All Cried Out

It’s been an emotional few days around here. Thursday night, I finally decided to have Lily cry it out at night. At her nine-month appointment, her pediatrician said she really should be sleeping through the night. She had still been getting up one to four times a night, and she seemed to be eating a lot while she was up. With Emma, we let her cry it out early, but my few attempts at having Lily do it always ended with me giving in after thirty or forty minutes, being willing to lose sleep night after night so that she wouldn’t have to be so sad. Then, Thursday night, I was reading a parenting book that said that letting her get up so much at night was teaching her poor sleep habits, and it was a sleep problem a parent was responsible for. Now, like most mothers, it was one thing to suffer myself, but between the pediatrician and this book, I began to think that maybe I was hurting Lily even more than myself. Emma has fantastic sleep habits, and we did sleep train her. Though I was afraid of Lily waking Emma with her extended crying periods, I decided that her long-term ability to sleep well would be worth it. This meant that Thursday night, I had the agonizing task of listening to her cries of betrayal and defeat from 1:00 to 2:00 a.m. Then, from 2:00 to 3:00 a.m., her cries persisted but were interspersed with heart-sickening moans. Let me just have it be known that the only parenting task that I have disliked more than crying it out is potty training. There is something so sickening about hearing a cry that is going unanswered. As I listened to her cries in the dark for those two hours, I prayed that she would feel loved and not abandoned. Sure enough, in the morning, she woke up with her usual sweet smile for me, seeming completely unaffected. I, on the other hand, was exhausted emotionally and from lack of sleep. The next night, Friday, the crying lasted an hour and a half. Again, heart wrenching, but a step in the right direction. Saturday morning, she slept until almost 9:00 a.m. I was so ready for her to eat, but my conscience wouldn’t let me wake her up since I hadn’t fed her when she wanted to eat during the night. By last night, I dreaded putting her down for the night knowing that it would be another rough night, but then she only cried for a few minutes in the middle of the night, and she slept from 8:00 p.m. until 7:15 a.m. I was thrilled at this progress and reassured that this had been the right path for our whole family. Through all of the crying, Emma never woke up, and each morning, Lily didn’t hold a grudge. Just as I was starting to take a deep breath after an emotional few nights, my poor little Lily had an accident tonight. Like most accidents, it was a freak thing. I was getting her dressed, and she launched herself forward, landing hard on a toy teacup saucer, and causing her gums to bleed and her two new teeth to push back. I think I cried harder than she did. After emergency calls to our pediatrician and a pediatric dentist, we are waiting until tomorrow to check on our poor little peanut’s teeth. As I sit here on Valentine’s Day still sick over the pain that my baby girl felt earlier tonight, I am struck by the power of love. I remember when I first fell in love with my husband, and everything felt stronger, deeper, more vivid. His smile made my heart leap, when we disagreed my heart ached, and his presence filled that same heart with such hope. I felt I could do anything, and we could do everything together. A mother’s love for her child changes everything, too. There is not pain that I have felt, including childbirth, that compares to the agony of seeing (or hearing) my children in pain. It is as if everything is so much more acute. Their joy causes me to see all of the beauty in the world, and their pain is excruciating beyond what I feel when my own body is hurt. Loving my husband and my girls has taught me both a richness of mountaintop highs and a riskiness of deep valley lows that I might not have otherwise known. So this Valentine’s Day, even though it’s been an emotional few days, I am overwhelmed by how blessed I am to have a husband who has made my world more beautiful and vibrant and two children that I love enough to have my heart travel places I never dreamed it could rise or fall. Today and every day, I am so grateful for my family.