Our Personal Stories Part 1: Sarah's Experience with Baby Sleep

If you’ve joined us more recently, or maybe you just didn’t know, there are two of us that make up My Connected Motherhood - Elli & Sarah! We started My Connected Motherhood after both becoming certified Sleep & Well-Being Specialists. Our reasons for getting started on this journey were based on our own personal experiences with infant sleep and we have decided that we want to share these experiences with you! Although our experiences with our first babies were a bit different, we both knew in our gut that there HAD to be a better way to help guide our little ones with sleep that didn’t involve cry it out or separation based sleep training.

While Elli will be sharing her experience with her first son when it comes to sleep next week (stay tuned!), today I (Sarah) am going to be sharing with you my experience. Although I didn’t sleep train beyond a couple of one night “failed attempts”, I still wish I had known more and done things differently. I wish I had been able to trust my instincts without feeling guilt or shame.

We spend a lot of time talking about our approach to sleep being between “cry it out” and “wait it out” and when it came to my first son, I was sitting on the “wait it out” end of the spectrum after not feeling good about trying “cry it out”. So when we say we exist as a form of support for families between “cry it out” and “wait it out”, what we mean is that we never (ever) encourage families to leave their little one to cry in isolation or use formal methods of sleep training, but we also believe that you do not have suffer and wait it out for things to get better. We exist in the middle to help families to make changes that feel good for your family.

So here’s my story:

When our first was born his sleep patterns as a newborn were pretty standard - up every few hours for a feed and then back to sleep. When it came to naps, he napped much better if he was contact napping. He hated the crib day or night and nursing him to sleep was the only real way to get him to sleep easily. I tried SO many times to lay him down “drowsy but awake” but it always ended in picking him up and rocking him until he was fully asleep.

I ended up co-sleeping with him so we could all get the rest we needed. I felt SO much guilt and shame around this. Looking back the only thing I wish I would have done differently around our sleeping arrangement was educating myself on safe sleep.

As he got a bit older I felt so much societal pressure for him to be self-soothing and for him to be able to go down “drowsy but awake”, for him to be in his crib and sleeping through the night. I had no information on what was biologically normal and I was feeling like I was doing something wrong. He wouldn’t nap more than half an hour and I felt responsible for creating “bad sleep habits”. I can vividly remember the day I called my husband at work crying that “it was my fault, I broke him”.

Societal pressure and unrealistic expectations around infant sleep started to steal my joy. I felt like I had to sleep train in order to be a good parent. So I tried it. I laid him in his crib and sat in the rocking chair beside him trying to avoid making eye contact and fighting every urge to just pick him up and snuggle him so tight. It lasted about five minutes before my husband came in and said enough is enough and scooped him right up.

So there I was, knowing that sleep training wasn’t going to work for us, but I still felt pressure, still felt shame and still felt like I was failing him.

I didn’t know there was a way other than sleep training.

I didn’t know that I could make changes without having to feel like I was fighting every instinct in me. So I waited it out.

What could I do if I didn’t sleep train? I waited it out when he started waking more frequently. I waited it out when I felt touched out and didn’t want to nurse every 2 hours even though he was basically a year old. I waited it out for naps to change, never having time to myself.

The part that really gets me when I look back, is that I felt like I had to hide the truth. I felt like I couldn’t tell people that he was waking up to nurse back to sleep multiple times a night (even when it was in the range of biologically normal). I felt like it was so wrong that he contact napped and we loved it. So when people asked “is he sleeping through the night yet?”, I would lie. I would tell anyone who asked that “yes, he was sleeping through the night and always in his crib and he could go to sleep independently”.

So, instead of lying about what my baby was doing and carrying out the opposite of normalizing infant sleep, here is what I wish I had known:

Babies are supposed to wake at night. It is a protective mechanism for them to call for us when they need us to meet their needs. My baby was doing what he was supposed to be doing and I was not doing anything wrong. I wasn’t failing him, I wasn’t letting him down.
Waking is normal beyond the newborn stage. Waking is normal 12 months and beyond.
When his wakes increased, there were things I could have done that didn’t involve sleep training.
When his naps were chronically short, I could have experimented with lengthening wake windows rather than trusting Google to know exactly what my baby needed.
I could have kept nursing him through the night but also not had to have done it every 2 hours at 10 months of age.
I didn’t need to feel shame or hide the fact that he contact napped the majority of his first year, but that I also could have again, without sleep training, worked to make changes to find a happy medium so I could take a break when I needed
That self-soothing was a myth and that I didn’t need to feel like a failure for never being able to get him down “drowsy but awake”.

The biggest thing I wish I had known while navigating sleep with my first is that I did not need to feel shame, I did not need to feel guilty for doing what felt natural to me, and that I should have been proud of showing up for him in a way that felt good to me, rather than trying to cover it up.