House husband 11 – Tough love is tough on parents

Finally asleep

Angus was in his cot, standing up and jumping.  He was screaming.  Despite being exhausted he didn’t want to sleep, not in his cot and not during the day.  He would fall asleep in the car without a problem.  He would sleep while being nursed on the couch or on our bed.  But when he was transferred to the cot he woke, stood up and screamed like a prisoner.

In those two cold-riddled weeks, Angus must’ve gotten used to the attention.  He learned that cry equals pickup, so that’s what he did.

As January turned to February, all he wanted was the pickup.  He was ten months old and getting by on one forty minute sleep during the day.  By three in the afternoon he was feral.  Imagine a feral cat caught in a small trap.  You don’t want to get close to a feral cat.

We couldn’t look at Angus because he’d cry.  If we picked him up he wanted to get down.  On the floor he howled to be picked up.  He did everything we didn’t want him to do, like open the DVD player, pull power chords and crawl so fast he lost balance and banged his head.

Occasionally he went beyond crawling and tried standing up beneath tables, banging his head and crying.  Everywhere he went he banged his head.  I’d be downstairs and hear the thud on the timber floor.  Then Angus would scream.

He badly needed sleep.  We badly needed answers.  Kristine and I talked to other parents about his refusal to sleep.  Advice was plentiful, because they’d all dealt with a determined baby.  But their advice barely differed, just put him in the cot and let him cry.

We loosely applied the controlled crying method.  The theory sounds good but there isn’t much too it.  Basically, we just put Angus in the cot and let him stand up and scream.

According to the theory, he’d get tired of crying and go to sleep.  But we underestimated his stamina.  We timed his tantrums and lifted him after twelve minutes.  The following day we let him scream for eighteen minutes.

A look in his mouth showed four teeth breaking through on his upper jaw.  That’d hurt, and while baby panadol can quell the pain, Angus didn’t always want to take it.

His teeth were making us tense.  We were spending hours in the morning and afternoon trying to get him to sleep. We started planning our day to leave the house about ten so Angus would sleep in the car.  It set a dangerous precedent, but at least he was sleeping.

He went for weeks existing on one 40 minute sleep in the morning.  We kept putting him in the cot for a sleep and listening to the cries.  Kristine and I held serious discussions about the situation.

‘We’ve just got to leave him,’ I said.  ‘When you put him in the cot go for a swim.  I do.’

One afternoon, when Angus went into the cot, his parents were determined to let him go for it, as long as he wanted.  I went for a swim and could hear his screams.  I could hear him from the garage.  He howled non-stop for half an hour before Kristine picked him up.

I came inside to emotional wrecks.  Angus was red and hot.  Kristine was frustrated and beat.  I held my son and told him to stop crying.

‘We’ve had enough,’ I said, taking him to the mirror.  ‘Have a look,’ I said.  ‘That’s you not sleeping.’  He looked at his reflection and smiled.  ‘Now look at me and your mother.  That’s what you’re doing to us.’

I’m not sure if the reflective lecture worked but he went to sleep without issue the next day.  Perhaps he remembered what it felt like to scream for half an hour.  We hoped he was beginning to understand the benefits of an afternoon snooze.

For a few days Angus enjoyed a morning and afternoon sleep.  His sleeps grew longer until one magnificent day when he slept for two hours.

It was a different issue at night though.  Angus had transferred his rage from daylight to dark.  After falling asleep on Kristine he would wake in the cot and scream madly.  We let him go about twenty minutes before trying to settle him down.

There were a few nights were nothing worked, not milk, not breast, not the lounge of our bed.  We were spending hours at night trying to get him to sleep.

One night he screamed so hard he threw up.  During the change of clothes the screaming didn’t stop.  Tough love wasn’t working, because its babies who deliver tough love.  It only works when they want it to.

Like every other parent in the history of mankind, we just had to wait it out.  He didn’t care that his ruined routine was disrupting our routines.  I like to write at night while Kristine watches television.  Angus was depriving us of our time.

‘I feel cheated when I don’t get my time,’ Kristine said one night when we had plenty of questions and no answers.

Those teeth caused constant pain for weeks.  Angus was pulling at his ear.  A light rash broke out over his body and his cough returned.  People kept telling us he was pale, and he was.  Worried about another case of sick house, Kristine made a doctor’s appointment.  In truth we were worried about a serious illness, because he’d been pale for a week.

The next morning the rash was gone.  He’d slept without incident and woke up happy.  He had some colour back.  The change was sudden.  The doctor examined Angus and said he was fine.

‘But you were right to bring him in,’ the doc said.

We’d been through six weeks of hell.  Angus is now sleeping twice during the day, slipping into the cot without protest.  At night he has gone to sleep like those perfect babies everybody else claims they have.

For the first time in his life I nursed him to sleep during his last feed, put him in the cot and walked away to silence.

Tough love is tough on everyone.  Our natural instincts are to comfort a screaming baby, but those screams create their own kind of madness, where you tell your child to shut the hell up, you can cry all you want…

And they will, for as long as they want to.

Comments