Who here can tell me what sleep training is? Fifty words or less. You can’t answer me directly, obviously, but it doesn’t matter because you couldn’t answer me directly seated next to me in my living room, given the stipulations that you can’t verbatim quote the Ferber book and you have to look me in the eye.
Nobody knows what it is! Nobody knows how to get their baby to sleep. And, there’s a cruel twist! The more babies you have, the worse it’s going to get, because you think that by now you should know, but you still don’t—plus you already weren’t getting enough sleep in the first place with the older two.
Plus, everyone told you the third one would be easier.
Plus, your pediatrician said bigger babies sleep through the night early.
Plus, you’re only human. A very, very tired human. What do all the other tiny humans want from you?
You’re going to go crazy. That part is inevitable. But there are options here. You can choose how you want to go out of your mind, with the Ferber method, the cry-it-out, the bedtime-hour fading. You can choose to go it alone or consult your loved ones for support. More likely, you’ll consult the internet, which is fit to burst with other parents just as high-strung and sleep-deprived as you are. Also, they’re complete strangers! So just in case there was any doubt as to whether you were truly, 100-percent, absolutely crazy or not, you can start taking advice from those people—or do what I did and invite one of them into your home.
Michael marketed himself as a sleep coach, which sounds as absurd to me now as it did six months ago, when we hired him. His rate was $500, to help us induce an already naturally recurring state of body and mind, for my third child. Again, we had done this two times before.
I hated myself for hiring Michael. I didn’t want to tell anyone we were doing it, and the more I thought about that $500, the more it seemed like it should have been going to war-crime victims in Yemen. So what if I wasn’t sleeping! I didn’t deserve sleep. I was a bad person, saddled with white privilege, white guilt and a white-noise machine that wasn’t making an iota’s worth of difference in helping my baby to sleep.
Michael didn’t shame me for the baby’s sleep problems, or for not sending the money to Yemen. We never got around to chatting about Yemeni conflict resources, but I know he would have supported my choices. He was very into that: supporting my choices. He came to our house, “toured” the nursery, offered a few pointers for an improved “sleep environment” and brought out four different sleep plans from which we could choose. We went with Ferber, which is what pretty much everyone goes with. What we had gone with on our first two kids. What we had already tried twice on the new baby, failing both times. This time would be different, though, because we had paid the $500 upfront, and also because Michael and I had four follow-up phone calls scheduled for that week.
I’ll say this for Michael: If anyone should be a sleep coach, it is this man. He gives off a big hippie vibe, but not irresponsible hippie. Loving hippie. Accepting-of-your-humanity hippie. A hippie who’s college educated, and washes and trims his hair, which, by the way, is a beautiful shag of gray curls.
He reserves judgment. He knows a lot about babies and their sleep; his is a wellspring of excellent and well-considered advice.
I deeply regretted bringing him into our lives.
I resented having to report back to a third party about what I was doing with my baby. I resented the sleep logs, the eating and activity logs. I resented the failures, even the successes. I was the one doing all this stuff; why should Michael get all the credit? I forgot that it had been my idea to hire him, and couldn’t wait for the week to be over.
I couldn’t tell him any of this, of course. He was too nice, the damn hippie. Michael forgave my defeats, my inability to keep to a schedule. He encouraged me to forgive myself, too, which I did, begrudgingly, to make myself try again.
For that one week, we made big progress with sleep training, which all came undone in a matter of hours. Months later, we did what we did with my older two, which was to grow so tired we just couldn’t get up anymore.
If it sounds negligent, cruel, even crazy—well, we knew that part was always inevitable.
Susan Anspach is a product of Northern Virginia’s schools, swim teams and cultural mores. Her sleep could stand for improvement.
