Medicating with Will Ferrell

During the time when we were sleep training my daughter, she often took short naps lasting only 15-20 minutes.  She was a ticking time bomb that kept me on edge even when she was asleep.  During this period, my sister sent me two DVDs to help pass my time, and I watched them in short spurts over several naps.  What I didn't expect was the deep feeling of dread and disappointment I had when each movie ended.  I could almost feel my heart physically dropping in my chest when the credits rolled.  Both movies are great but not cinematic masterpieces (Baby Mama and Stranger Than Fiction), but I became incredibly engrossed in them because they provided an escape from reality.

His girlfriend left him for an actuary.

With the end of each movie, I was forced to face the depression, the stress, and the anxiety again.  I felt kind of pathetic for being depressed at the end of a movie, but if there's no shame in taking antidepressants, then I suppose there should be no shame for anesthetizing with Will Ferrell.  So many activities in life are just distractions from reality: TV, blogs, Facebook.  I've found that self-reflection is often the biggest enemy of someone struggling with depression, and sometimes these superficial distractions are what keep us going.

On the other hand, I'm not sure God wants us to medicate with media.  I suspect the only things keeping Him from yanking these superficialities out of our lives are His gentle mercy and patience.  I hope one day I will be able to come face to face with my depression and offer it up to God in exchange for a deeper understanding of His grace and abundance.  For now, I'm acutely aware of the depression lurking in the corner of the room, but I only have the courage to look at it askance, trying on most days to just pretend it's not there.

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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.

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