I go to a great parenting group every Thursday. Run by a fast-talkin’, hard-chargin’, no-nonsense woman and mother of three; I love it. No one among my friends and family is that interested in which brand of organic carrot (pureed) to buy, and neither am I, to be honest – but it’s nice to have a venue where someone would be, if you wanted to debate the point. We’re a motley crew, though similar in more ways than we would probably care to admit to, being middle class, part-time working or full time SAHM, living in or around Berkeley.
Our Berkeleyness conspires against us, however, particularly when the issue of sleep comes up. Now, in most parts of America there is seen (however incorrectly) to be a direct correlation between the age at which your child sleeps through the night and the quality of your parenting: In other words, you are seen to be doing a good job the younger your child ‘sleeps though’, to use the parlance. In Berkeley, the opposite is true: the older your child when s/he begins to sleep at night, the more devoted and loving a parent you is (‘responding to your child’s every cry’, see above essays). While I (theoretically) see the appeal of running up and down stairs at all hours of the night to tend lovingly to my non-sleeping infant, I saw the appeal of actually sleeping at night a good deal more. And so we sleep trained Jack. For those of you not quite au fait with the vernacular, this basically means we let him cry at night so that he would learn to go back to sleep and not wake us up. See the gathering storm clouds above? The troops are being raised, the battle lines drawn…
The point of all of this, of course, is that I discussed it in group. And I got the mother’s equivalent of Could Have Done Better on a performance appraisal: ‘Whatever works, Victoria, whatever works’, said to sighs of support. I think you might have to be a woman to appreciate the subtlety of a put down, which is, ostensibly, not. Women, of course, are arch preservers of group coherence, and will typically evade dissent to preserve harmony, but the particular feel of this new retort was something I had yet to encounter. I think it’s especially hard to be a mother in our historical and cultural time where there are no rules, only equally valid choices (or so it is made to appear…). And if you put that sociological tail spin on top of our female bias towards connection you end up with a smooth-sounding ‘whatever works’. Only of course you don’t actually talk. And you don’t share. And you don’t really connect with anyone.
And so, despite my own occasional reversion to ‘whatever works’ whenever some other mother has infringed my own particular code of mother-rightness, I’ve made it my own personal crusade not to. Not to lie. Not to conceal the truth of my own experiences just to make another mother feel happier about hers. God that sounds so self-righteous! But actually, when I find myself just speaking honestly about a particularly difficult (or particularly lovely) aspect of Jack or my motherhood, I rarely offend or find offence.
So, yeah, the sleep-training thing: Jack cried for an hour and forty minutes the first time we tried it, before he feel asleep. It was awful. It was harder than labor. But now we all sleep and I am not insane any more. And that was how that was for us.
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