The Longest Shortest Time

Sleep and other traumas of being a new parent. 

I’m thinking of my friends Elizabeth and Alan who had their first child a few months ago.  And I am trying to recall what life was like when Antonia was that age.  I remember being astounded at the number of people with children only a few years older than Antonia who could barely recall the details of specific ages or their own parenting traumas.  Now I too am having trouble with the specifics of our experience. With Antonia well past two years old we find ourselves emerging from the initial shock and awe of the first years of parenthood. Now I think I might have the perspective to remember not only what was happening, but also why I’m likely to forget all but the most vivid of details any day now. 

One example comes to mind. When Antonia was five month old we were living in Los Angeles and we took a long trip to visit friends in New York. Antonia was having an incredibly hard time sleeping.  She has often fought the urge to sleep, but this was the worst we had experienced, and remains the single worst episode of sleep trouble to date.  We were traumatized by a child who would not nap, could not be consoled by our presence in the room, and would often only sleep if we walked her around in the stroller.  For Allison and I it was devastating.  We were questioning everything about what we were doing as parents, and everything we had done to that point.  We tried everything, read all the books searched all the websites. Nothing was working. 

While we were going thru this I remember asking our friends Kirsten and David about how they dealt both of their son’s sleep at that age. As usual they had insightful thoughts, but they were remarkably shy on the details.  I was shocked.  They must have had at least a few moments of similar trauma.  Why couldn’t they remember how they got thru the difficult periods that at the moment seemed to be being seared into my memory.

Now I can already feel myself forgetting the details. The sensation of complete terror that we were doing something totally wrong seems to be disappearing as our family drives past the quaint dirt road of those first months where we started our journey and we begin to see the larger terrain of mountains and plateaus we are ascending and descending.  The initial excitement that reveals each discrete detail of every turn and bump at the beginning a long road trip have now disappeared into the overall terrain.  The inevitable pothole is now is recognized as the passing hiccup that will ultimatly be navigated.  But in those initial moments the very real sense is that each dip is a much bigger deal than it is, each flat tire an epic crisis. 

Of course none of this does anything to provide the parent in that crisis moment with specifics.  And if we’ve learned anything it is that specifics are just that, peculiar to one child’s situation, and her parents ingenuity, and surprisingly useless to others.  It turns out that none of those books you can read about raising kids are about YOUR child. The big lesson is: do what it takes, don’t hurt yourself or your child, and rest (if you can) easy in the knowledge that it will all blur into a much more epic journey remarkably quickly.