Generally speaking, your nighttime sleep has been very good over the past few weeks. (Nap time is another matter, but it always has been with you and you may be transitioning out of morning naps right now, to boot.) After a spate of summertime illnesses brought on by daycare, for the last little while you've largely been sleeping through the night. No more fully waking an hour after you've been put down - a phenomenon I could just about set my watch by for months - and when we go into you at night you usually go back down with a replaced pacifier and little easing into a prone position.
Maybe it was teething; you have some molars pushing through. Maybe it was temperature; it's getting sincerely cold at night now. Maybe you were hungry; it's tough to judge how much you're getting actually IN your stomach at dinner. Maybe it was just confusion; we occasionally find you have awoken and are facing the wall instead of the rail that faces the rest of the room. Maybe, we'll never know. Whatever it was, though, you were up and in a panic many, many times from about 1:00 AM on.
Shrieking. Inconsolable. Thrashing out of our arms and throwing your pacifiers away. Panicking even more when we change your diaper, as though we were holding you down for some explicit torture. Your mom and I were at a complete loss, and eventually just had to go with whatever you would let us do. She stayed up and read to you around 4:00. I took over again at 5:30 so she could get a few precious minutes more sleep.
Much to my surprise, when I took you then, you didn't wail at her leaving the room, or smack me in the face with your binkie. I spoke quietly to you as I turned on the soft standing lamp in the TV room, preparing to be awake with you and trying to anticipate your yearnings until we could go to daycare at 7:30. But you were quiet, doe-eyed - still miserable but not crying as you had been when you recently woke in your mother's arms.
I thought it a long shot, but decided to settle back into the glider and see if you needed more rest. I expected you to shriek as soon as we moved toward the chair - a standard objection on your part, even moving to sit there, when you don't want to sleep. Instead, although we were breaking some prime tenets of Successful Josie Sleep:
- DO NOT have any lights on;
- REALLY DO NOT have them anywhere on Jo-Jo's face.
- MAKE SURE THE ROOM IS SEALED SHUT.
(Anton the Cat was not fed, and had no context for our bedroom door being closed, but the nursery door being open, and a light on, but no food, and the Tiny Human out of her crib but not screaming or thwacking him. So he meowed the entire time, and paced, and jumped on the ottoman, and tried to jump onto the arms of the glider. And you ... slept ... through all of it.)
I drifted in and out of sleep as I held you. It felt as though you were sleeping deeply enough that I could've set you in your crib and gotten on with the myriad preparations we have to do just to get out the door in the morning. That's my normal procedure. I try to get you to calm yourself in your crib. It had been a rough night, however, and I couldn't risk you or your mother losing any more sleep, and I couldn't bear the thought of you waking alone and afraid again. So I grabbed a blanket hanging from one end of your crib with my toes, and drew it over you, and drowsed as you slept in my arms.
When I was awake and not marveling at how you slept through Anton's arias, I worried. I don't like this sheer panic you display when you wake up during the night. I'm concerned that it is a habit that is coming from a general anxiety, and I want to spare you that. I want you to feel safe and at-home even when you wake in the dark.
Someone somewhere said that depressives dwell in the past, and neurotics fixate on the future, and that's a pretty apt description of what you can be caught between with me and your mom at our worst. At our best, my hope is that it balances out, and we find some equilibrium that buoys your development, makes you someone good with living in the present. But I wonder. Because I do tend to linger in what was, and your mom does tend to keep her eyes on what might be.
What concerns me about your erratic sleep history is that it echoes for me our flaws, that which I would rather not pass along to you - at least not with any intensity, or as a hindrance. The panicked waking reminds me of your mom, her struggle to get to sleep and her unease with the whir of her mind at bedtime. Your stubborn grip on that nighttime lamentation and its escalation as we turn on lights, rub your back, sing to you, this reminds of me, my firm adherence to my emotional state and using it to define reality.
It's natural for us to worry. It keeps us honest, and well-intentioned. The fact is, your mother's anxiety makes our life about 1000% better. She comes up with more scenarios than anyone else I know is capable of, and cares more about the minutiae of our day-to-day living than seems possible. It's my hope that my emotional sensitivity and accessibility helps us to be real and honest in a way that sometimes hurts, but always eventually helps. We want what's best for you, so much, so badly. Even when we're not at our best or you can't be consoled, that's got to count for something.
At 6:30, you roused, closed your eyes for another moment, then shot up to sitting in your customary fashion. Your mom was still sleeping, Anton was still meowing. You looked this way, that, then pointed to something in the room - no idea what - and told me, "Bah!" You had a couple of more things to point out ("Bah! Bah!") before getting down from my lap and picking up Are You My Mother? to take with you out of the room. We walked into the kitchen, I fed the cat, and you "read" through the book on the floor, happily murmuring to yourself and turning over cardboard pages.
The terrors of the night were slept away, and here you were in the early-morning moment, content to be alive and awake.
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