Are You ready for a New Sensation?

Right now life is weird.


I have a six week break from teaching my Saturday writing classes, during which I scooped up some contracting work, that has stalled out because my project director vanished to the UK and left me no direction for what to do in her absence. lolz.

So all of a sudden, I am staring down a solid seven days of JUST BABY.

This is no new news.
Essentially the first three and a half months of this year were JUST BABY, and I was in much worse shape by April than I am now. I mean, he and I were still very new to one another. We sorta know each other now. We  might even sorta like each other now.

But as time goes on, those "things we do in a pinch because we don't know how else to get the job done and can figure it out later" things are becoming glaring issues, and with nothing to plan or organize, my happy little obsessive brain likes to run them all on a loop from the moment I open my eyes to the moment I shut them.

Having a baby is kind of like having a lovable bomb dropped in the middle of your life. The first 90 days are all just fall out and survival. You're cleaning up things and trying to make your house resemble the house it was before the baby dropped. It's impossible. The explosion continues to happen, and you are running on adrenaline for much longer than adrenaline is meant to last.
You start pitching tents, rigging bedding, people come by to help with basic necessities like eating, bathing, and putting on pants. You want to depend on them, but you can't, and you know you need to figure out how to do this on your own now anyway.

You jerry-rig a lot.
Maybe your kid has colic at five weeks.
Maybe it's so bad that you can't be in the bedroom with the baby where his crib is all set up beautiful and tidy with a moon nightlight that actually follows the phases of the real moon. Your husband has to work forty-five hours a week, and you feel bad about him going in on four hours sleep and five plus hours of screaming infant, so you pack up and move to the small room off of the kitchen which houses the couch, the tv, and the closet with the vacuum in it.
You throw down a small fortress of pillows and you breastfeed until four in the morning when the baby finally stops writhing and howling and you both nod off for a couple of hours.

It's the most uninterrupted sleep you've had since he was born, so you do it again the next night.
The colic continues to be awful. Even on good nights you're getting three, maybe four hours of sleep, piecemeal, and it's not to be depended on. You go to the doctor a bunch, and they can't figure it out. They prescribe antacids, you cut coffee, then dairy, then peanuts out of your diet.

After ten weeks of this horseshit, you cut wheat out of your diet, and the colic is miraculously on the decline.
Two weeks later, you and the baby get six (count them!) six uninterrupted hours of sleep on the floor of the tv room.
You wake up feeling like Snow Fucking White. You're pretty sure if you throw open the windows, birds are going to fly in and help dress you. You do. They don't. You don't care. Coffee tastes sweeter. The baby is in a great mood. You've been converted. You want to do everything the exact same way you did it the night before so you can get another solid six hours of sleep again.

You do this for a few weeks.

Suddenly the baby is five months old.

You've been sleeping on the floor of a tiny room for 18 weeks. You don't know how it got this far.
But you have a routine.
Your back doesn't like it, but you're not in constant pain, and the sleep is so precious.

You decide to try sleep training because it feels weird to still be not in the lovely bedroom with the lovely nightlight.

It goes horribly. Screaming, no sleep, fighting with husband.
You resign yourself to the floor.
Your classes have begun anyway, and you have to be able to function.

The baby bomb clean up continues around you.
You begin to get the house cleaned up from the initial blast. Y
ou figure out cooking and grocery shopping, errands and social activity.
You start reading to the baby.
You start the baby on solid food.
The baby is cutting teeth!
The baby is trying to crawl!
The baby whips his head around when he hears his name!
Then one day you wake up and it's been almost nine months since you had the baby.
He's been outside of you for as long as he was growing inside, which is mind-blowing.
What's more mind-blowing?
You're still sleeping on the floor.
The small protestations your back made a couple of months back are now full fledged caterwauls, and the cushions of the couch are flattened. The baby doesn't know how to sleep by himself, and you and your mate have not shared a bed in so long it's embarrassing to mention.

This is how terrible shit happens.
Every day, a little bit at a time, until you suddenly realize you've done irreversible damage.



I am a full grown woman who has always taken responsibility for her actions.
I am the first to admit when I fuck up, and so here I am, I did it. I threw together something temporary for a good night's sleep and then I didn't want to let go of what sleep I was getting, so I kept it up, then it became habitual, easy, and all of a sudden, it's the norm.

Now I am faced with the horrendous task of sleeptraining a child who doesn't understand why he's being taken away from his mama.

And all I can think is:
I need a new bomb...