The Rod
I’m saying goodbye to nap-time this week. After three children, nearly ten years and countless hours thinking about, planning and directing naps we are done with them. I’m relieved like I thought I would be. The days seem to open up when you stop thinking in terms of morning (before nap) and afternoon (after nap). We have toyed with it for weeks, even months, skipping one or two then catching up with naps for the rest of the week but today I realised that I can’t remember the last time I laid down with my youngest in the middle of the day and waited for her to fall asleep. Whenever it was, it may have actually been the last time. One of those ‘last time’ moments that sneak up on us and make us think and reflect. It’s one of those things that feels like it will never end. For some of us it consumes so much energy and space that when it is no longer there we feel that space before we realise what has actually happened.
Reflecting on this ‘last time’ is complex for me. Each of my babies had a very different sleep story. First we had a textbook baby who took sleep training in his stride at 7 weeks old with barely a whimper. Next came his brother who could not and would not be trained, nor would he be cuddled, comforted or settled. He didn’t sleep day or night and every nap was a failed attempt to get him back into some sort of routine that would break the cycle of over-tiredness. Turns out he had a few obstacles to sleep and once we turned our focus to those obstacles and slowly removed them he found sleep…just in time to go to kindy and welcome his baby sister. She’s the one dropping her naps right now. With her I did all of the wrong things. I knowingly made a rod for my back and this is where my thoughts have landed. On that rod.
See the only stress I really ever had with her and her sleep came from that rod, the idea of it. Rocking and feeding her to sleep as a baby was not stressful. Patting her back through her cot rails or on the side of her bed as she got bigger wasn’t stressful either. None of it was stressful, none of it felt wrong, none of it was a problem until I thought about whether I should be doing it, how long I would have to do it and whether I had created bad habits. Each time I got caught up in these ideas and worries I eventually came back to the knowledge that I had made a choice to do things this way for a reason and choosing a different way wouldn’t guarantee things would be better or easy. In fact, going against my reasons for making the choice to begin with, a year or two down the track, seemed like a pretty hard road to go down. So I didn’t. I kept going. Sometimes I felt tired, exhausted and frustrated. Sometimes I let those worries hang out in my head for days and weeks at a time. I doubted myself and my choices often.
But here we are, three years along and the ‘rod’ is gone because she doesn’t need naps anymore. We are down to one bedtime a day and even that won’t last forever I know. So I know that the ‘rod’ advice comes from a good place. I know that people who have been here before us and experienced things we haven’t yet only want to help but I think we’ve muddled up the whole idea a bit. The rod is not the same for all of us. The rod is not a thing, a behaviour or a habit. The rod is not feeding or comforting to sleep, at least not for me. The rod for me, the thing I regret looking back, is that I didn’t cuddle my first two to sleep for longer. The rod for me was taking on the idea of a schedule and all of the ‘should’s’ when they didn’t feel good to me, they didn’t align with my values and beliefs, they weren’t something that I could maintain long term happily. I did them because I thought that’s what I should do and THAT was making a rod for my back, that was creating disharmony within me and a mismatch between what I felt and what I was doing.
The rod is anything we do on a regular basis that does not align with what we know about ourselves and our maternal instincts about our child. It’s not rocking to sleep and it’s not living to a strict schedule. The reason that there are so many books on schedules and sleep training out there is because they work for a lot of mums and babies. The reason that there is such a debate about the right way to address sleep for babies is because there are two ways, two extremes with a whole lot of potential ‘ways’ in between. The reason neither side can win the argument is because there is not one answer. Each mother is a complex and unique individual raising a tiny, new, complex and unique individual. How could there be one answer that suits every one of those millions of unique pairings in the world?
