Cramming for the Big Exam

Recently, as any dedicated future parent would do, I have been investigating learned sources on child rearing (google, youtube, facebook, buzzfeed, random blogs).

And as always with the internets, I have found that all their Secrets of Successful Child-Rearing prove not so much informative as contentious, focussing overwhelmingly on the negative – sidestepping the actual advice, but elaborating on the potential catastrophic results of choosing the wrong method. (A child that is left to cry will become a psychopath, while a child that is picked up when it cries will become a manipulative tyrant; a child that is fed on demand will be needy and self-centred, while a child that is fed on a schedule will have mushy intestines and an inferiority complex, etc., etc.)

There are so many vague shades and offshoots of so many theories that it is impossible to name or number them. There are nurses who interpret the infinitesimal variations of baby’s cries, and sages who teach comprehensible sign language to infants, and mystics who tap into the powers of intuition, and militaristic nannies who program their charges into responsive robots, and hippies, and disciplinarians, and strict-rule-followers, and no-rule-followers,  and conquerors of their children’s whims, and slaves to their children’s needs.

About one thing they are all, however, in agreement – child-rearing is by no means natural, instinctual, or even possible at any time in history previous to our recent understanding of psychology, neurology and the science of social behaviour. (Well, except for those promoting the Amazonian tribe method, but then could those poor tribeschildren really reap the benefits of their upbringing without fully understanding the development of neurological signals that it was promoting, or at the very least, without jotting down a few statistics?)

So after a few months of careful reading, I have come up with the fundamental conundrum of new parents: a) child-rearing is a mysterious and elusive form of magic which no one understands, and upon which no enduring wisdom can be imparted, even from the perspective of experience; b) all children, through all the eons of history, have nevertheless managed to grow up, and quite possibly retain no memory or trace of their parents’ blunderings in their early months.

Having agreed on the impossibility of the task they undertake, all child-rearing methods also ultimately set the same goals. For the purpose of oversimplification, I would say that all their discussions seem to hinge around one central issue in the early months of parent-child interaction: establishing who’s boss.

There are many variants of the “Do not let them rule your life” camp, all focussing, to one degree or another of extremism, on the importance of inculcating the newborn into the social world it will, eventually, have to come to accept. There are equally as many of the “Nature knows” camp, astutely separating the actual, visceral needs of the infant from the constructed, overlaid social needs of its parents.

Faced with this intellectual, ethical and philosophical dilemma, without yet being in possession of a subject to experiment on, I have no other option than to put my own life habits and needs (adult, socially constructed) to the test, and to examine them from both points of view – the “Do what the parent needs” routine-based infant flash-course on adult life patterns vs. the “Follow your baby’s instincts” nature-based complete enslavement by the unpredictable needs of your child. Highlighting a few of the pet peeves of infant behaviour that parents of both camps struggle against, I have found the following interesting behaviours in myself:

 

Night feeds

The number one developmental step in any type of newborn training seems to be dropping the night feed. This, I am promised by various proponents of various methods, can be achieved in 1 week/3 months/6 months/2 years by careful adherence to schedule/instinct/willpower/calculated daytime force-feeding/magic. But whatever the means, most methods agree that the getting-up-in-the-night-to-feed is an ogre that must be chased away as soon as possible.

Now, over the past several months, my body has been meticulously cultivating the opposite tendency, so as, I suspect, to plant in my mind the certainty of night-feeding as a necessity to health and happiness. Not to say that I have not tried several of these methods myself: the cry-it-out method (my empty stomach doesn’t so much cry as grumble, but the sounds it emits are equally disturbing); the move-your-schedule method (I time my daily meals and my bedtime carefully for optimum results); the pre-bedtime-forcefeed method (a big warm bowl of cream of wheat before I turn out the lights is just the thing). I train my digestive system for longer breaks, or shorter breaks, for larger meals, or smaller meals, to no avail. There’s nothing for it but to take up a banana, or a sandwich in a Tupperware, every night before I go to bed, in anticipation of my 3am feed.

I suspect my body of scrupulous mental and physical preparation for life with an infant. Or it could just be the curse of a fast metabolism, and one that is not entirely new for me. Although I’ve never been a night snacker before, I have frequently, throughout my life, woken up hungry in the middle of the night – not just a bit peckish, but the victim of painful, gut-roiling, nauseating hunger (often, inexplicably, causing me to wake from dreams of crawling through a desert with my belly bloated and burning). As a child I would wake up in the morning so hungry I would start to gag and be too queasy to eat; as an adult I have always found the sensation unpleasant, but ignorable; at the moment, the night time hunger is unbearable, and has to be addressed if I am to get any sleep at all.

Which makes me wonder – if I can’t bear the discomfort of waking up hungry at night, how reasonable is it of me to expect this of my child? I imagine myself, leaning over her crib at 3am, saying sternly through her cries, “You go back to sleep now, it’s not time for your breakfast yet,” as I calmly munch my banana. No, regulated digestion is not so easily conquered, and night time feeding has come to seem to me very logical indeed. I will bring two bananas, and make it a picnic.

 

Not sleeping through the night

A small addition to the above – according to all the methods, it seems, a good baby, a developed baby, a mature baby, is one that is sleeping through the night. This achievement is recommended at a variety of different ages, depending on the method, but no one doubts that it is a key achievement in the progress toward healthy adulthood.

There are camps of sleep-trainers and anti-sleep-trainers. There are sleep-trainers who recommend crying-it-out, and sleep-trainers who recommend patting-and-leaving, and sleep-trainers who recommend complex timed systems of variegated intervals noted carefully in a sleep log and increased according to formulas of high-level mathematics. There are those who think the child must learn to sleep on his own, and those who think he must be shown how, and those who think he knows how instinctually but lacks a feeling of security and confidence because he is/isn’t placed in his own room/a swaddle/a lambs-wool sleeper-suit/a magical cocoon of rocking rhythms and low mechanical sounds.

So how to impart this mysterious wisdom? I ask myself. And I look back on my years and years of sleep experience, and find that, after all, I am not the right mentor for the job; I have never, to my shame, been much of a good sleeper myself. I wake during the night more often than not, and can’t often get myself to sleep inside of an hour. Sometimes I simply don’t sleep at all. I remember as a child wandering, confused, around the dark house and looking periodically at the microwave clock, unable to understand why, despite the best efforts of my sleep-deprived woolly-brained head, I was still awake. I remember recurring stages in life where I dreaded the empty hours after bedtime, staring at the ceiling and trying to will myself to sleep, arming myself whenever possible with something I’d read or seen recently, to think about in the dark and distract me.

So if my child lies awake at bedtime, fussing and fussing and not wanting to sleep, I can hardly say, you must sleep! Can I? I guess we’ll just lie awake and fuss together.

And another thing – recent research would have us believe that sleeping eight hours straight is not a natural habit at all, but a learned one, fitting in with developing social behaviour (leisure time, work hours, access to artificial light, the cult of busy-ness) that has come into being in recent centuries. Our bodies’ natural urge, apparently, is to sleep in interrupted intervals, pausing between sleeps for minutes to hours of quiet, normally inactive wakefulness. The existence, and later disintegration, of this practice has been recorded or alluded to (so the internets inform me) in the diaries, musings, medical texts and fiction of previous ages. Does this mean it’s our babies who should be teaching us the patterns of healthy sleep, and not the other way around?

 

Frequent pit stops

The internets warn that one of the woes of early parenthood, especially for the active sorts who count on leaving the house, is the doom of the frequently-changed diaper. The mess, the hassle, and the widespread Fear of Poo have all been discussed at length, but the life-changing Disruption of the Pit Stop seems to be up there among the major inconveniences. Unless you’re in a park, or at someone’s house, it seems you will always be on the lookout for either a bathroom (with changing table) or convenient substitutes.

Well, this is an easy one for me. I cannot remember a time in my life when I have not always been on the lookout for a bathroom. Never having mastered the skill of increasing the capacity of my bladder by the most well-intentioned willpower, I have found the skill of sniffing out a bathroom in the unlikeliest of places, or of storing spied bathrooms in the recesses of my mind for future use, to be indispensable. (And my poor husband, who before he met me never knew the trauma that Bathroom Location Uncertainty Syndrome can cause, has taken to prompting me, before leaving home or, say, a restaurant, as one would a small child, “Would you like to use the toilet before we go?”)

This developed survival behaviour was exacerbated by the general opinion, imparted to me at a young age, that needing to make frequent pit stops throughout the day was somehow naughty and irresponsible (the correct number, practised by normal adults, was three per day, I was told.) And so bathroom-hunting while out and about took on something of the clandestine; it was a race against time, a manoeuvring and a manipulation, a system of second-guessing, so that the adults could be tricked into believing the conveniently-placed bathroom had shown up of its own accord, begging to be used. This habit has not left me. The basic requirement for any outing, no matter where or for how long, is access to a toilet, and bathroom reconnaissance precedes any possible enjoyment of the trip.  

So essentially, having to schedule the day, and the route of travel, around frequent pit stops (and/or diaper changes) is something I would be ungenerous not to sympathise with, if not encourage. If my daughter is anything like me, she will need this skill in her future years.

 

Crying for absolutely no reason, and needing to be cuddled

                Babies, some experts warn, are manipulative creatures who will do anything to get your attention; once you give in and respond to their fussing with a cuddle, they’ve got you eating out of the palm of their little chubby hands. Children, others say, need to develop a sense of security from an early age, and should be trained as quickly as possible to comfort themselves, by watching your example, then being left to their own, patiently encouraged, devices. Infants, still others claim, go through a phase where they simply cry for no reason; this crying is not caused by any discomfort or need, and should be kindly, but firmly, ignored, otherwise it will only continue. There are also those convinced that every cry is a communication of a specific need, which the super-human parent of super-linguistic capabilities should decode and answer, and not simply cuddle away.

But in all cases, it is agreed that the cry-cuddle cause-and-effect chain risks turning into a cuddle-dependency-caused-cry, if you make the fatal mistake of over-responding. Devious or innocent, instinctual, crafty or genuine, the various child-rearing methods seem to agree on two points: uncontrollable crying is motivated (perhaps intentionally) by a specific stimulus, and is a bad habit from which the child should be quickly weaned.

                Now, all this may be very true. But when I find myself in the uncomfortable situation of crying for no reason, then neither self-soothing, nor the domination of adult logic, nor an engulfing sense of security, nor the practised patterns of habit, make any difference. I just want a cuddle, dammit.

In the last several months, I have not often been victim to the overpowering mood swings generated by pregnancy hormones, but I do have my moments, from time to time, when I’m too exhausted to find life anything but hopeless and collapse into pointless, uncontrollable tears. Once it was the utter agony of trying to make a bowl of porridge, without having slept properly the night before, that brought it on. Once, it was the contemplation of the tragic yet poetic death of a turtle, the collateral damage of a story about avian hunting techniques told during a jolly fireside conversation with friends. Once it was nothing more than the sheer expanse of the empty weekend day and the mountain of things to fill it.

Whatever brings it on, I am fully aware each time that there is absolutely no reason for it. Nevertheless, it is overpowering and uncontrollable. And there is only one thing to do – cry it out, and be cuddled.

Without exactly encouraging the habit of regular abandon to uncontrollable crying comforted only by a pat and a cuddle, I can’t help sympathising with it, since I experience it myself. Another example, no doubt, of my body surreptitiously preparing me for parenthood. And I hope I’ll respond to the bewilderment and annoyance caused by my child’s uncontrollable crying with un-resented and guilt-free cuddles.

 

A fascination with putting things into other things

                This last one is a habit, an innate need, which my poor baffled husband will never understand. Why do I like to take objects of various sizes, and organise them by mystical criteria of classification, and place them inside receptacles such as drawers, and boxes, and Tupperware, and cupboards – and then remove them, and re-arrange them, and house them once again? What is the origin of my need to possess boxes of different sizes, and multiple sets of drawers; what is the mystery that determines what objects will go into one, but not another? How much more can I possibly fit into their seemingly infinite interior spaces?

                So yes, babies of the world, I understand your need. I understand the irresistible urge, when confronted with a drawer, to open it, and when confronted with its contents, to empty them, and when confronted with un-housed, loose miscellanea, to insert them into every imaginable receptacle within reach. And I can only hope that when my own child begins to explore this great pleasure of life, I will not be too overbearing with my prior wisdom and preferences as to where and how, but will consider the Putting of Things into Other Things as a group activity, an exploration, a tireless pursuit.

 

I’m sure that if I looked hard enough, I would come up with many more examples of infant-like behaviour in my daily life. But based on what I have contemplated so far, with the caveat that I do consider myself to be a rational and intellectually developed being, I can find no justification in my own behaviour for inflicting any sort of regimented life training on my child. And so we will merrily fuss ourselves into wakefulness at all hours of the night, keep irregular schedules, hold midnight picnics, eat whenever we feel like it, stop for bathroom breaks as frequently as we like, and joyfully unpack drawers and cache their contents in mysterious hideaways whose systems of organisation only we understand. And so, I am promised by the internets, my child will quickly become an ungovernable nuisance and ruin the peace and stability of my life. Oh, well.

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, how does your garden grow?

 

 

 

…with sticks and stones that break my... shovels… and my polar fleece is no longer white as snow…

...goes the classic nursery rhyme about two ignoramuses working in their garden.

While most of March was spent sitting in front of our computers (the Lord of the Manor had his exams, his Lady had an overload of work), our rare moments of repose were spent discovering our vast ignorance of the natural world.

Much like the early explorers, we spent many a long afternoon promenading around our new possession, pointing at creatures and objects saying, “What is it?” “Some kind of bush, I would say.” “No, indeed! I would say a tree.” “A tree, you say?” And we would survey the brown, stick-looking pointy things poking up out of the ground, and wring our hands. “Will we ever know?” And the conversation would invariably end with, “Mother-in-law will tell us.”

A Plant of Some Kind

We schemed and plotted to have Mother-in-Law and the Army of Aunts over for a party of tea and digging, in the hopes of solving the Mystery of the Unknown Sticks. Mother-in-law, for those who have not met her, is an all-knowing expert-of-the-garden, and does wonderful and magical things like turning seeds and soil into jam, and materialising magical stocks of sour cucumbers. Her verdict, however, was more elusive than elucidating – either, “It’s a type of bush of some sort,” or, “Well, let’s wait to see what grows on it” (interspersed with, “You really ought to cut these back,” or, “Don’t you want to clean out these dead leaves? Where’s your rake”)

And so we settled back to enjoy the early spring, content in the knowledge that by September, at the latest, we would be able to say with certainty if the small tree-like object in the middle of the lawn was in fact an apple tree, and if the twining leafy thingies under the deck were indeed roses.

 

With animal life we are no better. So far, I have identified from our rotating menagerie: a sparrow, an earthworm and a duck. There was a massive buzzing thing the size of my hand that burst in through the open back door, emitting a roar like a helicopter and sending me scuttling up the stairs to refuge which, when it stopped bashing itself against the window for a second, turned out to be a small, furry bumblebee. There was a small creature I unintentionally evicted from its burrow while digging in the compost heap which looked to my untrained eye like a mouse, but did not behave like one (do mice swim? Do they have black stripes down their back? Do they live in compost heaps?) There are the buzzing things which I identified as wasps but Piotrek assured me were “far too furry”. There is a whole organization of very busy birds criss-crossing our garden each morning, passing messages, checking this and that, holding meetings, of which I so far noted that some have blue feathers in their tails, and some do not. And there are the swarms of teeny-tiny insects that hover nebulously over one spot on the lawn every evening, which we currently name, “Dammit, I think these might be mosquitos… or are they too small?”

One thing we were able to do on our own was to identify the Things That May Be Alive and Things That Are Definitely Dead. And this is how we progressed toward our very first harvest: a harvest of sticks.



  We, in our growing wisdom, identified several items of our garden inventory – overlong strands of brown grass trampled flat, brittle twigs, tangled bits of overgrown bushes, broken branches clogging the little stream beyond our gate – as either candidates for relocation to the compost heap, or potential firewood. I with my secateurs and Piotrek with his axe set to work one sunny March Sunday, clearing out the messes of last year’s decorative hedges and ending up with heaps of kindling.

 

Our first harvest

 

The garden has turned out to be fairly addicting. We still have no clue what to plant, or where, or when, but there is always something to trim or tidy up. Piotrek has drawn an elaborate plan for our vegetable patch, which after a month of hard work with a pitchfork (several pitchforks, if we count the ones that were sent back to the store in disgrace with broken handles) has expanded to include all the components of a very yummy salad. And I have woken many mornings in the light of the every-earlier dawn to look out the window and find the Lord of the Manor, wrapped to the nostrils in a duffle coat and woolly scarf, hacking away at his squares of earth.

 

In no time at all, Piotrek has morphed into a hairy, sweaty, dirt-covered, pitchfork-wielding peasant: