Modified Ferber

Here is part of a note I wrote to a friend describing the beginnings of dreaded sleep training:

things got much better with emmett for a while and i was really enjoying him and even fantasizing about a second child until we hit this big struggle with sleep. now i feel like i am risking self-annihilation by continuing to sleep with him and comfort him through the whole night. [i think that a danger of attachment parenting is that, as an ideal, it can involve maternal self-annihilation.]

i like what jessica benjamin--a psychoanalytic feminist--says about how children need to feel the tension between self and other in order not to feel alone in the world. if the child determines everything and the mother erases herself and her needs, he is alone. if the mother is domineering and determines everything, he feels invisible and alone. there needs to be a tension and negotiation between multiple wills and desires in order to have relationship.

still, i never wanted to do sleep training and never wanted to assert my needs while he was this young. i thought it was okay for him to be the whole world for a while. we have done two nights of modified ferber. i nurse him twice in the night and am only a few feet away from him. but i do let him cry at graduated intervals before stroking him without picking him up. also, when i feed him, it is on the clock, every four hours. i have been sick with anxiety and have slept even less, but he naps now without objection. i hope that this will eventually give me back a little bit of myself and allow him to be less frantic and filled with tears during the day. the days were breaking my heart the most. before, no matter how hard the night, i would wake up to a happy baby. for the last 3 weeks, the nights were hard and the days were worse. we'll see how it goes. he still wakes every 1-2 hours, but judging only on one and a half days, the days are much better, probably due to the napping. before he was only napping on my chest and so i never had any time without him, unless will was watching him... which was causing some strain b/w us, since will has always been either working or caring for emmett. neither of us have had any breathing room. it is all part of having an infant, and, if he were sleeping more, we would have both persevered indefinitely. i still feel sick--literally--with guilt, but i have hope that, if not the "right" thing, we are doing an okay thing.