First of all, let me say that it’s all good. It’s all good because we’re together; and together we can tackle anything.
It’s all good, but it’s not all easy.
There’s a Cheryl Crow song with the lyrics: “No one said it would be easy, but no one said that it would be this hard.” That’s how I feel sometimes.
Usually the hard stuff is also the stuff that breaks my heart, which brings me to the picture above. It’s a beautiful picture. I love him in those cute PJ’s and he looks so peaceful and beautiful sleeping.
But it’s a hard-won and short-lived peace.
Danny has not been sleeping well. After Danny has been asleep for about an hour, he wakes up crying. Usually one of us can run upstairs and calm him down. But several times a night nothing can settle him. He cries like it’s the end of the world and it breaks my heart.
Here’s the really hard part: it’s never us who really calm him down. You can see his bear in the picture. This is a bear we sent him and I’m so grateful to his nanny for making this such a special toy for him. But it’s the bear that calms him down. When he wakes up, we hand him his bear or his bottle or his blanket. One of these things usually soothes him back to sleep. He is not comforted by someone rubbing his back. I think sometimes rather than comforting, he finds waking up next to us terrifying.
Danny learned to control his daytime world in the Children’s Home. He is very good at winning over strangers and charming everyone he meets into treating him with kindness. For the first 12 months of his life, nights were always predictable and safe. Now daytime still consists of the winning over of strangers, but night time is a new experience made more difficult simply because it’s the night time.
I’ve written several paragraphs of analysis of what Danny must be going through but I’ve decided to save them for another post.
Tonight it’s just about the sleep.
I am exhausted. Some nights, I can be up with him every half hour or so. I’m sure he’s not getting a good quality sleep either.
We’re trying some new things to see if they help. But it seems that each new thing we try involves giving up a bit of the closeness I had hoped to have with Danny.
It started with not being able to hold him while he drank his bottle. His nanny warned us about this – she said that he liked to have control of his bottle. It was clear that being held and fed was very stressful to Danny and not what he was used to.
Next it was not being able to rock him to sleep to comfort him through touch. It hurts so much to be pushed away by my child when I’m trying to offer comfort. But again, I don’t want to force ourselves on him. I’m afraid if we do this, he may never be able to trust us to respect his limits.
Tonight comes the toughest of all: moving Danny into a crib.
Everyone has opinions about attachment parenting. But for our family it worked very well to have our kids sleep with us from about 6 months until they were two years old. Both kids had no problem transitioning to their own beds and it was so nice to be close to them in their most vulnerable years. I had hoped this practice would assist in our bonding and attachment to Danny. Maybe it still will, but right now, it’s another thing to test and to hope it brings peace to Danny.
I assumed that closeness of parents would bring security. But I can only imagine what it feels like to Danny to wake up in between two hulking strangers who not only are new people, but who also bear very little physical resemblance to any of the people he saw on a daily basis.
So it’s another little bit of letting go. It’s another little bit of wondering how things might have been different if he had come home sooner. It’s another reminder that while we’ve known this boy for over a year and loved him even longer, we are completely new to him. We don’t guarantee any sort of permanence to him yet. I am learning that to gain closeness and trust, I have to let go a bit and work counter-intuitively to my mother’s heart.
Sleep well, little sweet Danny and please wake up just a little more certain in our love for you…
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