I am frustrated, my dear, because right now your needs seem incompatible with the demands of school (despite its last dying gasps). You are eating every two hours (almost on the dot), and when I leave, a bottle seems to do little to satisfy you. I return, and you want to nurse almost immediately. As a result, the extra time I spend pumping, just to get enough milk to enable me to leave the house, seems wasted. Between feeding you, pumping, and trying to figure out your difficulties sleeping, I am worn very thin. And my school responsibilities make it worse.
Tonight, I ate dinner, nursed you, and then handed you off to your dad while I escaped for two hours to work on a paper. When I returned, he had done everything to settle you and get you to sleep (including a bath, a bottle, swaddling, and rocking), but you were still wide awake and unsettled. I ate a piece of chocolate, undressed, and lay down in the dark to nurse you. You nursed for nearly an hour, whimpering loudly, until you fell asleep. After awhile, I was able to creep slowly away.
As I lay there, watching you squirm and whimper and then finally drift off into a limp-limbed sleep, I had a couple realizations. First, I think because my school responsibilities have increased this week, I've been very much focused on my needs and frustrated because your demands have not fit into my schedule. Second, I think as you're reaching the three-month mark, I've felt increasing pressure for you to suddenly become an easy baby, sleeping through the night, or at least be on a more discernible schedule. You're quickly leaving the newborn phase, where seemingly anything goes, and entering a more nebulous realm, where a sizable faction advocates sleep training and crying it out. Entering this new phase makes me anxious, because you're clearly not on a schedule or sleeping for long stretches or spacing out your feeds or anything else that seems typical. You're not even sleeping by yourself, much less in your own room. And while I've tolerated that arrangement during the newborn period (because I told myself anything goes), I think I always expected you to be able to ease smoothly into a more "normal" arrangement by the time you were three months old. That doesn't appear likely.
Tonight I realized that all these expectations are based around an abstract idea of a baby and that, even though I've paid lip service to the idea that I want to be a parent that responds sensitively to you and pays attention to your needs, I don't think I've actually been considering your needs. I've been considering the needs of some other baby. You lay next to me nursing, loudly expressing exactly what you needed, and I realized that I don't have a choice. If I'm gone for a total of six hours during a day (which was how today went), and you have a minor melt-down in the evening and need to nurse for a long time in order to settle and sleep, then that's what I'll do. If you need me to stay home from class for a few days in order to help you settle back into a routine after a few difficult nights, then that's what I'll do. My school responsibilities are flexible, as almost anything in life is. You and your needs are, at this point, not flexible. You're not being manipulative or learning bad habits by being needy; you're just being a baby. Not only that, you're being Elsie.
I guess I'd already forgotten the lesson I (thought) I learned when you were breech and needed to come out by c-section. You are your own baby. You are your own person. My expectations regarding who you are and what you need are (at least at this point) secondary and, frankly, unhelpful. Instead, I need to meet your needs as you express them and let the rest of the world fall in place around them.
Oh, my love. The day you arrived, I said you were perfect. You are still perfect now. You will always be perfect, to me.
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