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Sparkle (1)
As I was researching last week's post on parenting trends of the past ten years, I realized why my daughter's babyhood was so difficult for me.
Left to my own devices, I'm a pleaser and a perfectionist -- very, very Type A. As a kid, I used to wake up in the middle of the night to clean my room. Whenever someone presented a task, I wanted to do it immediately and perfectly. I am the evil anti-procrastinator. I do procrastinators' stuff for them. I don't do it to be annoying -- this is a problem for me. I have anxiety issues.
What does it feel like to have extreme anxiety? During my adult life before parenthood, I worried about my body image, what my co-workers thought of me, my relationship, my performance in grad school. After my daughter was born, my anxiety amped from worrying the cat would escape from the house while the carpet cleaner came to worrying that my baby girl would stop breathing while I was sleeping. I was sure she would get a horrible infection due to my negligence and lose a limb, that she would develop a terminal illness, that I would forget she was in the car and let her suffocate and die on a hot day while I shopped for groceries. On our first night home from the hospital, I sat in my bed and panicked about what I'd done, creating this person whose pain could destroy me as a human being. I could almost feel the cortizone and adrenaline downloading into my veins and vibrating through my body. That is what extreme anxiety feels like: It feels like you will be imminently devoured by your own thoughts.
After that night, I read magazines and parenting books and listened to comments and advice from friends, family and old ladies on the street who pointed out to their companions that my daughter needed shoes. It was 2004, the heyday of Baby Einstein and competitive parenting, of organic, homemade baby food and tummy time and choices about vaccination schedules and thimeserol that sent my tightly-wound soul reeling with my belief that one wrong decision on my part would impair or perhaps even kill my baby.
And then, at 18 months, my beautiful daughter stopped sleeping for more than two hours at a time. Adding to my already steady anxiety? Sleep deprivation! And not the hormonally enhanced, excited, aided-by-Grandma newborn sleep deprivation, but the why-the-hell-haven't-you-Ferberized-your-kid-why-my-Johnny-slept-through-the-night-from-the-time-he-was-six-weeks-old, no-sympathy-and-maybe-a-little-blame sleep deprivation. What before had finally become a manageable amount of anxiety snowballed into daily three-hour crying jags and escape fantasies coupled with crippling guilt over leaving my daughter at daycare so I could attempt to focus my half-closed eyes on work. When I dropped my girl off in the morning, she'd wail and throw herself toward the door, screaming, "No, Mommy! Don't leave me!" I'd squat under the window in the door so she couldn't see me and cry until I heard her teachers picking her up and whispering softly in her ear, leading her over to the little table to have a drink of water and maybe some pancake and help Miss Wendy do a puzzle, can you please? By the time I got to work and called daycare, my daughter was fine and enjoying her day, and I was an addled wreck dragging herself to the ladies room every ten minutes to cry off her make-up in silence.
The worst part? In the height of my anxiety, I didn't trust my own instincts at all. I felt crazy most of the time, so how could I possibly know how to solve my parenting problems? I constantly sought the advice of others, read more parenting books -- especially sleep books -- watched the great new show Supernanny, read parenting magazines and parenting Web sites. I read advice that said if I just let my daughter cry for ten minutes, she'd sleep well for the rest of her life. I read articles that said too much baby fat would lead to a lifetime of obesity. (My girl was an off-the-charts large baby and is a 50th percentile five-year-old.) I read about the mercury in the tuna fish and the lead in the toys and worried about gas leaks and refined sugar and screen time all while letting my daughter eat packaged toddler snacks and watch more Baby Einstein while I sat on the couch trying to calm myself down and not go through once more in my head
