Her Sleep Deprived Primal Yell

She heard him rustling, then came the expected and familiar cry.  There was no rhyme or reason to it, each night at different times of the night.  The pattern night after night was...that there was no pattern. On this night, she oozed off the bed and staggered across the hall to his room, careful not to smack her face into the door as she had done the night before, breaking the frames of her glasses.  She stumbled in, picked up the unhappy boy and heaped into the gliding rocker.  She nursed him first on the left, then the right. He didn't need over the shoulder burping any more...he let out the air as she pulled him up under her chin, arms and legs tucked around her, for snuggling and rocking.  She loved this part, his soft hair on her neck, his pudgy fingers around her arm, even his little sweaty just come up from the blanket smell.  They rocked, it got quiet.  She focused on the motion and prayed that he'd go back to sleep.  Every night he woke, and every night was a new adventure, but not one that included any real quality sleep.  He'd wake up 3 maybe 4 times a night, he might be up 30 minutes, or 3 hours.  No matter how the night went, he was up by 4:30 am for the day.  Keeping him up all day just meant he was grumpier, no change in his anti-sleep night time hours.  On this night, the sum of months of this haphazard schedule hung heavy on more than her eyelids.  She rocked, they cuddled, she rocked some more.  What seemed like any eternity later she slowly stopped rocking, hopeful, carefully searching to see if he'd dropped off.

Nope.  With gentle movement and the light of the moon spilling through the cracks in the blinds onto her little boy's eyes she knew...he was wide awake.  He grew more wiggly and more playful and her heart fell into a place of pure despair.  She took a deep breathe in, and a sound started from deep in her soul and evolved from there until it released through her mouth in a noise that frightened her.  It was an animal noise, both deep and intense more a yell than a scream.  It was an audible expression of her despair and and confusion and frustration, like a wild boar trapped in a pool of tar.  Somehow she knew the more she tried to free herself, the deeper she'd be in the thick of what caring for this active, beautiful boy meant.  The awful thing about her undirected roar of pain, was that until that moment - the boy had been cooing and playfully snuggling in her arms.  A millisecond after her unplanned roar, his own startled noise and subsequent crying commenced.  So, they both sat there and sobbed.                                                                                                                                             

With her first child....the girl, she had gotten fed up with the waking up every 3 hours and finally at 11 months she employed the "crying it out" method to get the baby to sleep through the night.  That first night was torture for her, the mother.  Herself the only child of a single mother, she had never grown accustomed to hearing any baby's noises.  It was like in her maternal brain, all crying meant internal suffering.  There was also the weight of the idea that the perfect and doting mother would never allow her baby's needs not to be met.  Didn't the baby crying mean she needed something?  To magnify her role as mother, she would dedicate herself not only to understanding and responding quickly to her baby's needs but there was this unspoken (and as yet unrealized as unattainable) additional goal of actually anticipating her baby's needs.  Then she wouldn't cry, suffer or hurt in any way, right?    In any case, it took exactly 3 nights for that first baby to learn to self soothe to sleep.  

But not this adorable guy.  From the moment he burst on the scene, all 8 pounds and 13 ounces of him was in bursting with energy, with strong feelings, and lots of motion and noise.  Everything about him was different from her first birth experience.  The first was a C section.  He was VBAC.  The first was a tiny premature baby.  He was considered full term and had those fully developed lungs to prove it.  She realized later that their first night together in the hospital, was a harbinger of things to come.  Her milk hadn't come in, and her large, wiggly and handsome little guy with the slightly lopsided head from his journey down the birth canal cried and cried and cried for her to nourish him.  Since the first baby had been whisked away to the Special Care Unit, she was determined that this healthy baby would stay in room.  Around 3:30 am, weary from the solid 4 hours of him crying she questioned her resolve.  She begged the nurses for some formula, which of itself she considered a failure since she wanted to be the one to exclusively nourish him.  Flirting with maternal failure after he'd been on earth less than a day.  Sigh.  AND the nurses never brought any formula that night.

Fast forward 8 months later and there she was.  Every night was different, but the same.  A clean and fed baby went blissfully to sleep, without a peep, at 7:30pm. A sage and gregarious toddler in the room next to his. Against her better judgement, she would then clean, prepare, and do the last bit of her work- from home calls and computer work.  IF he hadn't woken up by the time she fell into bed with exhaustion, made it clear to her husband that there would be NO touching IF she was able to get any sleep (he never tried anyway he knew better by now).  Within minutes of the house quieting down and her in bed, the boy would start rustling.  And the night shift of activity would begin.  Never sure what time, how many times, or how long he'd stay up...but that he would get up and be awake was CONSTANT.  Dad tried to go in but that just made him cry louder.

She had taken him to the pediatrician, held him out and said simply, "Something is wrong with this one.  He won't sleep."  The doctor insisted that she hadn't tried hard enough.  So crying it out method implemented ALOT earlier than the first baby.  The first night, 2 hours of crying.  He never did stop. Daddy actually took him on an hour long drive so she could sleep.  Second night, 2 1/2 hours.  Another, longer drive with dad. Third night almost 3 hours.  That night dad actually drove across the state line and back.  She got 2 1/2 hours of blissful sleep.  This went on for a week.  He never DID cry himself to sleep.  After listening to his blood curdling screams for that long, her nerves were shot and she figured she wasn't getting any sleep this way either.  She was determined that no babies would sleep in the "marital bed," (although baby #3 would throw that rule out the window a few years later....)

After all this, resignation. Thankfully her sleep-deprived, primal yell had not awakened the toddler.  Her husband never spoke of the yell...although there were definitely 3 or 4 more episodes before that boy finally found a regular sleep pattern around the time he reached 3 years old.  By then, room darkening curtains, a white noise fan and a couch had been added to the magic sleep combination room decor, and his mother knew that if she snuck in and plucked him from his crib about 4:20 am...that she could snuggle and sleep with him on that couch for another 90 minutes before his sister awoke them both.  It was a LONG time before having more children was considered a viable possibility; both mentally and logistically...