Night Wakings: No, Me

Fed Nathaniel at 11:30. He fell asleep on my lap for a while, and at around 12:35, I took the plunge and put him to sleep in the crib. He opened his eyes for several seconds and started to cry, but I stuck a pacifier in his mouth, shushed him, and helped him close his eyes. He fell back asleep. So far, it’s been a miraculous 15 minutes.

For some reason, the past few days, I’ve been hesitant about putting him in the crib. At four months, he seems to be going through “separation anxiety” of some sort. He’s crying much sooner when I put him down, and his lungs are much stronger now, because he’s crying much louder too. When I’m cooking or whatnot, I watch him—tears are streaming down his face and he’s got a serious, desperate look on his face. When I’m well-rested and healthy (as in, no blocked ducts), I feel like giving in and holding him.

His sleeping habits have been awful the past week. He’s waking up on average every two to three hours for a feeding. I’m beginning to wonder whether this is God’s way of telling me that I need to put him in the crib for the night. That Nathaniel is getting too used to having my being next to him that he thinks that “nighttime” means he gets an Open Bar for the next ten hours. I have to keep reminding myself of what my mom said about determination and persistence. I have to tell myself that I need to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gain. Sigh. Am I ready?

I have awful memories of swimming lessons during my younger days. Besides being made fun of by this one boy while I was doing the front crawl (I was always swimming too slowly and he always caught up to me from behind), I hated it when it came time to take turns to jump off the diving board. Because once you went up that ladder, there was no turning back, because all your peers wee waiting their turn. Then you walk up to the edge of the diving board, look down, down, down, at the waters below, and you pray hard that you don’t do a belly flop. This is the picture in my head when I think about putting Nathaniel in the crib permanently. “X” number of nights of crying, crying, crying. No sleep. No sleep. No sleep.

Since I’m continually being awakened by Nathaniel when I’m in deep sleep, I am remembering my dreams more. I can usually recall them during the day, and remember them vividly enough to share them with the husband. Lately, I’ve been having a lot of dreams where Lee is in “physical” trouble, and I do my best to try to save him, but I can’t. Last week, I told Lee that I had a dream that a big, muscular guy forced himself through the window on the driver’s side of our car and began strangling him. I was sitting on the passenger’s side, screaming, trying to pry the guy’s arms off Lee’s neck, but it was to no avail, Lee fell unconscious. Then Nathaniel woke me up. It was the scariest thing—because the dream had been so real. Then, the other night, I had a dream that I was in battle. All of us were clad in our armor. This fearsome soldier circulated the field, looking for Lee, ready to decapitate him, and here I was, running after the solider in an attempt to save Lee. I’m not sure, psychologically, what these dreams mean, but I’m supposing that it’s because, ever since Nathaniel has been born, I’ve grown much more dependent on Lee, and such dreams may be a manifestation of my fear of losing him.

Being awakened every few hours isn’t fun, especially when I can’t fall back sleep. On the bright side, as long as Nathaniel can fall back asleep, I can’t complain too much, I guess. Better him than me. During those insomniac moments, however, my mind wanders a lot, and I always hope that the next day, there might be a window for me to write it all down. Rarely does this happen, so since Nathaniel is sleeping, I’m trying to maximize my opportunity (though I really should be using this hard-won moment to shower…).

I just finished Dr. James Dobson’s Bringing up Boys today during my last feeding. I got so much insight from this book that it’s hard to know where to begin regarding expressing my response to it. I’ve been sharing a lot of it with Lee, and underlining the parts in the book that I hope Lee will pay attention to (he started reading it last night). It’ll also be interesting to hear his take on it when he’s done since he’s the BOY.

But since my time is always limited and I predict Nathaniel will wake up soon (whoa—he’s been sleeping for 40 minutes already!), I shall respond to the points Dr. Dobson makes in the order which he makes them in the book (so if I don’t tackle a point in this entry, it shall resurface in a future entry). I shall bring up the points that hit home regarding my own childhood upbringing.

My parents were “followers” of Dr. Dobson’s parenting principles as well. I remember in high school, I found Hide and Seek on their book shelf and went through it out of curiosity—in the book were my parents’ pencil marks on points they found important. So here I am, decades later, doing the exact same thing they did.

Chapter Five is entitled, “The Essential Father,” in which Dr. Dobson writes, “Let me emphasize again that boys suffer most from the absence or noninvolvement of fathers.” [Nathaniel awakens] He continues later by saying, a Father’s “legacy is like that of countless fathers who were too busy, too selfish, and too distracted to care for the little boys who reached for them… When a father is uninvolved—when he doesn’t love or care for his kids—it creates an ache, a longing, that will linger for decades.”

It’s this last part that hits a soft spot in my heart because I have come to experience that aching and longing. Thirty years old, and I still have trouble letting go of the fact that my dad didn’t spend enough time with us when we were kids. Enough so that the pains of my dad’s absence during my childhood years inspired many scenes in one of my short stories. I turned a painful truth in my past and gave it a fictionalized setting.

Granted, I have come to understand that perhaps my dad communicates his love to me differently. Perhaps providing for the family financially is his love language. Never did our family ever have to worry about shelter, food, education. My dad was (is) an ambitious, hard-working man. His being a visionary and successful businessman has led to his success in starting two big companies in the past two decades. He’s appeared in the Globe and Mail and the front cover of some magazine whose name I’ve already forgotten.

Perhaps one of the most heart-wrenching questions that haunted me during my childhood was this, “Did my dad love his work more, or me?” As a child, I never knew. He spent enough time at the office to make me think it was the former.

It is with this skeleton in the closet that makes all sorts of emotions surge inside me as I read Dr. Dobson’s words on the importance of a parent’s role in the home.

Of course, even before reading his book, I’ve always grown up wanting something different for my own future family (that’s what we all do, right?). When I was single, I was careful about which guys I was interested in. The one who appeared overly ambitious was the one that I tried to stay away from. I’m blessed to have Lee. He works hard—because he has to (as he says). But most of the time, when he comes home, I have no doubt that he’d rather be spending it there with me than anywhere else.

More on these thoughts later… Nathaniel’s crying is intensifying…