Gavin clawed the hell out of his head again last night. "A tiger got me," is what he tells us. But the truth is, our son is a cutter.I really don't want to fuck this up. This being the whole parenting thing. Granted, I'm sure most parents don't want to fuck things up, even the ones that do. But there's really no surefire way to know you're doing things right.
The sleep train has been derailed. Or perhaps rerouted is a better word. The whole "cry it out, Tough Guy" approach has been nothing but horrible. It has made Stacy and I both feel like the worst parents in the world. Gavin is a really sensitive little guy and I think we really screwed up. I feel really guilty. Like I should have had a better idea or answer. But it all seemed so reasonable at the time. Which is something I often think about crazy shit I did as a teenager. Though, for the record, I didn't really do crazy shit as a teenager. I was a pretty good kid. So my idea of crazy shit is probably pretty boring. Like when the brakes failed on my 1984 Ford Escort as I drove my twin sister and I to school one morning. I remembered the whole "pump the brakes and do something with the emergency brake" thing from driver's ed and there was still some, albeit very little, braking power left. It seemed perfectly reasonable to not only continue driving to school but to also pick up our friend Meghan on the way. When she got in and I said, "Buckle up. We don't have any brakes." As if "buckling up" wasn't already a rule in my car and brakes were an optional feature like power windows.
In any case, my heart is pretty broken over letting Gavin cry for over three hours the other night and for an hour or so both yesterday and today during naps. I'm worried the poor little dude is going to have PTSD. Getting him up after he's spent an hour crying instead of napping he looks like a wounded animal. His face is all red, eyes all puffy and shiny, little salt trails down his face. All I want to do after that is hold him. Like I can somehow compensate for that hour of neglect. I've really hated every second of it.
And yet. Tonight he fell asleep after less than five minutes of crying and it wasn't even full throated. I was taking the trash out and then went to the library so I missed the bedtime routine. But Stacy said it went well and Gavin was asleep soon after 6 p.m. Here it is, almost 10 and he's still asleep. So maybe, just maybe, it hasn't been all for naught? Still, we've revised the sleep training plan a bit. I just can't stand to let him cry like this. I feel like we're teaching him that his crib is a scary place where he is offered no comfort and left alone. I don't want him forming negative associations with his crib. And I don't want him forming negative associations with bedtime either. So soothing has entered the process, though it's supposed to be minimal. No picking him up. And no rocking, since that's something we're trying to get him to let go of. Both Stacy and I agree that we can't expect him to learn how to self-soothe if he's totally losing his shit. That's like trying to help someone with an intense phobia of flying by sticking him on a hijacked jet with an engine failure.
I went to the library to get another sleep book, of course. Two of them, actually. If it's possible to over research something, then I think we've over researched this. Stacy is the kind of person who wants as much information as possible in order to make a decision. She wants to read book after book about a topic and weigh pros and cons. I do, too -- to a point. But I also am the oldest of five brothers and sisters (one brother, actually. Three sisters) and I baby sat a lot when I was younger. So I have some experience with kids. Not a lot of quality experience, mind you. Looking back I have no idea why people let me babysit their kids when I was a pre-teen. A pre-teen! Maybe these people did not love their children. But I would never leave Gavin with a god damn 12-year-old. Hell, 16 is too young in my opinion. You leave your baby with the teenager down the street and the next thing you know she's humping her boyfriend on your couch when you come home a little early from work (that happened to my dad. There's also an excellent story about a babysitter taking Laura and I to a high school football game when we should have been at home in bed. According to my father, our Grandma Bea, God rest her soul, was working the concession booth and saw us in the stands in just a t-shirt and a diaper and she marched all the ay across the field to retrieve us. Granted, this is according to my father who is an unreliable narrator.
Stacy and I have been together 12 years and I was with her when she changed her first diaper. Not her own diaper. She doesn't wear diapers. Thank God. But Stacy and I went to the Michigan Women's Music Festival oh so many years ago and, because the Festival is like vacationing on a commune, I signed up for a work shift in the Sprouts and Shoots area. Which meant watching little kids. Very little kids, it turned out, though I thought I was signing up to watch kids who took care of their own potty-related needs. Not so. (It should be noted that when I signed up for my workshift I had the choice of kids or garbage. The choice seemed so obvious). And because Stacy loves me, she went with me to my work shift and was watching a little girl named Cassidy who was still in diapers. Cassidy could walk, but not talk and spent most of her time playing on a slip and slide type thing set up in an area with little grass and lots of mud. When it was time to change Cassidy into dry clothes and a clean diaper, Stacy found, to her horror, that Cassidy's privates were packed with dirt. I was off somewhere else trying to reason with a little girl named Maya to put her Pull-Up on so that she didn't take a dump on the play room floor (because toddlers respond so well to reasoning) so Stacy was left to shovel out Cassidy's nethers on her own. And while she did the best she could, I still worry that Cassidy ended up with some kind of infection.
And to think that Stacy still wanted to have kids after that. And that she still would like to go back to the MWMF. I am with her on the first (obviously), but I feel like I have more than earned my Lesbian Scouts MWMF badge and never have to do that again.
Anyway, my point is that I think parenting requires you to trust your gut more. There's so much conflicting information out there. It's crazy making.
So. Sleep training continues. But a kinder, gentler sleep training. And as Gavin learns to sleep, Stacy and I learn to forgive ourselves. It won't, I'm sure, be the first time we have to remind ourselves that we're doing the best we can, even if that "best" looks terrible in retrospect.
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