IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:Falling at the first controlled crying hurdle meant years of three-in-a-bed
GINA FORD makes contented babies apparently. Fair play to her. I hadn’t had cause to think about Gina in a while, what with mine being eight and five, but she popped into my head last night as I wondered were my pair content.
When the elder came home there were fanfares and trumpets for she was the first child ever to be born. Don’t lie, you probably acted the same. She was passed around and held aloft and we basked in the reflective glow of her greatness. I wobbled circuits of the house in awe of the perfection we had produced. Oh man, we were awful. The poor kid, how’s she supposed to live up to that kind of pressure?
Anyway, after a couple of months, when the adrenaline wore down, we figured we’d like our room back and attempted a separation. “What?” she said. “Are you serious? You don’t think you’re gonna get away with this?”
We put her in her cot in her new room and sat on the stairs with head in hands as she wailed. Gina recommends a process called “controlled crying” which, according to my straw poll of asking a couple of friends, seems to work for about 50 per cent of parents. Controlled crying facilitates a routine early in the child’s life by placing the baby down at appointed times and not picking them up until a certain amount of time has elapsed no matter how hard they roar. In that way, they learn you will come back, but when you decide, not when they tell you to.
I have serious Ford fan friends and know others who would rather peel their children and roll them in salt rather than follow her guidelines. She didn’t work for us, but that was mainly due to our child being so special (as stated earlier) and needing attention every waking and sleeping moment.
We sat on the stairs and listened to her wail. For about three minutes. It was fingernails down a blackboard while chewing cotton wool as your teeth are cleaned by a drunk hygienist. I was powerless and couldn’t take it. Went in and picked her up and wound up holding her for about eight years. It was the ultimate “short-term relief for long-term pain” action.
We milked it though. We were the sap parents who couldn’t get their child to sleep without performing live-action lullabies and staging Gruffalo productions. I had to lie on the ground beside her bed, at a certain angle as indicated by the elder, and hold her hand as she nodded off. It was our thing, our calling card, to be so utterly ineffectual at getting our child to sleep at night by herself. I missed years of dinners and the 9 o’clock news while I lay on my back in her bedroom.
She used to wake then every night between two and four and charge up the stairs, clambering over us into her own well-worn groove in the middle of the bed. We never thought to put her back in her own place. That would have been mean. She might have thought we didn’t love her. Sometimes she would sleep directly on top of one of us, and other times she preferred to kick us to the sides. Either way, we argued it was a sacrifice we were willing to make. We bought a 6ft wide bed.
Her sister came and within a couple of months had no problem getting to sleep solo and staying in one place for a whole night. We realised other kids had been born before her. Still we stayed sleeping in the tramlines of our monster bed so the elder could rest head on one of us and feet on the other.
She doesn’t come up any more, at least not very often. And when she does it is because of a bad nightmare or a bug. She wanders in and pokes me and I do whatever needs to be done to get her back to sleep. In her own bed.
Last week the younger told me she had had a bad dream and was scared when she woke up. I said she could come in to us whenever that happened. She said it was okay because sissy had said she could come in with her. That’s what she had done; hopped into her sister’s bed until she was warm and calm. Big sister took care of her. I sleep well now, but the bed seems very wide.
- abrophy@irishtimes.com