Pretending.

[rivka]

Colin has been going through such a rough patch lately. He's had a cold for a couple of weeks. Even before the cold he had been ramping up his nursing, and with the cold it has been pretty much nonstop. He hasn't been eating more than a few bites of solid food; he makes up for it by constantly.wanting.to.nurse.

And his sleep, oh my God. Alex slept through the night starting at ten months. At Colin's age she could be put into the crib awake, and she'd put herself to sleep and sleep for twelve hours straight. Before the cold Colin was waking around 4:30 and then coming into my bed around 5:30-6 and dozing/nursing/dozing until it was time to wake up. For the last two weeks he's been up every few hours every night. The last two nights he slept no longer than two hours at a stretch, and each night there was a period of 90 minutes in which every time I put him in the crib and went back to my own bed he woke up and cried. I cried too.

What I need to do, and have needed to do for a really long time now, is nightwean him. The thing is that it's incredibly hard to do something that means even less sleep in the short run, when you are already getting so little sleep that you can barely function.

Thursday night was awful and I was wrecked all day yesterday. Last night was awful. Today Michael took Alex to the Rennaissance Faire, which means that I am on my own all day with Colin. I am so exhausted and angry and fed up.

So I'm doing the best thing one can do in a situation like this: I am pretending to be a naturally good mother. I took the kids to Alex's ballet lesson this morning and while she was in class I fed Colin healthy little snacks and pretended to be excited to read his train book again and promised him he could take ballet too someday. (He is jealous.) Then I brought them home and made myself some strong black tea and let Colin have half my breakfast when he asked for it. I felt a little desperate when Michael walked out the door and Colin also didn't have Alex to follow around all day, so I packed him into the stroller and took him to the park and we wandered around in the sun tossing a little neon-green toy football and playing "hide and seek" the only way you can play it with a toddler, which involves hiding slowly in very obvious places while talking to them the whole time.

I took him to the Italian deli and got some fresh hot bread and prosciutto and smoked mozzarella for our lunch and listened to him meow at the cats on the cases of Gato Negro and engaged him in conversations and fingerplays while we waited in line so he wouldn't ask to get out of the stroller. I let him sit in Alex's big-kid chair for lunch instead of his high chair.

I am pretending to be an excellent mother with all of these outings and interactions, but really my goal is not so much to nurture him and enrich his day as to keep him off me and minimize his need for my attention, and especially to keep him from asking to nurse. Because I have HAD IT.

He's napping now, so I should go lie down too. Because when he wakes up I'm going to need to be able to pretend to be an excellent mother again, because if I am my normal kind of mother there's no way I'll be able to get him to leave me alone.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

This is an EXCELLENT strategy, particularly the outings. My kids got a LOT of outings to the park when they were toddlers (we have one within walking distance, thank goodness).

If you have friends with kids who also like the park, you can call them and suggest that they meet you there, and then you can pour out your misery to a sympathetic ear while you both push your kids on the swings.

I also totally endorse night-weaning, even though I didn't accomplish it with either kid until they were two. It helped in our case to have Ed do all the putting-them-to-bed; I had been nursing them to sleep. Ed read Molly to sleep starting when she was about two; we moved her to her own room, which also helped a lot. I think Kiera was actually a bit younger when we realized that she would happily let Ed put her to bed as long as I was not anywhere in the house. So I'd go to a coffee shop for a couple of hours each evening and leave Ed to deal with her.

When they were tiny babies it was very nice to settle them in bed next to me and nurse them. When they were toddlers there was nothing sweet or cozy about it, I was just desperate to do whatever it took to resettle them and the more they kicked and squirmed the more resentful I felt. It was a HUGE relief to get them into their own bed, both times, and it was a huge relief to wean Molly because then I could hold her in my lap and snuggle her without her yanking up my shirt and demanding a boob, OMFG.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Internetty message of support goes here.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

[ailbhe]

You are so so awesome. That sort of pretending is possibly the hardest bit of mothering, I think. I hope you had a good lie-down before he needed you again.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

About forty minutes.

*sigh*

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, sympathies. Spending 90 minutes trying to get SteelyKid to nap suddenly seems like a cakewalk. I hope he feels better soon and you can nightwean him without too much angst.

[tea-dragon.livejournal.com]

There really should be a word for the kind of claustrophobia caused when your children just will not get off of you. Any thoughts?

[puzzlement.livejournal.com]

That sounds terrible. Human infants really need something like six devoted parents. Or nineteen of them. Or something.

I hope you and your family can find the energy to nightwean soon and you can all start getting the sleep you need. But payment upfront is so difficult.

[ailbhe]

Earning the Non-Defenestration Medal. I believe it's with a mother in Edinburgh now.

[ailbhe]

*gin*

[txobserver.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. My younger daughter sometimes expresses resentment that I don't remember very many stories about her toddler days. That is when I remind her that I was a working mom who didn't get a full night sleep until she was nearly four. I weaned both of mine at 18 months and they started the night sleeping in their own beds in a different, shared bedroom. But she would wake in the night and come into our bed where she rubbed her face with my silky nightgown to get back to sleep, gradually turning horizontally as I clung to the edge of the bed. :-/

She was just a very light sleeper, and still is at age 23, while my older daughter slept (and sleeps) like a log. The upside was that she was dry through the night much sooner because she would wake up to go to the toilet.

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

Some days I feel like all I am doing is pretending!

Maybe if we fake it long enough, we'll become it?

[torontoteacher.livejournal.com]

If you can manage that kind of faking for more than a couple of hours without resorting to shrieking like a harpy or drinking? You're a better mother than I am.

I found that occasionally chanting such mantras as "I will remember this fondly someday" and "This too shall pass" sometimes helped.

[sioneva.livejournal.com]

I dreaded nightweaning too...but it ended up being easier than I'd expected with my own no-more-than-two-hours-at-a-stretch son.

*hugs*

[acceberskoorb.livejournal.com]

*hug* that sounds truly terrible and frustrating. You are naturally incredible. I'd make a band-aid-removal metaphor regarding night weaning but I'd really be talking out my ass since I haven't been in your shoes, and if I were you that would pretty much just piss me off, so I'll simply say good luck. I know you can do it because you can do anything. For reals.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

In my humble opinion, this isn't the pretence of excellent motherhood, but actual, excellent motherhood.

My oldest son slept like this until he was four. When he was nursing, he nursed like this as well, and he nursed into toddlerhood. It made me screamingly tired and frayed.

But something one of the mothers I met at the Santa Claus Parade said to me was hugely helpful, stress-wise. "My daughters both slept like champions; my youngest, my son was horrific. He didn't sleep through the night in any reliable way until he'd cut all his teeth." I asked if he'd started sleeping properly at that point, and she said, "thank god, yes."

Of course, in my son's case, he cut his second year molars when the was four and a half =/. BUT he did then start sleeping through the night. His dentist said his jaw bone was dense enough, in x-rays, that the dentist would have said that the teeth wouldn't cut at all without surgical intervention (!), but as one demonstrably already had, he was willing to wait it out. But he also said "they'll probably be in a lot of teething pain, and the pain will last longer."

So I could then tell myself (and mostly believe it), that the reason he would wake and not go back to sleep easily was that the pain was making him too cranky. Baby Advil did help. He also had a very runny nose while teething, fwiw.

ETA: He nursed a lot during the runny nose period as well, but I assumed it was comfort and suction because it relieved some of that pain.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

"Touched out." Or, alternatively and possibly more accurately, "fucking DONE."

[brainwane (from livejournal.com)]

Thank you for your story of performing motherhood; it's a warning/tip/tale that I appreciate.

[kiya]

Could I ask how you managed it? I'm not seriously contemplating nightweaning at the moment, but KJ is a "I want to nurse every two hours overnight and I'll scream if I don't get it" kinda gal. Which on the one hand makes me want to nightwean. And on the other hand makes me not want to nightwean. Ever. Because I fear the screaming.

[sioneva.livejournal.com]

We used Dr Jay Gordon's nightweaning method - I can't remember the link offhand but it's easily Googled. It did involve some screaming, initially, but not as much as we had expected and, in the end, it was worth it to be able to SLEEP.

[tendyl.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

Faking being an excellent mommy when all you want to do is meltdown is a good description of this last week. I wish I could help.

[kiya]

Thanks! I will look that up.