Getting to Know Margaret

My (and our) parenting styles have shifted and evolved over four and a half years, as I'm sure they'll continue to do in all the years to come. In the beginning, I strongly identified myself as practicing Attachment Parenting. I have come to reject that label, even though I still do a lot of "AP practices" during the baby year(s). I don't like to apply the label to myself anymore because there are too many practices I see, either properly within AP or done by AP parents, with which I don't agree.


So, here I am, just a parent without a label. One thing Chris and I definitely never did was let our babies cry.


And then came Margaret.

She has always tolerated only me. She is almost four months old and now sometimes lets her own Daddy hold her for all of ten minutes before the crying starts. Even with me, she has been a "colicky" baby (whatever colicky means, nobody can really agree). Colic is generally supposed to end by three months old, and here she had passed that mark and was still regularly having screaming sessions of 30 and 45 minutes, numerous times a day, screaming like her life depended on it. She was crying two to three hours per day cumulatively.

I have come to see that different parents have different degrees of resources. I had more resources for soothing my baby when I had only Mary and John, and still more yet when I had only John. I have more resources than some other mothers, for example, how I was raised, that I have a husband, that my husband is supportive, that we have a stable income, that I get to be a homemaker, and so forth. Resources dictate a lot about parenting practices. I have fewer resources when Chris is traveling for business than when he is home.

So, one day Margaret was 45 minutes into a screaming stretch and I'd spent the whole time trying every soothing technique under the sun while my other kids needed me and I couldn't get to them . . . and for the first time in all my parenting, I set down my screaming baby (in her Pak N Play) and walked away.

Miss Margaret fell asleep.

So the next day, I decided to try this radical new experiment. The moment Margaret seemed to be moving out of her quiet wakeful state to a tired state (showing slight fussiness), I'd take her upstairs, put her in her Pak N Play in a dark room, and leave. She'd cry for one or two minutes (I watched the clock) and sometimes not even one little peep: I'd put her down wide awake, she'd let out a relaxed sigh, close her eyes, and go to sleep. At bedtime, she does seem to cry pretty consistently for four whole minutes, probably due to the fact that, by the end of the day, a baby is her most tense and overtired.

Her cumulative crying dropped immediately from two to three hours per day to 15-30 minutes per day.

As last week's experiment proceeded, I thought so much about Margaret's prior behavior and her new behavior. It is my interpretation that she is easily overstimulated. In order to fall asleep, she needed to be left alone. I would see that she was tired and start "soothing" her in ways that soothed my other babies, but were bothering her and keeping her awake, so she'd scream louder and in a more panicked way. She had grown not even to like my sling much. If I put her in my sling when she was alert, she was fine. But if I put her in my sling when she was tired, she'd stand up in it, scream, fight me, and struggle.

Margaret still hates the car. We drove to Atlanta last weekend and she screamed almost the entire four-hour drive. I was an absolute wreck by the time we arrived. Indeed, she screamed the hour's drive to the party we attended and the hour's drive home, the 45 minutes to Mass on Sunday, and most of that drive home. Margaret hates the car.


Coming home from Mass, it occurred to me that maybe she was being overstimulated by the scenes flying by outside the window. If while at home she needed to fall asleep in a quiet, dark room, what was the car doing with all its noise, movement, and visual stimulation? That first time, I grabbed my black Maya Wrap and made a tent for Margaret. Immediately she calmed enough to fall asleep over the next few minutes. So, for our four-hour drive home to Atlanta, I borrowed a dark-colored towel to make a tent for Margaret. She went from fussiness immediately to calm and fell asleep all by her little self.

I've now pieced together that if Margaret becomes overwrought with stimulation, then she can't calm down easily, whether by herself or with my help. In the last week, I saw that when I tried to go on an evening mothers' night out, I saw it at an anniversary party on Saturday (at a restaurant where Margaret couldn't stand the hustle and bustle, so I spent most of my time walking a crying baby), and at an afternoon party at my in laws' home on Sunday (every time I got M. calmed again, someone would make eye contact with her and that would set her off to crying again). My first two babies, I seem to recall, lulled pretty easily amidst hustle and bustle as long as they were in my sling. This baby: not at all!

I feel like I have such a happier baby on my hands! Margaret's new routine is to wake and nurse immediately, plus nurse happily a couple more times during her alert, wakeful time. During her wakeful time she is full of giggles and smiles. Margaret likes being in my sling as long as we're going somewhere and she's alert, but really her preference is to be held loosely in my lap. She almost never nurses right before going to sleep. It seems that even nursing is too overstimulating for her by the time she is tired, and it would contribute to her screaming. Do you know how weird that is for me as mama and La Leche League leader? Don't all babies fall asleep while nursing? Apparently not! So, as soon as she is tired, we don't nurse, but I do sway her a little, sing a song, tell her I love her and to go night-night, and I walk out. And within one to two minutes, she's asleep, sometimes without having made a single peep. I feel like she and I are much more in tune with each other now.

And that's what it is all about, right?

Now I get to live with the feelings of regret of how I sat in judgment of other mothers who told me about their babies crying before falling asleep. I'm not saying I recommend "crying it out" as a training method, even with a baby who does not want to fall asleep that way. But I no longer see it as a black-and-white situation and I know I judged very unfairly some situations that were probably similar to Margaret's. And how do I know how many resources individual mothers had for soothing screaming babies? In other situations, I didn't believe certain mothers who told me they could lay down their happy babies and walk away.

I'm so curious to get to know little Margaret as she grows up! Will she mature out of this oversensitivity within a couple of years? Will she always be our delicate girl? Who knows, but I look forward to finding out!