Sleep Training (or my first regret as a mother)

I try to avoid drive-by prayers where I treat God like a genie in a bottle (eg: "Please make the neighbor's dog stop barking!" or "Please help me get to my client meeting on time!").  But my two most common (and often only) prayers when I was initiated into motherhood were "Please make this baby stop crying!" and "Please make this baby go to sleep!"

At six weeks, my daughter started waking up in the middle of the night and not going back to sleep.  I knew she was tired because she would cry and claw at me with her little baby fingernails, but no amount of nursing or rocking would put her to sleep.  One time I held her for two hours in the middle of the night, and then she got the hiccups.  The hiccups put me over the edge.

My husband and I decided to sleep train our daughter.  I had read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (HSHHC) and was sufficiently spooked about the adverse effects that sleep-deprivation would have on my baby's neurological and emotional development.  I had also read Babywise and was afraid to raise the clingy, needy child that it described would be the result of my not taking a hard line on teaching my baby to self-soothe.  So we let our baby cry.  She cried over an hour for some of her naps and over two hours most nights in the first few weeks.

She's a great sleeper now, but my first regret as a mother is having sleep trained our daughter so early.  Even though I was at the end of my rope physically and emotionally, I feel like I traded her emotional well-being for mine.  It was either me suffering or her suffering, and I chose for it to be her (although technically it was both of us suffering because I think a part of my heart literally died from hearing her cry for so many hours).  I wish I hadn't been so weak.

I doubted myself as a mother.  I thought I had no maternal instincts, and when I started believing that about myself, I could only make intellectual decisions based on books that I had read.  My co-worker had told me that Babywise was good as a guideline, but my rules-based approach to the world did not understand what it meant to use something as a guideline.  I kept out of trouble by following rules.  I made good grades by following rules.  You always get the right answer when solving a math equation by following rules.  What did it mean for something to be a guideline?

I'm still a big believer in crying-it-out (CIO) for sleep training but just not at such an early age  (I made it a goal to hold out until at least 12 weeks with my second, but God saved me by giving me a baby who puts herself to sleep without crying).  I'm also still a big HSHHC and Babywise fan.  I kept Babywise next to my glider after having our second child and referred to it almost daily in the beginning.  But this time around, I had a better idea of what it meant to use it as a guideline.