Why do you care how long my baby sleeps at night?

“Is he sleeping through the night yet?”

This question plagues me.  It seems to follow me everywhere.  Everyone asks – friends, acquaintances, random strangers and especially family – and every time they do, it makes me irate.  Why?  Because it’s a reminder of how messed up our society is when it comes to parenting.  How little we value our kids and our jobs as parents.

Little Man snoozing in the big bed

For starters, there’s the pregnancy/parenting dichotomy. We’re told we can’t be too careful when we’re pregnant.  We can’t give too much to our fetuses.  How many times was I chastised for drinking coffee with a bump?  Eat a piece of salami?  My God, how could I play such Russian roulette with my precious child’s life?  And how often did I hear from people that I shouldn’t want a homebirth, rather welcome a C-section because surely getting the baby out alive (no matter what it did to my body) was the ONLY thing that mattered?

But then the baby is born and the same society tells us to push it away.  Why are you nursing him again so soon?  Why are you nursing him at all?  Formula isn’t poison you know!  You know, newborns don’t really need to nurse at night.  Whatever you do, don’t let him ‘get used’ to sleeping with you or he’ll ALWAYS want to be that comfortable.  Isn’t he sleeping through the night yet?

Yup, the change in ‘advice’ from pre- to post-birth still makes my head spin.  And I often wonder if the two extremes feed each other.  Perhaps women who fall prey to the martyrdom mantra of pregnancy find themselves exhausted, disconnected from everything they used to be and yearning for control of their bodies and lives.  Maybe that makes them more ready to subsequently follow the minimum-inconvenience mantra of parenting, to get back that control.  Maybe we feel we were under the thumb of our fetus, so now it’s our turn to show that fetus who’s boss.  But we don’t realize it wasn’t our baby who took our autonomy, it was our culture, and it’s our culture that needs to be put in its place after our little one is here.

Then there’s SIDS. SIDS is the leading cause of death for infants in Canada other than congenital abnormalities and perinatal trauma.  In other words, sleeping is the single most dangerous thing my baby will do this year.  So why should I make it my goal to leave him vulnerable for as long as possible each day?  I’m perfectly happy to wake up in the night if it means my Little Man will wake up in the morning.  But it doesn’t take statistics to tell you that it’s unnatural and unsafe for a baby to be away from it’s parents all night.  Every parent knows it instinctively.  That’s why there are whole sections of stores devoted to gadget that will let you know your baby isn’t dead.  Right down to the ones that measure every possible marker of aliveness – breath rate, body temperature, heartbeat – and beep it at you all night long.  Wouldn’t it be easier just to know your baby is alive because it wiggles next to you in the night?  I honestly don’t get it.

But these things aside, the question prickles me because I’m not sure why it should be asked at all. Why should it matter to anyone else how long my baby sleeps at night?

The people who ask the question (especially the ones who ask it repeatedly) aren’t asking because they think his wellbeing is in jeopardy.  I know this because these same people see that he’s happy.  All.  Day.  Long.  They see that he’s growing and developing ahead of ‘the curve’.  They compliment me on these things.  If he were falling asleep at breakfast, or screaming all day then I’d be the first to say that something needs to change.  But he’s not, and the doubters know that.

They’re also not asking because they’re concerned about me being exhausted. This one I know because I never complain about being exhausted.  Probably because I’m not, in fact, exhausted.  On the contrary, I sleep better than most moms I know, because I’ve found ways to meet Little Man’s needs easily (ie nursing and bedsharing) and I brag about how rested I am.  I also know that these people aren’t worried about me missing sleep because they’ve never asked me about my sleep before I became a parent.  No, they weren’t calling my dorm room to ask if the other Frosh were ‘giving me at least six hours.’  They weren’t tut-tutting at me when I worked night shifts or crammed for biochem or dragged my drunk ass home at 5am only to head back out at 8.  I guess these were considered acceptable reasons to forfeit sleep, but caring for my (nearly) helpless infant doesn’t make that cut.

They’re asking because sleeping babies have become synonymous with good babies.  In a society where a ‘good’ child is a ‘well-controlled’ child, a baby’s goodness can be numerically summed up, it seems, on a scale of 1 to 12.

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I’m going to put in a little caveat here: everyone loves their baby, no matter how many hours that baby sleeps in a row, and even if the method used to achieve that sleep isn’t one I’d employ.  I do get that.  Hey, if Little Man drifted off to sleep and stayed that way all night, I wouldn’t be complaining about it.  This is MY vent about a societal value that I deplore, and about the people in MY life who get on my case about something that is none of their business.  It’s not an attack on parents of babies who sleep ‘well’.

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Why I get prickly about bad birth portrayals

Even though I was determined that my TV drama roster was full, I caved and started watching Off the Map.  And I admit it – I like it.  That is, with the exception of the third episode and its totally botched, overly dramatized, hellishly inaccurate portrayal of birth.

It went something like this: woman in labour, goes to the jungle-clinic where they slap an EFM on her and require an ultrasound to determine the baby’s presentation.  The EFM – as EFMs tend to do – goes ‘beep’.  That single beep is enough to indicate to the wonderful American (male) doctor that the baby is in imminent danger and an emergency C-section is the only answer.  Never mind that they can barely create a sterile field, or that none of the doctors has been identified as a qualified anesthetist, cutting the mom’s abdomen open on the patio of a jungle hut is deemed (within 3 seconds of that single beep) to be the ONLY way to proceed.  On they charge and baby comes out, hooray, a medical miracle!

But come on, this is a show where they gave a guy an IV of coconut milk when they ran out of blood.  It’s not supposed to be realistic, it’s supposed to be dramatic and entertaining, right?

I get that.  I really do.  But here’s my beef with birth à la Hollywood – not only is birth the only health topic portrayed on TV that a viewer is likely to experience first hand, just about EVERY viewer is guaranteed to experience it.  And, as sad as it is, a lot of people take in this message and never question it.  So when they (or their partner) are in labour (albeit, presumably not in the jungle) and that EFM goes beep, and the doctor says it has to be a C-section, that seems totally reasonable to them.  Even for those of us who do question and search before our babies are born, it’s difficult to forget the scenarios we’re so familiar with and accept something we’ve never seen – rarely even heard of – as possible for us.

It doesn’t matter that they gave the guy the coconut transfusion because no one will ever be in a situation where they have to choose coconut milk or death.  Just like it doesn’t matter that Grey’s Anatomy once showed Izzy cracking open a guy’s skull on the side of the freeway with a drill she grabbed from the back of a pick-up.  None of the crazy, “you’ll never guess what they did” scenarios about anything else matter because it’s all so far removed from the realm of possibility that no one will be hurt by seeing those scenarios.  Birth is different.

There are a myriad of reasons why the C-section rates in North America are astronomically high, but patient perception that major surgery is a normal and safe way to have a baby is one of the biggies.  Women have lost confidence in our ability to give birth; to do the most important thing that our bodies are designed to do; the one thing that men can not do.  We’ve come to believe that we’re in mortal peril from the moment the contractions start, until the moment that the heroic (and usually male) doctor rescues us.

If we want to take birth back, we have to start with our birth stories.  We have to stop showing birth as a catastrophe and show it as an achievement – a female achievement – and we have to stop making men the heroes of our stories.

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