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Dad on a Lark

A couple of entries ago, I wrote about how having Larkin affected our sex life. But there's something far more important to new parents than sleeping together: sleeping at all. I mean the crazed struggle, in the first year of your child's life, to get your six hours' worth, or whatever baseline amount you need to stay sane.

What sleeplessness does to the fabric of marital cooperation is not pretty. Sooner or later every slumber-challenged couple gets there — those moments when the buffer of daily consideration that keeps a marriage functioning has eroded away entirely, and the two of you are left face-to-face with your brute and insistent demands. I need this. You owe me that. It's my turn. Life gets political, and the politics can be rough.

For us, the rough patch began when Larkin was eight months old. We had kept her in the bassinette longer than we'd planned, and now it was time to use the nice new crib in her nice new sky-blue room.

Except that she didn't want the nice new anything. Every night, around 2 a.m., she'd wake up and cry, and nothing except being in our bed would calm her. We considered letting her cry it out in her crib. But a strict Ferber approach seemed too heartbreaking, both for Larkin and for us. What to do?

New parents can drive themselves crazy with this, and Molly and I tried to get back to basics. What was it we wanted for Larkin? Well...we wanted her to be healthy and happy. To have a foundation both for intimacy and for independence. We wanted a lot of long-term things. But more than that, we wanted sleep, and we wanted it tonight. Might caving in make it easier for Larkin to manipulate us and always get her way? Were we embracing the family-bed setup that in theory we opposed? Maybe... but who cared? When sleep goes out the window, so does philosophy. Just give me my six hours!

One night Larkin woke at 2 a.m. and wouldn't stop crying. Even after we brought her in to our bed, she stayed wide awake, whining and thrashing about. We lay there, festering with self-pity.

"I need to sleep," Molly said. "I can't live my life like this."

"You want to go downstairs?" I asked. Downstairs is the guest room.

"No. Then she'll really scream bloody murder."

2 a.m. became 2:30 and then 3; Larkin subsided, then woke again and began crying furiously — arching her back, spastic with unhappiness. I thought about what tomorrow would be like on three hours of sleep.

"I'm going downstairs," I said. "Unless you want to."

"No," Molly sighed. "Go."

And so I did, toting my pillow and closing every door behind me. In the guest room I fell into two hours of blissful, greedy sleep. At 5:30 I woke and went upstairs to find Larkin awake, and Molly bleary-eyed and baleful. Let me take over, I said. I knew she was angry, but I also knew I had gotten my sleep. And that in turn made it possible for me to be generous; my greedy two hours made me human again. All parents of newborns and infants learn this paradox, that in order to be generous and help one another, you sometimes have to be selfish first.

But the sleep dilemma continued, and by Christmastime, Molly had had enough. She immersed herself in a book, Good Night, Sleep Tight, by Kim West, aka The Sleep Lady. The Sleep Lady takes a two-front approach to untying the tight knot of your child's sleep. By day, you set a regular schedule of morning and afternoon naps. At night, you handle her wake-and-wail outbursts with gentle firmness. Keep a pacifier nearby, but let her put it in her mouth herself. Rub her back to reassure her, but do not pick her up. Step by step, the Sleep Lady instructs, you take yourself out of the picture. Eventually, a chair in the hall outside your child's door lets you talk to her without going in.

Molly implemented the Sleep Lady's program to the tiniest detail, with the superstitious exactitude of the desperate. She kept a "Teaching Larkin to Sleep Log." It has entries like "10:10 to crib, half hour of crying, screaming, binky ejection, protest poop." And sure enough, for the first two weeks of the new regimen, Larkin was in full protest mode. She'd shriek in outrage as Molly sat in the hallway chair, patiently reiterating, I'm here, honey, it's all right, go back to sleep, you're OK. Lenient Dad, it must be confessed, was not always helpful. One night at 4 a.m. I was awakened by Larkin's howl of despair. It sounded so anguished. Finally I went out into the hall. "Do you really think this is worth it?" I asked Molly.

The question got the icy stare it deserved. "This is going to work," she insisted, "if you'll let it."

And lo and behold, it did. Gradually, the naps caught on, Larkin's nighttime outbursts grew less frequent and loud, until finally, miraculously, they melted away entirely. As new parents we now joined the ranks of the blessed, those who can say, "She sleeps the whole night through."

What we couldn't accomplish was getting her to wake up a little bit later in the morning. Every day at 5:10 a.m., like clockwork, she'd sit up in her crib and start vociferating — a full hour before we had to start our day. We wanted that hour. I wanted it especially. Getting up at 5 was forcing me to go to bed early, and I hated it. Reading, watching a movie or the late news, it was a way of life I had hoped might survive parenthood. But nothing we tried with Larkin worked. If we pushed back her bedtime, she was simply miserable — and still woke at 5:10 anyway. I was caught between the rock of Larkin's seemingly inalterable circadian rhythm and my own desire to go to bed at a civilized (i.e., late) hour.

And then help came from unexpected quarters. In February I read a newspaper story about Daylight Savings Time being expanded this year, and how much it would save America in diminished energy costs.

"Do you know what this means?" I asked Molly.

"What, we can afford to turn the heat up past 65?"

No, I said, even better. "In two weeks, 5:10 a.m. will become 6:10 a.m."

Her eyes went wide.

And so an act of Congress resolved the last glitch in our sleep schedule, saving me from the dreaded 9:45 bedtime. Now the nation has 100,000 more barrels of oil a day — and the Coopers have one extra hour of shut-eye.

At least until November, that is, when the clocks turn back again. But we'll deal with that when it comes. March to November, after all, is practically a literal lifetime in the life of a one-year-old, and a lot can change. For now it's good night, Lark, sweet dreams. See you in the morning.