Lessons learned the hard way

I wish I could tell you that my acceptance of natural mothering was smooth sailing, but alas, I am a slow learner. I think my short foray into detachment parenting methods began when I signed up for a “nursing class” that my former obstetrics group offered. Among the advice I was given there: “Give yourself a break and put your baby in the hospital nursery and get as much sleep as you can in the first two days postpartum.” “Place a comfortable chair in a corner of your bedroom and turn on the TV for those night nursings to relieve boredom.” “It won’t hurt a baby to let him or her occasionally ‘cry it out.’” Since, sadly, I did not do any reading on motherhood until my precious first baby was six months old, I didn’t know any better. I took some of this unfortunate advice.

I can still vividly recall those night nursings as tears were rolling down my cheeks from exhaustion. I would try very hard to cry quietly so that my husband would not wake. I concentrated on looking at the clock, getting more agitated and nervous as the wee morning hours ticked away from me … and still no sleep. I walked around in a state of serious sleep deprivation for too long. I forgot things. I was irritable. The house became a mess and I rarely cooked dinner anymore.

I vented my frustrations frequently and loudly to my husband, which caused problems. I began to resent staying at home because I thought this was how it was always going to be. After all, my work as a lawyer, even when it took me into prisons, was MUCH easier than this! At times I even wondered if I had made a mistake in becoming a mom. I was losing my very openness to life.

I bought into the whole strange cultural fad that you just couldn’t “do anything” those first six weeks because you just had to tough it out and be miserable. I also listened a lot to my dear mother-in-law who blamed my exhaustion on picking up the baby too much. Sadly, my poor son, Thomas, bore the brunt of my inexperience. I was not able to just “enjoy” and cocoon with him. Breastfeeding was difficult at first. Perhaps this was because I kept trying to send him to the nursery in the hospital, where later the nurses admitted that they gave him formula because they felt sorry for him when he cried!

Nights were terrible. When my son was actually sleeping, and I finally had a chance to rest myself, I would stare at the clock again with an impending dread … when was he going to get up again the next time? Would I have half an hour or 10 minutes to sleep? I would fervently pray for him to sleep though the night, and one night, at my wit’s end, I let him cry to sleep in his crib in another room (I usually had him in a detached bassinet in our room). My poor husband had better instincts than I. He sat on the stair outside my son’s room until he finally calmed down (probably from exhaustion and dejection) and then checked on him often that night. He knew, as he wisely does with many things, that this “system” was somehow not “right” even before I did. Meanwhile my face was buried in pillows as I cried, too. Deep down, my instincts were right on target, yet I was thwarting them with all this bizarre advice.

At six weeks, in such a state of disarray I can’t describe, I attended my first La Leche League meeting. A light went on that day for me that will never be extinguished. Although proponents of detachment parenting and the “cry it out method” imply that natural mothering is “too much work,” these brave ladies, in spite of ill informed societal notions, made for me a great case that just the opposite was true. Shortly after that I read Sheila Kippley’s Breastfeeding & Natural Mothering. Then I picked up Dr. Sears’ The Baby Book, at a garage sale … perhaps the best $2.00 I ever spent!

My life literally changed in less than a month’s time. I brought my baby into to bed with me. I nursed him lying down, and blissfully drifted off to sleep with him near me, hearing his every breath. Words can’t do justice to the inner peace I experienced at this happy turn of events. I was no longer sleep deprived, and began to function perfectly normally as nature intended. It was as if I was lifted out of a fog. My marriage blossomed again.

The early days with our second son were so much better. I actually walked around like a refreshed, normal human being for the first six weeks of his life. Those first experiences with him were so different for me … I wish for some of that time back with my first son. I nursed my new baby lying down from the start, while “rooming in” at the hospital. When we got home, my husband would sometimes wake in the morning and ask how many times he had fed during the night. Listening this time to my friends at La Leche League meetings, I had stopped “watching the clock” and I seriously told my husband that I did not KNOW! The interruption was so brief, relaxed, and natural it rarely registered as an “interruption!” As evidenced from his queries, the nighttime feedings also did not disrupt my peacefully sleeping husband.

Of course, a solution to have alleviated some of my early problems would have been to learn NFP as an engaged couple. We did not do that, rationalizing that we had “time” for that after we were married, and it would be better to learn it together (we lived in different states before the wedding). As it happens, though, time got away from us and we were overjoyed to find that we were expecting a baby right away. Now we surely had no need for NFP and we could not really chart anyway. So we put it off again. In retrospect, those decisions were very big mistakes. If we would have taken the course, even while pregnant, we could have used the important signs to determine postpartum fertility, since my bad habits in early breastfeeding did not allow me the postpartum infertility that ecologically breastfeeding mothers typically enjoy.

We could have also saved ourselves time, grief, and money by reading the chapter on family life, which introduces the reader to the family bed, a concept I had been totally unfamiliar with. The wise authors recommended a king size bed on the floor. We had just purchased a very tall and expensive fancy bed frame with large cracks near the headboard that make it less safe than it could be for our little one to be with us. We do compensate by sealing the cracks, but the height is a problem for our bed. A mini “co- sleeper” has been helpful (particularly if I have to get up in the middle of the night) for peace of mind that our baby will not fall to the floor, but the easier course would have been a low lying mattress as the manual recommends. I wish, too, in retrospect, that I would not have listened to the baby retailers and bought a baby crib.

We are now expecting our third child, and are armed with a wealth of knowledge that would have taken years to amass with just our own experience. Our new baby, due very soon, will reap the amazing benefits that natural mothering, which works marvelously in tandem with NFP, has to offer. If you have enjoyed the benefits of natural mothering, please consider giving other poor hapless moms, like me, a break and share this good news!

— Gretchen Pimentel is a CCL member from Virginia, currently enjoying the early weeks of life with her third son.