Currently Reading
- Currently reading: Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber, and
Cuddly Crochet Plushies by Glory Shofowora - Currently eating: s’mores tart
- Currently crocheting: a bunny 🐰
Last week I did one of my favorite pastimes: feeling bad about feeling bad. I felt like I was a bad mother, a bad scholar, a bad wife, a bad writer, a bad crocheter. You name it and I will feel bad about it! If you can’t tell by my ‘currently reading list' I’ve been looking to books on how to manage my feeling bad. This might be my third time checking out Burnout on my Libby¹ app, but I’ve been slowly making my way through it. It’s about the stress cycle, how to manage stress while being a woman in a patriarchal society. I like that it’s not about removing the stress but instead how to manage it better so that you feel less burned out. There is always going to be stress. But it would be nice to feel a little less bad about it. To be a woman, let alone a women of color, is to be stressed in our society. And while I can’t rid myself of life’s stressors, I can manage how I respond to them. I learned that you need to complete the stress cycle. A few ways to do that are:
1. Swim or other exercise
2. Deep breathing (inhale for 5, hold for 5 and exhale for 5)
3. Positive social interaction
4. Laughter (like full belly laughs)
5. Affection
6. Big ol' cry
7. Creative expression
I decided to pour myself into creative expression. I crocheted stuffed animals for my boys, made buttons from avocado pits, finished sewing a handmade book, dried rose hips for tea, and picked flowers from our garden to make bouquets. None of these things I did particularly well. It didn’t matter if they were prefect. It mattered that I made something. In making something badly, or mediocre-ly , I can’t feel bad, because there is no expectation for me to be good at crocheting.
We had a new baby in December. He was a “good sleeper”² but has now decided he wants to wake up every hour and be fed throughout the night. Like our first, we were hitting our limit with sleep deprivation. After reading [yet another] judgey post on one of the mommy message boards³ about the cruelty of cry it out, I decided to go to the source and actually read the book that the Ferber method is based on. You know what? It’s not as cruel as it’s been made out to be by the “never let you kid cry” enthusiasts or as cut and dry as many of the sleep training bloggers let on. Of course much of the sleep training theory becomes distilled, and will of course lose details( and nuance), as it makes its way through the simulacra-machine that we call the internet. But Ferber’s book offers quite an in depth background on the science of sleep and how to go about helping your child to sleep better.
We decided to take the plunge into sleep training once more.⁴ We followed Ferber’s progressive waiting method, and while there were some bouts of crying, each night they were less intense and for shorter periods. By night five we could put the baby down while still awake. Maybe he’d make a small protest-cry, but he would settle down to sleep until after 1 am for his first overnight feeding.
I remember reading one of the critiques about CIO/Ferber being that a baby doesn’t learn to soothe themselves when they stop crying, they will just stop crying because no one will come. But that’s not what happened. F will still cry to let us know he’s hungry in the middle of the night. During the day he will still cry when he’s wet, hungry, tired, bored, or just wants a cuddle. He knows that we’ll come if he needs us. But he also has learned he can go to sleep on his own as well. We all need the sleep!
This summer I decided to [re]learn crochet. My mother first taught me when I was a girl and I made mostly pot holders with rough, ugly yarn. So unsurprisingly, I gave it up. Lately, I’ve been thinking that I need something to do with my hands since I have a skin picking disorder.⁵ Trying to just stop has never worked. Instead I tried replacing one (negative) activity with another (more positive) activity. While I haven’t totally stopped picking, I have had fun crocheting different projects in my spare time (which amounts to long car drives and watching TV at the end of the night). The stress is still there but at least I can yarn-over and pull thorough the stress!
Thanks for reading!
More next time,
~Jennifer
¹Libby is an app where you can read [free] ebooks from your local library. It’s fantastic!
²What even is a good sleeper? It could probably be because he was a newborn and newborns just sleep most of the time.
³It was a Facebook group post but this is how I refer to all parent related social media.
⁴Our first was a terrible sleeper. Even as a newborn he didn’t sleep unless constantly held.
⁵Dermatillomania is a “skin picking disorder or excoriation disorder, is a mental health condition where you compulsively pick at your skin.”
