cry it out

Back when I believed that I was going to be a Good Parent, I thought, but didn't say, that I wouldn't let my baby "cry it out". This is the method endorsed by most sane parents, which is to say, parents whose love of their children coexists with the belief that they, too, deserve things like sleep and actual meals, eaten at a table, before ten pm.

Still woozy from labor and hormones, I looked at my perfect, tiny son and thought, very quietly, in the privacy of my postpartum home: I will love my kid so much that I will stay up with him no matter how long it takes. My son will never cry for me and not know where I am or why I won't hold him. And then, once he can understand English, I'll just explain to him that it is bedtime, so he knows that while I'm the boss, I still love him.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. and HA. and, wait, hold on: HAHAHAHA.

Mac, preparing for his hit single, You Failed Me.

My son, now a year old, has no interest in understanding any language that is telling him things he doesn't want to hear. Still just as adorable as he was at four hours old, he will curl sweetly around my growling stomach as I nurse him, his face settling into happy baby sleep face. And I will gently carry him to the crib, and whisper that I love him, and he will sense the way my arms tense as I pull him away from my body to set him down, and the jig, my friends, is up.

So last night I just couldn't. I basically failed at everything I tried to do yesterday: jobs either rejected me or have hours I can't work because of school. Husband came home to find the house full of chores I said I'd do, still undone, and my bleary with a cold and crabby in the way I can only truly be after four solid hours of job-searching. I ate not a single meal but a random assortment of foodstuffs, most of them some form of complex carbohydrate, re-establishing myself as both Mom and Fat in my own eyes.

And so, after about thirty minutes of cooing and back patting and up to nurse and down to sleep and then up to wail accusingly, I took my precious child, set him -- not even very gently -- in his crib, said -- not even very gently -- Good Night and I Love You, and walked, not tiptoed, from the room.

It was neither a Come-to-Jesus moment in my house nor a Critical Parenting Failure. He sobbed with the tenacity and bravado that reassured me that, though I may now be the Enemy, my son will one day be a formidable and tenacious foe.

I have no opinion anymore on whether "sleep training" is a good thing or a bad thing. But I don't feel like a worse parent than I did before abandoning my child in his pack and play. And fortunately, 100% of the self-appointed parenting consultants with whom I've been blessed this week seem to agree that, on the list of things I Should Think About Doing This Other Way, "cry it out" is unlikely to even make top five anytime soon.