I read a lot of "mom-blogs" (blogs like mine, written by young moms with young kids), and have recently been reading about real live babies who at the age of four or five months started sleeping through the night. This is incredible to me because so far my experience with babies and sleep has been very different--anything but smooth and rocky at best. My Ellie, at the relatively ripe old age of 15 months
still doesn't fall asleep on her own and
still wakes up frequently during the night.
Ellie has been a champion sleep-fighter from the get go. I remember watching her at only a few weeks of age being so sleepy, yet using all her strength to try and keep her eyes open. Maybe this will give you an idea on just how dismal our sleeping has been over the past 15 months: I recently started trying to wean Ellie from nursing at night, hoping that if she didn't get the goods every time she woke up she would stop waking up so much. I set the initial time limit at 3 hours because this seemed like a doable goal, but would certainly be a stretch. The first night
she didn't make it. At 14 months Ellie wasn't sleeping even for 3 hour stretches!! She has before in the past, but I can't remember the last time. As you can imagine, my memory's not the best right now.
In the US, and maybe other Western countries, sleeping through the night is considered something of a benchmark of successful mothering. A mother who can get her baby to sleep through the night by x-months-old is considered a "good mom". Does this mean that one who CAN'T seem to get their baby to sleep is a "bad mom"? No one says this, but it can certainly feel that way. Oh, can it ever feel that way.
In Taiwan there is a completely different "good mom" requirement: a
fat baby! Lucky me, that is what I have always had. Ellie has always pushed the 95th or even 100th percentile for weight, and everywhere we go people exclaim, "Look at all the meat!" or "Look how many rolls!", and "You have really taken good care of her!" Hey, she doesn't sleep, but boy can she eat
all night long.
At 2 weeks she already has a nice chunky arm, and and 9 months she is in all of her roll-ful glory!Additionally, in Taiwan there is a-whole-nother perspective on babies and how they sleep. For starters, it is the norm here for babies to sleep with their parents well into their toddler years. And when I talk about Ellie still waking at night the response I get is never, "Well, what's wrong [with you]? Have you tried such-and-such method?" Instead, the response is without fail, "Is she still nursing?" Yes. "Well no wonder! Of course she's still waking up at night to nurse, my sister's/cousin's/friend's/etc's baby is over 2 years old and still wakes up at night to nurse." Night waking to nurse, even in older babies is considered unlucky, but quite normal and even expected behavior.
This attitude has most likely helped me more than I can ever know. As a student in school I was very performance driven, and in general am particularly susceptible to connecting my self-worth with my own perception of how well I am doing and how well the rest of the world thinks I am doing. Even without this predisposition I think it can be very easy for moms to get caught up in tying their own worth to their children in some way, seeing as almost all of your physical and mental energies are spent trying to nourish, grow and teach a new human being who will reflect you in the most fundamental sense. Even as I write this I am wrestling over whether or not to defend myself and give my hypotheses for why I think Ellie sleeps so poorly.
But I don't need to. There is good in every bad, right? Well the good in this whole thing (
other than feeling like maybe I could hack it as a Navy Seal...sleep deprivation? pshaw, no problem) is that I am learning and re-learning some lessons. One is to be more confident and stand by my parenting decisions, because you're always going to be able to find someone who thinks you're doing things the wrong way. Two (or maybe 1-b) is that I am the expert when it comes to Ellie, not books, not doctors, and not anything on the internet.
Three is yet another reminder that doing a good job at mothering (or
anything) doesn't make me Good. Maybe it does in my own eyes, or in the eyes of the world, but the only Judge who matters is God, and by His standard it is only through faith in Jesus Christ that I receive justification and can be considered Good. How many times will I have to learn this lesson? I suppose until it's really learned.
So, thank you! Taiwan, Thank you for helping me to accept the fact that Ellie doesn't yet sleep well without feeling like it is my fault or failure. Not that I am immune to these thoughts by any means, but I think living here has helped allay some of these feelings. And thank you for setting me free from my self-imposed standards, letting me enjoy the grace I have received and praise God all the more because of it.
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