Cry It Out

After seven months of life, my beautiful son finally sleeps through the night. Now, some mothers out there may be reading this and immediately feel one (or many) of a variety of emotional responses: jealousy, sadness, failure, discouragement. I used to feel that way when I heard that another person's baby was giving his or her parents seven or eight blissful hours of straight sleep every night while I was still getting up two, three, four times a night for no apparent reason. My stomach would clench as this parent (or parents) gleefully, and with rested face, recounted how his or her cherub went down peacefully at night and slept until 6:30 or 7:00 the next morning. I would immediately feel shamefully jealous, then quickly descend into despair (He will never sleep all night! He will be ten years old and I will still be getting up at 2 am to feed him!), discouragement (What am I doing wrong? I have read so many articles and tried so many things. Why do none of them work on my son?), failure (I must be a bad mother. That's all there is to it. My poor child can't sleep and it must be my fault.). 

Then, a most beautiful story was casually recounted, and hope was restored to our world. 

"[My son] was getting up every two hours. I just couldn't take it anymore. Finally, we just let him cry it out. The first night, he cried for two and a half hours. I slept with a pillow over my head. But after a few nights, he was sleeping all night." 

I felt a glimmer of hope. I had heard about Cry It Out - read about it, analyzed it, debated it, agonized over it. It seemed wrong - to leave a tiny, helpless baby in his crib to face a dark, terrifying room alone, to cry with no comfort or refuge, to let this baby possibly feel tiny hunger pangs and not relieve them immediately. In the past, I could not ever feel comfortable with the concept. And then Allie was born, and by ten weeks old, she was sleeping all night, and has slept all night since that point. 

Mac was a different story. 

He was immediately less of a sleeper than Allie at night, but nothing insane. He would wake up, I would feed him, he would go back to sleep, and the cycle would continue throughout the night. By the time he was two months old, he was down to about once a night, with an early morning feeding around 5:30. And I thought, Okay. I can do this. He's getting into a pattern. 

Then he started teething. At two and a half months old. And all sleeping hell broke loose. All routines that had been established during the night were broken as he was desperate for the comfort that nursing provides. Suddenly, the one feeding a night was up to three or four, every hour, or hour and a half, or two hours. I would sit and feed him and cry at 3 am, as I was up for the fourth time with absolutely no idea how to rectify the problem. When his bottom two teeth came in at four months old, I hoped for a reprieve and got one. For a week. Then the top two started and it was exhaustion all over again. 

By the time he was seven months old, we had had enough. My husband and I discussed it. He's too old to get up so many times in the night. He can't be that hungry. He's same weight as the average thirteen-month-old. He can last all night. But the question remained: what do we do? 

Once we heard the Cry It Out story, everything seemed to come into focus. All of the articles I had read, all of the advice I had heard, all of the strategies I had tried boiled down to one fact: he has to learn to get back to sleep on his own. We could do sleep training or any number of things, but he had to learn. And for us, Cry It Out just made sense. We could do it that night, immediately, with no reading necessary. We knew it would be difficult, knew we would have to fight our parental instincts to run in, comfort him, make it better. But we also knew, we had to do it - for our good and for his. 

The first night was petrifying. We waited, dreading the inevitable cries and the purposeful negligence that was about to ensue. The first wave came at 11:30. Mac began to cry and my husband and I sat on the edge of our bed, just listening, try to gauge how bad it was going to be. After a few minutes, the cries dissipated as he went back to sleep. That wasn't so bad, I thought. 

Then came 2 am. He began to cry, and it escalated as his cries went unanswered and he waited in the darkness for me to respond, to put him back to sleep. It was torture. Time was endless. Time dragged on, an assault on all senses as I clutched the pillow and my husband and I waited with open eyes for him to stop. And, a mere twenty minutes later, he did. 

The next night, he cried around the same time for between 5-10 minutes. Much less time, much less torture. The next night, only a couple of minutes. And by the fourth night, he was sleeping almost twelve hours straight. And he has continued to sleep like this ever since. 

I wonder if we are like this with God sometimes. We cry out for Him, cry out for His help or healing or comfort, and sometimes it seems like we get no response. We need something, or lots of things, and we are imploring our Heavenly Father to rescue us from where we are flailing in the darkness. We wonder where He is, wonder why He is not with us, why He has not picked us up and made everything better. We feel lost, forgotten, abandoned. 

But what we don't realize is that He's right in the next room. He hears us. He knows we need Him, even more than we know it. He knows our heart pangs, our fear, our sense of not knowing where we are or what is next. He knows we feel completely overwhelmed because we can't see what's in front of us. 

But what we also don't realize is that, sometimes, we need to cry. We need to cry because, in crying, we learn to trust. We learn to say, "Even though I can't see You, even though I can't feel you, I believe that it's going to be okay. I believe that You care for me and love me. And even if I know nothing else, I know that. And that's all I need to know." 

So we don't need to fear if God seems to be ignoring our cries. He is not. He hears. He is just giving us an opportunity to trust. And for that, I am so thankful. 

Mac, 8 months old