am he had a whinge, I got up and he was wet but his bed wasn’t. I changed him, put him back in his bed and we all went back to sleep. Simple. I woke in the morning and was happy with our decision. We just needed a break to get some sleep, regroup and then we could tackle the night time training again.
The second night we put a pull up on him before bed, he fell asleep quickly again and the next thing I knew it was six thirty am and he was standing in my bedroom with jocks on. He had woken up half an hour earlier, been dry, been to the toilet and got himself dressed. I was shocked and over the moon at the same time. I got out of bed and wandered around the house laughing to myself. It was just so ridiculous and so perfect that all I could do was laugh. By giving up on my struggle and letting go I had released the responsibility I had felt for the outcome, I had let it be and it had worked out on its own so quickly. It may have been a fluke, we may have to change him out of wet pull-ups for months to come yet but it won’t matter. It made me think about where we are and how focused I had become in just three short weeks on “getting there”. I say it all the time, I‘ve said it for years, “we’ll get there” without really understanding where ‘there’ is or what it is. All I could focus on was the thing that was stopping us from being ‘there’, in that magical place where everybody is happy and healthy and balanced and toilet trained.
I focused on the wet sheets so much that I missed the important thing. The important thing is that three weeks ago my three year old son, who has never been able to settle or sleep soundly at night started to do just that and had I not been worried about him being perfect and toilet trained too he may have also been sleeping through the night that whole time. I had immediately, without missing a beat, replaced the worried anticipation of waking to a screaming, inconsolable child with the worried anticipation of waking to a child soaked in urine. I have grown so accustomed to feeling that way, maybe I was holding onto a habit? A three year long habit that has become my life, my problem, my hardship, my issue, my identity. Holding on to all of that and holding out for perfection robbed me, for three weeks, of relief and of the realization that we will never ‘get there’ because we are there. Things are not perfect, we haven’t got everything completely under control but we are back in a place where our challenges are the challenges of having a young family. This regression is a teensy weensy little hiccup that parents everywhere deal with. I have the option of putting a pull up on him and getting a good night sleep and I can choose to do that.
It’s funny how often I still catch myself talking about sleep cycles, sleep deprivation and our struggle with it all. It comes up in conversations that aren’t even about sleep. My brain seems to be able to find a link or association between sleep and anything I am presented with in a conversation. I even have a couple of new friends who didn’t know us back then, who don’t know what we went through to get to here, where we are, with a little boy who seems cheeky and active but mostly normal. I have to stop myself from letting those old reels run, from rehashing those old stories and old conversations because they don’t fit here. I find myself trying to explain it all, after I’ve mentioned something about it and been faced with polite confusion and misunderstanding. I feel like I can’t convey how difficult it was, how long it consumed us for or how far it pushed us toward breaking point. The stories I do tell don’t make sense here without all of the background and I feel frustrated, like I need them to understand, but maybe I don’t. To be honest it’s freeing to think that none of that really matters anymore. It happened, it was important at the time and it was part of our journey to here but I can stop feeding it anytime I choose to now. I am no longer the sleep deprived, highly-strung, semi-depressed mother of a child who just cannot sleep. I am no longer desperately searching for the answers that will help us to manage and live our lives. For three years it was something I struggled with and it consumed my life. I will always remember how difficult it was and people who were there will remember too. The thing is, it’s not who I am anymore and I need to find a way to make sure that it will not define me or my little boy anymore.
