No Boundaries

When my oldest daughter Lucy was born in 1998, it took me one week to realize that this young lass was never going to sleep according to my schedule. Daytime–always asleep. Nightime–always awake. Unless I planned on becoming nocturnal, I was just going to have to figure out a way to cope. Enter the family bed. And when Lucy was just 3, and Ben was just born, people said, “what are you going to do now?”. Ben had the same idea of sleep hours as Lucy, but this time, Lucy took matters into her own hands. She declared “he’s too loud!” and went off to sleep in her own room and in her own bed, for the first time, without any fuss.

Some sibling snuggling in Ben's hospital bed, 2007

Without planning to, we were following what “attachment parenting” disciples had been preaching for years. Time magazine’s May 10 cover story on attachment parenting by Kate Pickert has been all the rage–and has caused rage–for the last week. Kara Baskin has summed up why–because it seems that we parents are more focused on what parenting means for us, and are not thinking about the bigger picture for our children.

But attachment parenting behaviors may be viewed in a totally different light for parents of children with medical complications. Prior to his tracheostomy, Ben used to sleep with a pulse oximeter sensor wrapped around his toe, and this machine’s screeching alarms would notify us when his oxygen levels went below 89%–which meant it went off several times an hour. In order to stop this racket from waking the whole house, I would often sleep in his bed, so that I could quickly shut off the alarm and save Lucy and Sherin from the horror. When Ben would wake up in the middle of the night in terror because he didn’t remember going to sleep with the threatening CPAP mask on his face, being closer to him helped me soothe him faster. And now, I still awake once or twice each night and traipse to his room–every night–to wipe away the goop he coughs up from his trach, turn him from his favorite right side that I’m afraid will become tender with sores, and when he is sick, suction him. I often think, I might be getting more sleep if I was sleeping in his bed.

We can’t be in every parent’s shoes. Co-sleeping, extended breast-feeding, and other attachment parenting behaviors may be the ways that some parents– who have lost a child to miscarriage, or who are coping with a child’s life-threatening illness, or who work all day and feel like they are missing out on so much–cope with life’s circumstances. I don’t know many parents of 10 year old boys who curl up in their son’s bed, but if you meet one, please know that their behavior is probably based on circumstances that not every person can understand. Instead of trying to understand, we should just accept.