One final installment about sleep, sleep methods, and training myself into motherhood.

Okay, I figure those of you who read that heading and are still with me know that this is all about sleep issues, and those who are bored to sleep (lucky you!) by the topic have gone off to do something more interesting, like take a nice long nap. Now, to the crux of the matter. I think we are done with formal sleep training. I find this hard to come right out and say, but it isn’t working for us. We tried to get started, after carefully reading Ferber this time, and rather quickly decided to stop. My kid, when placed in her crib drowsy but awake starts crying right away, very hard, and ramps up to complete hysteria—I mean the whole works—from the first minute and it only gets worse. Visiting her on the recommended schedule does nothing but upset her further. Were we to stick with this, we’d need to commit to some very prolonged bouts of crying, probably several hours over several nights. I think for many kids the crying is less shrill, and with patience and a lot of consistency, the child can slowly calm down and get to sleep. I wish this were the case at our house, but even Ferber does not recommend leaving a child who is as upset as ours became. Ironically, I am following the advice he himself gives: if you can’t commit to this method and really follow it, spare yourself the trouble. It will not work if you try it only in fits and starts. Knowing that we are not going to stick with it for hours of crying, we are throwing in the towel now.

Now, please, if you are in the Sears camp, do not stand up and cheer—I am not crossing the field, baby slung close to my body, to go stand in the bleachers with that crowd, either. It may be that I am just the nervous, doubting type, but I’m still not quite content with attachment parenting. What I am, folks, is a sucker for sleep manuals of every single style and philosophy. Publishers love parents like me—parents who cannot seem to operate a book and their own common sense at the same time. You have only to check my bookshelves to see why this is an industry worth gazillions a year. Each book in turn has made me a zealot, for about 24 hours, to its methodology. The vignettes written by parents in the sidebars always get me—they sound so confident! So free of doubts! But this is exactly where I drive myself nuts and a more sensible person puts down the book, uses the helpful bits, and does what makes sense for her and her child—without obsessing over what the book recommends.

I would like to pause for a moment to say that Scott has weathered this with me with the patience of an absolute saint. And it was not Audrey who required his patience, my friends. It was me. Please send him an e-mail right now if you know him—he deserves pats on the back for his endurance. And I haven’t even started reading the toddler manuals yet.

So although we have put aside his method, I am not opposed to Ferber. In fact, philosophically I feel quite comfortable with sleep training and I wish I had a child for whom some sleep training could, without a mammoth struggle, really work. Maybe down the road, in some modified way, it will work for us, too. We know an awful lot of families for whom it has been just right. For now, Audrey is taking a nap in her swing (which is turned off, but she likes sleeping in it anyway). And last night, even though it took a while to get her down for the night, she was only up once, which I find I can live with. Maybe I can reach a similar peace with all these stacks of books around me…