Maternal contortions

I wonder how many other mothers have found themselves in bizarre bodily predicaments like those of my early days with P. I always fed him on demand, & had no qualms about feeding him to sleep; in fact, I keenly remember the hazy sense of relief that came with an afternoon feed when I had managed to grab myself some water first and a DVD to watch as he lay completely relaxed on the pillow on my lap. Nothing could alleviate the appalling lack of sleep, but my aching back relaxed, I didn't have to respond to anyone or anything, and I could be distracted for a while and allow my emotions some time off too. Really, that was about as good as it got for many, many months.

Despite being relaxed about feeding and sleeping arrangements, I had foolishly assumed, when I was pregnant, that there was still a place for a pram and a bassinet in our sleeping configurations; P would, surely, be happy to be lulled occasionally by singing, rocking, or rolling, wouldn't he? I mentioned in an earlier post the sinking sensation that I felt when he was less than 2 weeks old, as it registered with me that, basically, I was not in charge of any of these decisions. At night, we would lie him in the bed between us, to have him stir within minutes. We put the bassinet mattress on top of ours with a wedge under it so that he was not quite flat; no better. For not a few nights I "lay" propped on a pile of pillows while he slept on my chest. No matter where he started the night, when he roused, he didn't just whimper or resettle quickly; he got very, very upset, and the effort of calming him, which consisted mainly of frantic bouncing, usually with thumpy disco music in the background, was exhausting, and frankly, unrewarding. And during the day, if I didn't/couldn't feed him and have him sleep on my lap, or over my shoulder, I would carry him around in one of the array of carriers and wraps that I ended up with. The one that was most comfortable for me, he slept worst in; best for him caused my back to burn. I remember one day being determined to toughen up and put him in the pram and stick with it; I lasted a block and a half before carrying him home, defeated and totally demoralised.

So my daytime options were P sleeping on my lap (at my breast) or on my chest. Ads for baby carriers and wraps are full of halcyon images of babies sleeping contentedly while their mothers cooked, chopped vegetables and gardened with their charges held blissfully against the maternal body -- another failure for me to chalk up! Well, strictly speaking, no; he slept longer nestled against me than he slept anywhere else, but any activity on my part other than walking woke him up, as did his feet brushing against our thighs if, after all the stomping required to get him to sleep, we dared to sit down (so any sitting had to be done perched on the edge of a chair with legs akimbo), and if I propped myself on pillows and tried to rest (despite this working some nights), the precise angle where I was able to relax was the one where he woke up and wailed like an air-raid siren. It felt like my baby was an instrument controlled by a higher power in a calculated program of persecution.

At 7 weeks, we discovered hammocks, and were dreadfully excited as he lay in one, without complaint, and was bounced and patted to sleep without being fed or carried. That excitement was soon tempered by the realisation that he would not sleep more than one 30-40 minute cycle in the thing, and sometimes, we could bounce and pat him for longer than he slept for to get him down at all. It was still better than what we'd had, but the relief was minimal.

The months dragged on. At 11 weeks, when his eyesight kicked in, I abandoned lying him down in the pram and sat him up instead; so fascinated was he by the world he could see that we were now able to go for short, fast walks, if we avoided lulls in the motion (waiting for lights had me sweating from stress), prominent bumps in the footpath, which sent him ballistic, and direct sun in the eyes, which had the same effect. The baby carrier was always stowed underneath, and usually employed before we reached home. I could also now lie him down at home in the bassinet and wind up the mobile over his head, and this would keep him quiet as long as it was spinning. It lasted about 90 seconds, and I would frantically run from it to the toilet or the kitchen for food or whatever I needed to do in those short bursts, for as long as they lasted. One day these 90-second bursts lasted for 40 minutes. Another, he relaxed enough that his eyes closed for a few brief seconds before whatever it was that made it so hard for him to sleep forced them open again.

At 5 months old, I, sleep-deprived and alone all day in the heat of a dreadful summer in our un-airconditioned home, could not sustain any of this. The first time I took him out in the car specifically to make him sleep, I felt that I had fallen one ledge further down the Cliff of Failure. I sat in the air-conditioned car, listened to the radio, and worried about staying alert when I was so tired. He took ages to fall asleep, but it was without tears (on his part) or pain (on mine). Settling him in the evening became particularly horrendous at this time, and so sometimes, Q and I would both go on the drive and converse, an occurrence so rare that it felt decidedly strange. Sometimes we did 2 or 3 round trips of the entire freeway before P dropped off. I remember for New Year's Eve, we festively varied our route and drove by the river, even though the slower speed was not as conducive to sleep ...

By now, P was mobile enough that we felt that the hammock was no longer safe. We still clung to the notion that he would learn to lie on some kind of surface during the day and rest there. We had a cot, and now, we decided, was time to use it. For 3 weeks we persevered. The first few days, he seemed entertained by the novelty, and may even have fallen asleep by himself, I really can't remember now. If he did, it didn't last long; rebellion soon began. Not only were we tired by the effort of getting him to sleep; he didn't seem to be in anything like a regular sleep pattern, and also seemed to tire very easily, as he had since birth. We were monumentally confused and worn out.

Not knowing how to get him to sleep, when he needed sleep, or how much sleep he needed (since he never seemed really rested), I decided that I would make it as easy as I could for him to sleep, which meant feeding him to sleep every time. If I did that for a few weeks, we could at least figure out what his sleep pattern should be. He would also, we presumed, be more rested and so easier to deal with, which would help our energy and morale no end. Then we could work on how to get him to sleep. I'd run out of options, so this was the best plan I could come up with. At 6 months, I started lying down with him on the bed, and staying. Stupid as it sounds, I didn't know how to get my nipple out of his mouth, but it didn't really matter; after about 20 minutes, he started comfort sucking in his sleep. If my nipple had dropped out of his mouth while his jaws were loose, he woke up; with it in, he settled down for at least another sleep cycle.

So much for my plans. Once there, I couldn't escape. He was too heavy now for my sore back to carry him round. There was no-one here to help me, so I went down with him and stayed there. At least, you would think, I was getting some rest too, and I sort of was, but there is no way that I could actually sleep with a baby working on my nipple for much of the time. So I read. I don't know how I could think enough to read, but it was that or lie there in the dark despairing of how I'd gotten myself into this predicament. I read books about babies. I learnt an awful lot. But the ground beneath my self esteem was crumbling every day, and I slid by degrees further down that cliff face ...

I sought all sorts of help. We'd had a gentle-minded sleep consultant visit when he was very young, and had several sessions with another expert in the field. I read everything on sleep out there, and got as far as booking into one of the dreaded "sleep schools", although I never went through with it. I did have a phone consultation of sorts with the nurse though who thought I was actually doing a good job of recognising my baby's tired signs, and as it happens, I think so too. I think we had a pretty good repertoire of strategies up our sleeves as well. Working against us was our exhaustion; it's hard to change anything when you are in that state. But I do believe that at the core of it all was a baby struggling in ways that no-one appreciated. Post-diagnosis, much of this early time made a lot more sense to me, and I was so traumatised by that time that I had been over P's infancy with a fine-toothed comb, never understanding why it had left me so utterly crushed. With hindsight, I can say that at least we were always guided by trying to meet his needs, rather than trying to force him to be the baby that he wasn't, and really couldn't be. It was gruelling, and I have no doubt that it could have been done at less cost to ourselves, if only we'd know what we were in for ...

But what happened happened. At around 1 year old, we started to stretch out P's night-time sleep intervals, as he rarely slept more than 2 hours, often less, depending on which part of the night it was. Over several months, we got him to sleep for 5 hours. That was our goal, but once there, I had to make it 6. From there, he went quickly to 8, and by about 16 months weaned himself from night feeds. The day situation continued. At night, Q held P if he cried for the breast, but there was no-one in the day to do that, so there was no change, until I got pregnant with S, when P was 19 months old. Four weeks into the pregnancy, for unknown reasons, P started damaging my nipples. One night, Q popped 5 blisters, and they were just the big ones. I presume that my supply diminished, or the taste changed, and so he reacted by kind of worrying my nipples; whatever the reason, we had to change things quickly. Q stayed home a few days, and his distress was horrendous. P pretty much continued to cry at every sleep for months and months and months ... I felt like a heel, but I guess I had just enough of a shred of self-respect left to draw the line at suffering physical damage like that (hmm, I didn't adhere to that too well next time round! But that's another story, and the circumstances were different too).

Oh, I've made it sound so dreadful, and so it was. But in some ways, only because the stakes were so high. Feeding P to sleep, I could see that he was in the best place in the whole world; anybody who has watched the phases that a baby goes through as it relaxes at the breast must have seen this too, but how much more intense it is for the mother who is physically connected to the child. This is not just about sleeping; whenever I see a baby being fed from a bottle, gazing at the mother's face, and sometimes reaching out, I just wish the woman knew how euphoric it would be for her if she could complete the physical connection. So the sadness at taking the best place in the world away from my child was just huge. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so if he had seemed a more robust little individual, but it felt to us as though everything came at a huge emotional cost for him, and so, for us. The serenity that came with being fed to sleep and lying by my side while he slept ... I'm not sure how else we could have provided that for him, with the resources we had.