#2 – Working on the Night Moves

The nuances of putting a small child to bed … every five minutes

To die, to —
No more—and by a to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to —
To —perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!

Q: What does Old Dad have in common with this famed Hamlet soliloquy?

A: The lack of sleep.

I’ve learned by this point that there is no rhyme or reason to how well or how often any given kid will sleep. Some parents get lucky and have a little tyke who will pass out for 12-hour stretches and won’t be awakened by a tornado. Other parents become walking zombies because their kids can’t or won’t sleep. Sometimes one of these kids eventually turns into the other.

At the risk of being that guy who complains about the lack of sleep his child has created in his house (or, um, devotes an entire Substack post to said complaining), let me give you a quick synopsis of Young Kid’s sleep history:

-Birth to six months – slept only on top of his mother or father on a couch or atop a reclined pink pillow thingy in four-six-hour shifts (I still don’t know how we pulled this off)

-Six months to 1 year – slept in a pack-and-play in the master bedroom, woke up every two hours or so for a feeding

-1 year to 22 months – transitioned into his own room in the pack-and-play but wouldn’t sleep in crib; a sleep specialist came a few times and said some wise-sounding stuff that had, uh, no effect whatsoever

-2 years to present – finally in his crib, a 60-90-minute nap in the afternoon, plus between 7-10 hours* at night

The first three eras were somehow understandable. My wife and I traded sleep shifts, with one of us sleeping in the adjacent room and the other, in a feeble attempt to reclaim lost sleep from the previous night, on a separate floor with wax earplugs in. Rocking him or singing songs usually worked to get him down and he would generally pass back out again after feeding. Eventually, as his diet improved during the daytime, he required fewer nighttime feedings and for a time the sleep stretches got longer.

The current system, however, has been the trickiest, for a couple of reasons. First is that my body clock has been (mal)adjusted to the point that I can’t sleep through the night even without the kid and/or with sleep aids. That might sort itself out eventually, but for now, it’s rarely an issue, because Young Kid very rarely permits me or his mother to sleep through the night. The second, somehow more frustrating aspect is those minutes right before sleep. After we’ve done the potty and a bath and a snack and teeth brushing and read some books and sang some songs and told some stories (a routine that takes just about an hour), I hug him and kiss him and say goodnight, and leave the room. And that’s that, right?

(Narrator: That is NOT that.)

Within five seconds, I hear one of the following:

-“Hug kiss” (he wants additional hugs and kisses. Sweet, yes, but also … go to sleep, bruh)

-“Toes” (he needs to be recovered with the blanket that was covering him five seconds earlier)

-“Noo dypah” (he says he needs to be changed even though he has a fresh diaper on)

-“Need mo ayo” (he wants more water … don’t ask about the pronunciation)

-“Need help” (one of his stuffed friends fell was thrown out of the crib)

-“Knock peez” (he asks me to reciprocate his knocks on the wall so he knows I’m in the next room)

Once the initial demand has been met, there is a short pause of 1-5 minutes before the next one is made. Now, here is where you and any child expert worth his or her salt is saying, “Be strong. Bedtime is bedtime. Do not give in to his every whim.” Well, that ship has probably already sailed, because for the last several months, if not all of these sleep conditions have been fulfilled, the result is a gradual slide into a full-blown tantrum. I’ve talked to him in a calm voice about it, both during these infinite requests and at times well before bed, to no avail. I’ve yelled and cursed (more on this in a future ‘stack), which has had some cathartic effect I suppose but rarely achieves the desired result. I’ve ignored him/pretended to be asleep. He doesn’t care. And just in the last week or so, when his nightly sleep or nap is over, he wakes up in full meltdown mode and demands to be held for at least 15 minutes. Fun!

(We haven’t even mentioned his meticulously crafted sleep environment, which includes a Hatch machine set at a particular sound and color, blackout blinds on the windows, and the door left mostly open but closed just enough to block out ambient light from the hall.)

The maddening part, dear reader, is that as a dad, when you fulfill all of your obligations (bottle, bath, books, brushing, songs, stories, toes, water, et al), you believe that the job should be done. And old dads like—love, insist upon—getting things done. But the lawn doesn’t grow back 10 minutes after you mow it. The trash doesn’t jump out of the can and run down the street after you’ve taken it out. Putting the kid to bed once, every other night, is fine. A chore? Perhaps. But doing it two, three, seven times AFTER you’ve already done it? The inefficiency of it grates me, especially when I have so often tried to impress upon him the direct relationship between his sleep and his mood (to say nothing of the relationship between Mommy’s and Daddy’s sleep and mood).

As dads, you eventually learn that this sort of logic has no place in a toddler’s world, but that only makes it slightly easier to deal with, particularly when you value those few hours (minutes) of peace between when the kid falls asleep and when you do. For him, it’s about comfort. He needs to feel safe before he can shut his eyes (we won’t even talk about the months of nightmares brought on by a certain Big Bad Wolf), and the toes and the songs and the hugs are all parts of that. It’s about reminding yourself that your job is to amplify those feelings of comfort and safety and not, by yelling and ignoring and doing all the things you’d do if an adult treated you in such a way, undermining them.

Which, I suppose, is one of the challenges of being an older dad. We’ve had more time than our younger counterparts to deal with adults, some of whom have never quite emotionally developed past the toddler stage, and the ways in which we’ve learned to deal with them (ignoring, arguing, simply standing up for ourselves) are precisely the wrong strategies for dealing with those who haven’t yet had the chance to emotionally develop. Plus, we’re also more accustomed than younger parents to years of nights of uninterrupted sleep that allowed us to better handle the challenges of the day. It’s little wonder our tempers are shorter and our brains more fatigued when the sleep is sporadic at best.

My five-cent advice? Don’t prepare for the worst so much as expect it. You might be one of the lucky parents whose kids sleep like the dead. If not, expect that your kid is going to fight you, and test you, every night, and that the wakeup call might come at 4 a.m., 2 a.m., or 10 p.m.—or all of the above. Swallow your pride, tuck the toes in for the 17^th time, plant an extra kiss on his stubborn little forehead and think of the future nights when you’ll be wide awake because it’s 2 a.m. and you don’t know where he is. You’ve slept well before. Someday, you’ll sleep well again. But doing everything in your power to help give your kid some good feelings to drift off to will help you sleep more soundly once the racket finally subsides. Or at least enjoy the blissful, blissful quiet.

*-this represents the maximum end of the range and does not account for the 3-7 wakeups interspersed therein