crying, training and sleeping in that order

i have always been a disaster around tears. i fall apart completely when i see someone else cry. sympathy tears i guess

so imagine how me, cry baby mcgee, could possibly endure little m getting "sleep trained". first of all the name "sleep training" sounds so dumb.  is she getting ready for the sleeping olympics?
she knows how to sleep, she's just not great at starting sometimes...

i remember having the opinion that sleep training (and let me clarify: there are different forms of "sleep-training" and most of them involve letting your baby cry it out) was fine for other parents. i had nothing against this practice in general, it just wasn't for me. like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. i think they are gross, but i don't usually say that aloud because i don't want to yuck anyone's else's yum. if other people wanted to sleep train their babies and eat pb&js, that was fine by me, i just, personally, wasn't interested in either endeavor.

anyway,  half of our collective families believed sleep training was the way to go; had let their kids cry for hours for a couple of nights and then voila! the babies could go to bed solo with no tears. the other half of the family thought sleep-training was barbaric and awful. no matter how we managed we would be going against someone's preferred method...which is fine, except that everyone loves to share their opinion of what poor choices you are making as a new parent, whether or not you ask for their input.

part of the idea of sleep-training is that a baby learns to "sooth itself" rather than let you sooth them. again i remember thinking, "why does my baby need to sooth herself? she doesn't feed herself, she doesn't walk around by herself...she does NOTHING by herself and i am asking her to do something that quite frankly i wouldn't want to do either" (if given the option of having help when i'm upset or just crying myself to sleep, i would choose getting help with whatever is upsetting me, and i'm a sucker for mimitos...no good translation for this spanish word)

but all of these thoughts and feelings came before a couple of developments in little m's life and our relationship. #1 was riding in the car, #2 was me unsuccessfully "soothing" her to sleep for 3 hours one night.

when m was itty bitty she would just sleep in the car. we drove from philly to north carolina when she was six weeks old and for 7 hours she slept like a rock (there and back). she was a champ. but then as she got older, the car didn't magically put her to sleep. in fact, for a about a week it magically made her cry hysterically. it didn't matter if i stopped to feed her, tried to put her to sleep before getting into the car etc. for that week, she would scream for whatever duration we were in the car for. which made my hatred of driving everywhere even more wonderful...

as awful as having to listen to her cry and be completely unable to help her was, it also trained me to not freak out and fall apart. this of course was after one particularly bad car ride after a particularly long day when i finally yelled "no llores más, carajo!" (loosely translated to "stop fucking crying already!") which made me feel like an awful asshole mom. who screams at a little baby for crying? answer: lots of parents who are human. it forced me to learn to tolerate/block out the sounds of her cries; for the good of both of us...

the other educational moment? one night when i was trying to help little m go to bed for forever; rubbing her back, rocking the crib, picking her up, putting her down. there were moments of calm but it took three hours of crying off and on, and of course one moment of me yelling at a little baby to realize that maybe this wasn't the right method for us. this was clarified and reinforced when one night she stopped crying when i stopped helping her and left the room.

what i'm saying is, you might think you hate pb&j and then wake up one day to realize, maybe its not so bad, especially if you use a certain kind of jelly, or maybe almond butter in place of peanut butter. or just let your baby cry for ten minutes at a time instead of for hours cold turkey.

i've learned that part of doing the "right thing" is discovering there is no right thing, we all just do what we can/what works for us.  like everything else...it's a work-in-progress.