A Guide for New Fathers: Part II - Sleep

If you've never had a baby, there are probably innumerable things that you find boring and annoying about people who have babies. But one of the most boring and annoying is (I suspect) parents' unending obsession with their baby's sleep habits. New parents are constantly bitching about how little sleep they get.

Well, non-baby-havers, I too was once as stupid as you. When I got into this whole mess, I was convinced that the sleep issue wasn't going to have that big an impact on my life. Before having a baby, I regularly got only 5-6 hours of sleep anyway, so I figured I was already used to the amount of sleep that all our baby books predicted we would get. This belief was, of course, fucking retarded.

The retardidity of the belief comes from my failure to recognize that, pre-baby, I got to choose which 6 hours were spent sleeping, and those 6 hours tended to be more or less contiguous. I had not realized that our little miracle would have powerful psychic abilities and a deeply ingrained terror of adult REM sleep, leading to a piercing scream the moment Heather and I actually entered the phase of sleep that stops you from going crazy. For the first 3 months, Heather and I were getting the kind of sleep that a Guantanamo Bay detainee under heavy interrogation could expect to receive. If Logan had decided to switch tactics and put sacks on our heads, stack us in a human pyramid and point at our privates, we would have wept with joy and relief.

The well-studied effects of sleep deprivation include irritability, loss of memory and reasoning skills, a high degree of suggestibility, and eventual homicidal madness. Heather and I fully succumbed to each and every one of these effects. The irritability was probably the most immediately alarming aspect. Heather and I were a couple who almost never fought, and yet would find ourselves shouting the most vile things we could possibly imagine at each other at 3 a.m. during our frequent arguments about who had to get up with the baby:

Heather: Can't you hear him crying?

John: Yes I can. Which begs the question, why haven't you gotten up?

Heather: Because, asshole, I got up with him last.

John: It's pointless for me to get up! He needs to nurse.

Heather: So why do I have to be the one to do it?

John: Because I don't have any breasts!

Heather: Big fucking deal. Any man who cries during Moulin Rouge is capable of lactating.

John: Satine's untimely death was a tragedy, you heartless bitch!

But, in retrospect, the most shocking manifestation of sleep-deprivation was the ritualistic superstitions that we came to embrace. During our months of baby-enforced sleep-interruptions, I entertained beliefs that would make a Scientologist blush.

For example, we began to believe that Logan couldn't sleep unless he was swaddled so tightly that he could not move. In our defense, this belief was based on the observation that when he could move, he regularly jabbed himself in the eyeballs and made himself scream. But the swaddling theory had a number of problems that we, in our deranged state, were unable to detect, namely:

1. Logan screamed regardless of whether he was jabbing himself in the eyeballs.
2. He obviously hated being swaddled.

Point (2) was evidenced by Logan's hysterical shrieking whenever we would swaddle him, and his obvious attempts to escape as soon as the swaddling was done. Our solution to this problem was to buy specially made escape-proof baby straight-jackets with smiling bears on the fasteners (I'm not kidding). But this failed to solve the nighttime waking problem, so I decided that the real problem was that Logan wanted his arms to be swaddled, but not his legs, so I cut the bottom out of one of his swaddling blankets so his feet stuck out (again, not kidding). When this strategy also failed to elicit the desired results, Heather and I decided that Logan was asking to be held in our arms while we bounced vigorously on a yoga ball while we (often angrily) sang “You Are My Sunshine”. If you find this behavior odd, perhaps even pathetic, then you have never seen it performed by a naked person who is literally sobbing with frustration. That's pathetic.

By month 3, I had become convinced that Logan was trying to tell us that what he really needed was a custom-made spring-loaded baby hammock that I had found online for the low, low price of $300. This seems ridiculous now, but if I had been convinced that Logan would sleep through the night if I gave Ving Rhames a rimjob, I would have been on the first flight to Los Angeles with a handful of mints.

Luckily, just as I was typing our credit card number into the baby hammock website, Heather suddenly realized we had gone insane, and it was time to take a new approach. It was time to pull on to the information superhighway.

The internet has ushered in an exciting new era in child rearing. Now, if you have any question about any parenting difficulty, you can log in to a parenting message board and have instant access to the collected experience and wisdom of the dumbest motherfuckers in the entire world. There is a good reason for this: the only people who have the time and energy to post on these sites regularly have

1. a desperate need to be listened to
2. not a god damned thing going on in their lives

To be fair, not everyone who posts on these sites is an idiot. I know intelligent, well-educated women who post on these sites 2 or 3 times a day. The trouble is, the long-winded, semi-educated halfwits who regularly hijack these boards often post 30-50 times a day. So there is good advice to be had - buried on page 73 of a 200 page discussion. But you won't get this far, because you will quickly be exhausted by acronym-laden discussions like this:

everylifeispreciousrythmmethodeer: Hi, gals! My DH [Darling Husband] is constantly nagging me to strap OPLA [Our Precious Little Angel] into his CS [Car Seat], but sometimes it makes OPLA cry, and I'm TMOAFPTHTFTSBDKWBFT [Too Much Of A Fucking Pussy To Handle The Fact That Sometimes Babies Don't Know What's Best For Them], so I won't do it! I think that our baby is allergic to environmental toxins in the car seat straps, and that's why he's crying! Any suggestions? I will be WSFMHUIRFI [Withholding Sex From My Husband Until I Receive Further Instructions]!

vaccinationisabusive: Did you vaccinate him? Because vaccinations have been known to cause death and disfigurement in over 90% of babies that receive them, and are a known cause of SICSAS [Spontaneous Inconsistent Car Seat Allergy Syndrome].

lactivist: I agree! We vaccinated my son at the insistence of my SPJHD [Smarty Pants Jesus  Hating Doctor], and ever since his seventh birthday he's been allergic to my BM [Breast Milk]! He refuses to nurse, no matter how forcefully I hold him down.

vaccinationisabusive: OMG! [Oh My God!] ICWYBFA! [I Commiserate With Your Breast Feeding Angst!]

smartassdaddy: Wait a minute... BM means Breast Milk? No wonder Logan wouldn't take that bottle I made...

manysmurfcollectibles: My baby developed SICSAS from car seat straps too, everylifeisprecious, and if you weren't such a lazy, abusive skank you wouldn't be having this problem. How many times do I have to say it: Don't trust store-bought car seats! Get out your scrap-booking supplies and MAKE YOUR OWN. Our child gets by just fine in the car seat I made for her. All you need is some miniature American flags, some uncooked macaroni and some pinking shears, ladies! Aren't your kids worth it?

Even in our sleep-deprived madness, Heather and I knew that these people were idiots. But Heather was certain that she was bound to find something useful if she carefully sifted through the posts. So she began the Sisyphean task of combing the attachment parenting message boards.

Some background: Up until this point, we'd been pursuing a parenting philosophy known as “Attachment Parenting”, popularized by child-rearing luminary Dr. Sears. This parenting philosophy is based on the idea that you will be a more effective parent and raise a happier child if your child has a “secure attachment” to you. A “secure attachment” basically means that the child sees you as a source of emotional security, but is independent enough to explore new situations and environments on his own, and won't spend hours and hours on the phone in the common room clutching his sides, rocking back and forth, and whimpering “I love you mommy, I miss you mommy” like some freshman-year college roommates I could mention.

Anyway, Dr. Sears' parenting philosophy categorically rejects the idea that sometimes babies want things that they don't need.  This leads him to recommend a lot of hard-to-implement practices, like co-sleeping, unlimited breastfeeding, letting babies wean themselves, and always, always getting up when a baby cries in the night, because if a baby is crying, it means that there is some desperate biological imperative going unmet.

Sub-digression: Dr. Sears' books have been widely criticized for focusing too little on actual child-development research, and too much on smug little anecdotes. For example, when Logan was a newborn, he was nursing about every 45 minutes. This was making Heather's life miserable, and by the transitive property of spousal misery, it was also making me miserable. In desperation, I looked up “frequent nursing” in one of Dr. Sears's books, and the only information I found was this helpful quote from one of his minions:

I would no sooner count breast feedings than I would count kisses.

Which caused me to pen the following companion epigram:

I would no sooner count kicks to Dr. Sears' nuts as I would count the number of times my sobbing wife tells me that her nipples are bleeding.

I'm considering having it embroidered on a darling throw pillow.

Anyway, we started searching the message boards for help. We learned that there did seem to be an alternative to Dr. Sears' method called “Sleep Training”, outlined by a Dr. Ferber in a book called “Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems”.

Unfortunately, we were searching message boards teeming with attachment parenting zealots, so we found it difficult to find any objective information on Dr. Ferber's method. In fact, Dr. Ferber's book was mentioned in much the same tone that the Necronomicon is mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft stories. The only posts we could find looked like this:

concerned_mommy: My baby is waking up every 2 hours! Someone at work suggested we try something called the “Ferber Method”. Does anyone know anything about it?

manysmurfcollectibles: The so-called Ferber Method is what we call Cry It Out. Here's what I've been told by the millions of published international child care experts with whom I correspond on a daily basis: you should just shoot your baby in the head with a shotgun. At least that will be quick. Allow me to reprint an essay written by an actual baby who had been subjected to the Ferber method:

“Mommy! Where's mommy?!” I scream with the last of my breath. The darkness closes in around me. I beg for death. In my terror, I am plagued by hallucinations where I am sodomized by winged demons in clown suits. As the my strength finally leaves and I sink into blessed unconsciousness, I bid farewell to the last of my innocence. I turn gay. As coma engulfs me, my last thought echoes in my empty heart: “I hate you, mommy.”

Heather and I were shocked that there were parents out there so heartless and cruel that they would allow a baby to go through anything like that. We kept bouncing Logan on the ball...

Another month passed.

By the end of a month, we realized that the eternal hatred of our gay son was a small price to pay for a decent night's sleep, so we decided to read Dr. Ferber's book.

It turns out that most of what we had been told about the book was inaccurate. For example:

1. It was not bound in the skin of aborted fetuses
2. Very little of the book was dedicated to the summoning of Cthulu and his shambling Shoggoth minions from a terrible dimension of chaos beyond the stars
3. It did not recommend locking the door and letting a baby scream until he passes out

In fact, Dr. Ferber's book had the distinct advantage of actually being based on empirical research. He points out that when babies wake up in the middle of the night, it's often in very different circumstances than when they fell asleep (for example: there's no nude weepy bouncing lunatics); some babies need to be given the chance to develop the ability to fall asleep on their own. To this end, he recommends putting babies to bed while still awake, and letting babies cry for a few minutes at a time before you go in to check on them.

Heather and I were terrified that Logan would not be able to handle this system at all. We were convinced that he would scream and scream all night long. But we had to try something.

On the night we started Ferber-izing (as it's called), our friends abducted Heather and placed her in a secure, beer-filled environment while I put Logan to bed. He shrieked and shrieked, and I went in to check on him at the suggested intervals. I was sick with worry and hated myself the whole time. "The whole time" turned out to be about 35 minutes, and then he fell asleep. He woke up twice that night, and both times fell asleep within 20 minutes.

The next night he cried for 20 minutes, and woke up once to nurse.

By the third night, his sleep was entirely fixed.

So here's the brilliant parenting revelation I took away from all this: Don't trust biased morons to give you reliable information about opposing viewpoints.

And that after only 4 months of research.

Epilogue:

After this experience, Heather was shocked at how poorly informed her online community was about sleep training. She decided she had to make an effort to correct their misperceptions. This experience taught us that her fellow posters were not only morons, but also weren't even using the same rules of reasoning and evidence that are generally accepted by us college-educated, faggoty types:

smartassmommy: I can't speak for anyone else's experience, but in our case, sleep training really helped our baby. He used to wake up screaming and crying every 45 minutes, and now he sleeps through the night.

manysmurfcollectibles: Well, I feel sorry for you. I don't have it in me to be that cruel.

smartassmommy: How were we cruel? He was obviously unhappy before; he woke up crying many times a night. But he spent less time crying even on the first night of training than he did before the training started.

manysmurfcollectibles: He may be acting happier, but that's because he knows he can't trust you enough to show you his real feelings. You sicken me.

smartassmommy: Not that I expect any kind of useful answer, but how can you possibly claim to know that?

manysmurfcollectibles: A mother knows.

smartassmommy: How did you find someone who was willing to fuck you in the first place?