I wish I knew

Since we started solids, the babies have been pooping like crazy. They used to be once-a-day, nice and regular, but now our house is a bowel movement free-for-all.

Bear with me, there is a point to this scatology. I'm not inflicting it on you for no reason.

Poos can come at any time, and any place. I'm sure this will all calm down once their little guts start to cope with all the new food, but for now? Like I said: free-for-all. There's only one exception to the unpredictability - baby L always feels the call of nature during her midday nap.

Ah, the delights of a midday nap. I'm aware that I posted about sleep a few months ago, promised a follow up, and never did it. Well, here's the quick version - after doing sleep training for just a few days (cry it out, with check and console) their sleep changed utterly and they turned into magnificent, calm, happy sleepers. And yet - I guess part of the reason that I never posted an update is that I still feel a bit conflicted about the whole issue of sleep training an adopted baby. And I feel kind of bad talking about the fact that we did it, because hey, I know it's a bit controversial and I want people to like me.

But this was my thought process. Somehow, through my brain fog, I managed to read 'healthy sleep habits happy child'. This book is written by a guy who knows a LOT of things. Unfortunately, how to write well is not one of them, so getting through this book is a bit like picking jewels out of a big pile of dung. It's not my intention to review this book in detail, because I can't be bothered. But I compared his views (a man who knows pretty much everything about sleep) with those of people who know a lot of about adoption, and I realised that there is no concensus on sleep, just like there is no concensus on any other area of parenting. There are experts, but they don't necessarily agree. And putting something in bold type, or in a little box, doesn't necessarily make it true. At least I hope so, because reconciling all the little boxes and bold type in all my different 'definitive' books was making me crazy.

I was terrified about the interactions between sleep and attachment. I knew that attachment is really important because attachment experiences affect a child's brain chemistry. This freaked me out when I first found out about it, in books like this, and one of the monster bad nasty chemicals I've been totally phobic about ever since is cortisol, the evil brain chemical of stress. And yes, I know I shouldn't be getting my information on neurochemistry from a book with a picture of a dancing child on the cover, but to be honest, I don't have enough knowledge of biology to get my information on neurochemistry from anywhere else. So anyway, lots of my thinking about parenting styles (including sleep) had revolved around trying to make sure that our babies got a nice flow of happy, bonding chemicals in their brains, and not too many of the evil stress chemicals. One of the reasons I originally wanted to always respond and soothe during the night was to reduce the evil stress chemicals. And then I found out that: sleep deprivation also causes the brain to release cortisol. [in bold type, so it must be true]. Cue major freakout from me. Obviously this wasn't our intention, but the way we were approaching sleep (always being there, always soothing) meant that the babies were probably getting about 11 hours total, when babies their age should have been getting 14-16 hours. And as time went on it was getting, not better, but much much worse. Arrgghhhh! The cortisol!!!

It's absolutely not my intention to try to convince anybody else that they need to try our sleep methods with their children (also, I'm really hungry, AGAIN) so I'm going to skip any kind of long defence of what we did and why. I guess what I'm really writing about is the fact that I feel defensive in the first place.

I know that sleep can be a really big issue for adopted children. But I think that it might be an even bigger issue for adoptive parents. I think that the dark, silent unknowableness of sleep plays into so many of our insecurities. And know all parents have insecurities, but I'm sure that adoption is a good way to multiply them. And I feel like this: my child had to go through so much trauma before joining our family - now that they are in it, I want everything to be perfect. (Not physically perfect - I'm really quite remakably laid back about things like what they eat, and clothes from ebay, and cat hair, and so on - but emotionally perfect). And most of this desire is good. But when I look down into the deepest, worst recesses of my soul, I think there's a tiny bit of me saying 'because if you are super perfecto attachment parento, then, if they grow into messed up adults, it's not your fault'.

And the problem with me being issued my super-parent cape is this. I would do anything for them, but often I don't really know what that is. As time goes on, I'm pretty sure that we did the right thing (or at least, not the wrong thing) by sleep training them. Once they were sleeping more, their energy levels increased, they are able to sleep solidly for hours at a time (because sleep begets sleep - probably the most annoying thing a sleep deprived parent can hear) and their feeding improved hugely. It used to be the case that baby L would start to drift off to sleep as soon as she got a bottle in her mouth, because she was living in a constant state of chronic sleep deprivation and the relaxation from the milk was enough to tip her over the edge. But remove the bottle from her mouth and wham - she would wake straight up again and howl. Bottle in again, drifting off again, snoring, bottle out - more howling. Now that she is properly awake, she can drink a whole bottle wide eyed, and it's only when she's had a really disturbed day (eg, hospital trips during naptime) that I see the old milk-sleeping thing happen again and think 'oh yeah, every day used to be like this'. And I feel pleased with our choices. But then sometimes other things happen - like when L starts screaming in the middle of the nap for the first time in months and I think it's the pooping but I just don't know - and yes of course I'm changing her if she poops during her nap, I'm not a monster- and I think 'oh no, they aren't attached to me at ALL' and I'm gripped by The Fear. 'They don't trust me. It's because I'm not cuddling them immediately when they wake up. They feel abandoned. All their loss issues are surfacing and I'm not supporting them'.

And I suspect you're thinking 'lighten up!' but it's hard to realise that I'm never, really, going to know whether or not we made the best choice regarding their sleep. Or anything else. And even if we found out, we couldn't go back in time and change it. And it seems that this is the case for pretty much every parenting decision I make - there is no feedback form. There are no grades. I'm flying blind, here.

And of course, I already knew this going in. Obviously. This is not exactly a news story. Time magazine will not be paying me for my insights about this. And yet, I do wish I knew. I wish I knew what to do with them all the time. I wish there was some kind of light up display on their foreheads that would indicate, at any given moment, whether I was providing adequate love and stimulation or scarring them for life. I can pretty much tell the cries that mean 'hungry!' 'bored!' 'annoyed!' 'stinky!' or 'my brother is chewing my ear!' and I'm really pleased that we have come this far. It means so much that I am beginning to understand them, on some level. But I do wish there was a way to decode what would mean 'attachment disorder!' 'trauma flashback!' 'I'm processing intense grief!' 'I'm feeling my primal wound!' and how that would differ from 'oooooh, that sweet potato made me a little bit constipated'.

Sometimes it's simple. You want to play, kiddo, but you need to sleep and we'll have hours to play when you wake up (refreshed and happy) after a nap. So down in your cot you go, my little friend. And in thirty seconds you're asleep, and I know I did the right thing.

But other times? It's not that I'm lazy. (Okay, sometimes I am lazy, but mostly it's not that). It's not that I don't care. It's that I really don't have any idea what I need to do for you right now. There have been multiple cases of me holding a crying baby and sobbing a little myself and saying 'honey, mummy wants to help you but she doesn't know what to do!' And the thing that is freaking me out is that I realise that nobody has the answers. With most things I have done in my life, I may have messed up, but at least I knew what I had done wrong. I didn't deal very well with a lot of my issues surrounding childlessness (of which more, I think, another day) but at least I knew what I should have been doing. But now? Yeah, not so much.

Which brings me back to sleep. I don't want to give the wrong impression here - this isn't something that is eating me alive. But sometimes I do wonder. What if we did make the wrong decision on sleep? What then? What does it mean?

Mostly, I'm really enjoying all of this, and mostly, I think I was pretty well prepared. But sometimes, this parenting stuff messes with my head way more than I expected.