How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (11 page)

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Until today, anyway.

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Okay, the sudden, irrefutable awareness that one day you and everyone you know will die—maybe that's worse (see Chapter 24). But undeniable proof that your parents are Going Down to Funkytown? That's an easy second.

^†
Not specifically, I should say (please God, no), as the merest hint of graphic detail would send me into a spontaneous coma.

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Although I am not a professional scientist, I did major in theater with a minor in chemistry, so I'm practically a Rhodes scholar.

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Note:
There will be those among you (like you there, laying on your purple-velvet chaise lounge, wearing slinky lingerie, fluffy high-heeled slippers, and spritzing yourself with bottles of Eau d'Ohhh-Face) saying, “That's not us. Our love life hasn't changed one bit. In fact, I'm stretching out my sex muscles right now in anticipation of the marathon boink fest we're going to enjoy later this afternoon.” Listen, I applaud you. Really, I do. But you are as normal and average as a sparkly, talking, rainbow-maned unicorn. Please, do us all a favor and go, make dreams come true for your lottery-winning partner. The rest of us will be here, working through our based-in-reality problems.

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If you can read this, please disregard that last example. And also: thank a teacher.

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Like, for example, how to correctly load a dishwasher; or whether KISS is the greatest rock act in history. Or not.

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Behind (1) furtive sex with a member of your wedding party and (2) groupie sex with Mick Jagger, circa 1970. (Note: I have no personal experience with either of the foregoing.)

five

HUSSSSH

I
‘m lying on the floor, impressions of a shag rug embedded in my cheek. I'm not sure how long I've been here, but judging from the six-inch-wide wet spot under my chin, it seems I must have passed out some time ago.

But even though my shoulder is jacked and my bladder's about to burst, I'm staying right where I am. I've come too far to change course now.

Parenthood in the twenty-first century is a never-ending obstacle course through a brier patch of thorny topics. Cloth diapers versus Disposable. Circumcision versus Natural. Breast-feeding versus Formula. Piercing your baby's ears versus Piercing your baby's navel.

“Sleep Training”—also known as the “Cry It Out” method—is the latest hot-button issue. Some consider it a sin of great magnitude, somewhere between formula feeding and leaving your kid in the backyard tied up to a tree.

The general gist behind “crying it out” is
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As much as I pride myself on being a badass who can handle anything,
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even this sounds especially brutal to me.

But for us, lack of sleep has become the thorniest thorn in our well-pricked sides. The kid, now six months old, is
incapable of sleeping more than three hours at a time. As a result, the husband and I bicker constantly over whose turn it is to get her, based on such arguments as “I got her last time,” “I have to work in the morning,” and “But I'm the one with a family history of brain aneurysms,” and I am now losing what remains of my already stretched paper-thin mind.

A few weeks ago I found myself in the living room, awake at two in the morning, with the baby sound asleep in my arms. I sat on the couch and began watching
Reservoir Dogs
, one of Quentin Tarantino's more delicate films, as a treat to myself after a long day of momming. An hour or so into the movie, I happened to glance down at the kid and saw that her eyes were wide open and trained on the spectacle of Michael Madsen hacking off some poor bastard's ear. This threw me into a panic because, as everybody knows, being exposed to violence at so young an age may/can/most certainly will turn a baby into a sociopath.

“Now I've done it,” I thought. “I've broken the kid.” And then I landed on an ingenious idea: Maybe if I press on the soft spot of her head, that will erase the memory . . . because didn't I once read somewhere that it's like a human “delete” key?

Now, the important thing to know is that I did NOT press on my baby's soft spot in order to purge a violent movie scene from her memory. But I did think about it. For a solid three minutes. Which is why I spent the entire morning of the following day researching the topic of “Sleep Training.”

A friend turns me on to a dog-eared spiral-bound handbook that espouses a “gentler” sleep-training technique—the idea being that you put the kid in its crib at bedtime, stand in the doorway, and offer some verbal assurance that “Mommy will be right outside,” that kind of thing, but—and this is important—no touching. You close the door, and if (when) the kid starts to cry, you do exactly
nothing
for precisely five minutes, at which point you poke your head into the room—again, without touching the kid—and say, “I'm here, all is well, everything's gonna be okay, buh-bye now,” and after thirty reassuring seconds at most (NO TOUCHING!), you close the door. This time you let the kid cry for ten minutes before going in again and giving brief, loving, verbal reassurances.

Lather, rinse, add five more minutes, repeat.

There's a little more to the setup (some stuff about sleep routines and “dream feedings”),
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but those are the broad strokes. The theory is that for the overwhelming majority of babies, it should take three days until they're able to fall asleep without crying and make it through the night without waking; some die-hards may take up to five days. One child was said to have taken a week, though clearly this was some überintense, sub- (or maybe super-) human kid.

This is where the differences in our (my husband's and my) parenting styles come into play, for if it were up
to the husband, we'd continue to wake up every three hours to feed and cuddle the kid, up to her freshman year in college.