I think the hardest thing to deal with as a mother to an infant is sleep regression. I mean, the first couple months are hard, but you expect to be sleep-deprived, so you grit your teeth and bear it.
But being blindsided by a baby who's capable of sleeping well? Who's accustomed to sleeping well? Who knows he's supposed to be sleeping well? But for whatever reason, he doesn't. Those are the times I feel the frustration welling up -- at the baby, at the sleeping husband, at the world. Would somebody just make things be the way they're supposed to be already?
"Supposed to be." What exactly does that mean? Am I supposed to expect uninterrupted sleep? Am I supposed to believe that the nighttime hours are mine, to be jealously and selfishly guarded for myself?
I picked him up, muttering under my breath to him to just be quiet, and wondered what he wanted this time: to eat? to talk? to practice crawling or walking or screeching? Babies wake up for the weirdest reasons.
No, none of those things. The moment I picked him up, he stopped crying, clasped his pudgy hands around my neck, and nuzzled his chin into my neck. I felt tension just draining out of his body. I didn't rock, sing, pat, walk, nurse, or rub him back to sleep. I just sat there while he hugged me. Then I lay him back down and he drifted back to sleep.
He only wanted a hug. He only wanted to know that he wasn't alone in the world, that mommy was still there, that she smelled, felt, sounded the same. Maybe he had a bad dream or an unexpected noise startled him awake or...maybe not. Maybe he just needed to know that I wasn't going anywhere.
I lay on my back in the darkness and remembered the first few weeks of having him. I remembered worrying about whether his belly button was ever going to dry up, worrying about how many diapers he was filling, worrying about whether he would ever learn to latch correctly and what if he didn't?
It seems so funny now that that I wasted time worrying about those things, which seemed so ominous at the time but lasted just a couple weeks and seem like a distant memory.
Sometimes I still worry about little things, though. Sometimes I worry that night wake-ups will become a habit if I don't nip it in the bud. That if I nurse him to sleep, he'll want to be put to sleep that way forever. That he won't learn to be independent, that he'll become a snacker if I feed him too often, that maybe if I were a little stricter in routine he would sleep better and be happier.
But then last night I thought about Someday, when I'll look at him and think, "My goodness, my baby's a man-child." And then not too long after that, I'll drop the "child" from the description. And then I won't see my baby at all, but a man who seems a stranger to me ("could he have come from me?") and yet impossibly familiar.
It will seem so silly to me then, that I worried about whether he nurses to sleep or whether I carry him too much. What's the worst that can happen? That for a year, maybe two, he'll wake up and ask for mommy? That he'll need a middle-of-the-night snuggle to ease his precious baby mind? Years that will seem like such a short time in the long run.
Sometimes changes are needed NOW for sanity's sake. That's fine - we make those changes as necessary. But I don't want to parent out of fear for the future. If we're all happy with an arrangement, I don't want to miss the precious moments with my baby today because I'm afraid of...what? That I won't want those precious moments with my baby tomorrow?
For now, I want to snuggle my baby just a little bit longer. And if that means he wants an extra snuggle tomorrow...that's fine by me.
