Confessions of a Co-Sleeper

When we moved to Northampton, Jack started full-time daycare. In Brooklyn, he attended our beloved Little Mushrooms four mornings a week. But now he’s gone Monday through Friday from 8:30 to 5:00. When he comes home at the day’s end, he’s out on the playground, with a short break for dinner, playing it up with a motley gang of kids until bath. Then he falls, exhausted, into his own bed.

Those last three words count. A lot. Up until July 1, when we left Brooklyn, Jack was sleeping in our bed. When I say ‘our,’ I mean mine and Josh’s. But when Jack said ‘our,’ he meant mine and his. The three of us had become embroiled in a somewhat complicated sleeping dynamic. Toward the end, Jack would awake cheerfully in the morning, then catch sight of Josh and growl, “Go away.” He wanted me all to himself.

I never meant for it to happen. We Ferber-ized Jane when she was about six months old, and though it was a textbook case of three nights of decreasing crying then — poof! — done, it was unpleasant enough that I didn’t want to go through it again with Jack. So when he was just days old, I procured a trio of books by professional nannies (who I figured knew a lot more about getting kids to sleep than pediatricians) and set about making schedules and charts that I posted around the house. Then I began the dogged and clearly insane work of waking him up at pre-determined times and letting him cry it out for great lengths at other times. The moving and profound movie “Away From Her” — all 110 minutes of it — will forever be tainted for me by the plaintive cries of our infant down the hall.

Despite months — and I mean several months — of persistence, I could not get Jack to adhere to any nanny’s schedule. So we upped the ante to Ferber. Over the course of the three nights it’s supposed to take to at least get a toe-hold on regular sleeping habits, Jack’s crying got longer and harder, and it began to mess up his naps. Baby Jack was never much of a crier nor was he high-strung, but he was beginning to slip into a hysterical panic at the mere sight of his crib.

I remember one night when he cried for the better part of every hour from 8:00 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. until Josh, who is no softie, insisted we bring him into our bed. At which point, Jack — and we — promptly fell asleep.

Anyway, I’m able to confirm for you that some kids are just not sleep-trainable. And so we finally limped onto the path of least resistance and began full-on co-sleeping with Jack.

It was wonderful. It was horrible. But, mostly, wonderful. I got two-and-a-half years of that cuddly little body curving into the crook of my arm, pressing into my side. On countless mornings, I witnessed a tiny, cheerful person open his eyes to a new day and grin. Sometimes, I would kiss him and he would smile in his sleep. It was blissed-out contentment for both of us.

Of course, there was a dark side. The restless, wiggly sleep phases where Josh or I would be wakened by a sharp kick to the kidney or a foot in the face. Or the long hours of lying with him until he fell asleep, excruciating when I knew I had to get up and put in a couple more hours of grant-writing. And then there was the eventual jealousy and the increasingly vivid enactment of a classic Oedipal complex. And the constant groping. Uh, I’ve said too much.

Anyway, it had to end. And we knew that the best, and perhaps only, opportunity for significant change was our move to Northampton. Josh and I decided that once we left Brooklyn, Jack would never again sleep between us. And he has not. With all our old patterns and routines out the window, it’s been shockingly easy to accomplish. I simply told him that if he wants to play with the big boys on the playground, then he would have to sleep in his big-boy bed at night. And he made his choice.

But I miss it. I miss him. I feel like we hardly see each other at all. And that’s because he’s not my baby anymore. He’s a separate, sovereign person. He has a life of his own. And a bed of his own, too.