'Nighttime parenting' by Sears

I already admitted recently that we bought our first baby sleep book. After a year of not sleeping much longer than 3-4 hours (or less) at a time, I felt that maybe we were missing something. Previously I resisted getting a baby sleep book, because I thought (and still think) that worrying about lack of sleep takes even more of your energy than just not sleeping well. I also believe that sleep is not something you can force onto your children, but that the only thing you can do is create an environment in which they feel safe to fall asleep. So we didn’t buy any of the books that say that you have to let your baby cry-it-out, but instead got ‘Nighttime parenting’ from Bill Sears, the father of attachment parenting. Does it make sense to get a book on something that you already do (namely breastfeeding and co-sleeping)? It kind of does, which is why I’m writing about it.

The book starts out explaining what attachment parenting is. Sears doesn’t say that you have to breastfeed, babywear and co-sleep, but he just says that attachment parenting helps you achieve two goals:

• To know your child. 
• To help your child feel right.

And I like the way he talks about ‘nighttime parenting’, suggesting that you shouldn’t put your baby in a separate room from 7PM to 7AM (as some people around us suggest) but that you should also be there for him at night. But what annoyed me a bit was how he made it sound so overly romantic: you lay down with your baby after a nice warm bath, hold him in your arms and nurse him to sleep. Yeah right. In our house, that works only some of the time. Most of the time however, BlueEyes will nurse, almost fall asleep and then turn around and sit up, crawl out of bed and start playing. So then usually Dr. BrownEyes will come in and walk around with BlueEyes until he either sleeps or wants to nurse again (which he will tell by crying). This is far from the romantic picture dat Sears is painting in his book, which is filled with 70s pictures of people cuddling with their sleeping baby in the family bed…

In another chapter Sears talks about the ‘high need baby’, with which he means babies that have a hard time sleeping and/or cry a lot. I’ve been wondering whether BlueEyes would qualify as a high need baby, and to be honest: I have no idea. I don’t really have a lot of firsthand experience with other babies (I had never even changed a diaper before BlueEyes was born!), so I can’t say how he compares to other children (well except for all the stories about children who sleep through the night at 6 weeks old…). But the solution for a high need baby is basically even more co-sleeping, breastfeeding and babywearing than for a regular baby.

So was this book useful? You might be surprised, but yes it was! Because now I know that we’re not just doing something, but that it’s sort of normal to still nurse a 1 year old to sleep and to walk around the room with him when he wakes up at night in order for him to fall asleep again. And that it’s just a matter of waiting until he will sleep better.

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain – a review

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As I said before, I like reading books about addiction, so when I read on twitter about this new book by Marc Lewis, a recovered addict turned neuroscientist, I immediately ordered it.

The book is Lewis’ biography that starts when he is sent to a boarding school where he has his first encounter with alcohol. As with all the other drugs that follow, he describes vividly how he feels upon taking those first sips and then gulps of alcohol. He enjoys that it makes him feel different and that for a while it takes away the depressed feelings he has because of not fitting in well in school. I quickly got carried away by the story and how well it is written. But then he says:”The cerebral cortex is the most complex structure on earth”, and that type of neuroscience-arrogance almost made me put down the book. And he continues to talk about the brain, and how alcohol, and all the subsequent drugs he takes modify brain chemistry and hijack the neural circuits used for learning and memory, thereby causing addiction. At first all this neuroscience talk kind of put me off, mostly because I felt that it interrupted the story he was telling, but also because I felt that Lewis sometimes oversimplified things or made too harsh statements just for the sake of telling a nice story. However, I think for the average lay-person it is an interesting mix of the story of Lewis’ life and the biology behind what drugs do to the brain and more importantly, that addiction is a brain-disease caused by the repeated taking of drugs, and not ‘just’ a couple of bad choices in life.

The story of his life continues to be very interesting and well written. He moves to California and continues to experiment with how he can modify and improve his mood. He first experiments with LSD: “The room swells and changes in shape and size. It becomes more than a room: an enormous space broken down into subspaces with gripping dramas unfold with each glance, each word spoken or withheld, each facial movement. The skin of those faces decomposes into exotic fabrics made of pores, features, facial hair that seems to grow while I stare, transfixed, horrified. I don’t need this much detail. I am overwhelmed by the acceleration itself.”

And later he takes other hallucinogens and eventually starts to use heroin. Using opioids is what truly gets him addicted, with horrible withdrawal when he quits for a while. It is also what drives him to start to break into doctor’s offices and go down a road of caring less and less about the world around him and more about getting high. I don’t want to spoil the end of the book, but the fact that Lewis is now a neuroscientist already tells that in the end he managed to overcome his addiction and change his lifestyle.

Books about addiction

I think I was 13 or 14 when I first read Wir Kinder from Bahnhof Zoo from Christiane F. It’s a true story about a German girl in the seventies who starts to experiment with marihuana, moves on to try different pills and by the time she is 14 she is a heroin-addict and a prostitute behind the train station (Bahnhof Zoo) in Berlin. I found it fascinating that someone who was my age at the time had such a different life, and I was most intrigued by the fact that drugs could make you do things that I thought no one would ever have to do. After this book I read a couple other books about addicts and addiction of which I cannot find the English versions online anywhere. And for mandatory English reading in high school I read Trainspotting from Irvine Welsh. Both of these books are films too, if you don’t like reading.

I love reading about drug addiction, because I find it fascinating how drugs can change someone’s sense of what is important in life. The main reason though is that I’m curious what it feels like to take drugs but at the same time I am reluctant to try it for myself (okay I have tried a few things myself, but that is nothing compared to the people in these books). So I love the detailed descriptions of what it feels like to shoot up heroin so that I never have to try that myself. I live my junkie-life vicariously through these books.

  

Currently, I have almost finished reading Memoirs of an Addicted Brain by Marc Lewis, who is a neuroscientist himself. I’ll soon tell you what I thinkabout it!

On eReaders

I still read old fashioned books, and it sometimes seems that I’m one of the few people left on this planet who don’t own an eReader of some kind. (It seems like Word doesn’t know what an eReader is yet. It wants me to change it into ‘eraser’.) Until two years ago I said that I would never get a smart phone because I didn’t want to check my email everywhere I went, but since I then succumbed to my iPhone that has been attached to me from the day I got it, I’m not going to say that I will never buy an eReader.

But I like regular books; because you can have the pages flip through your hands, and see how far you are towards the end. I like how people have thought about the cover, the font and what kind of paper it was printed on. I like to look at my bookcase and see what books I have read. I especially like my collection of Lonely Planets that show where I have been and that sometimes even have beach sand or tickets and receipts falling out of them when you open them. Along that line; I like to see what kinds of books people have in their bookcases when I visit them. I think that when you only have ebooks, you should at least get a projector and project a bookcase with all the ebooks that you have on your eReader on the wall for people to see when they come to your house. Also, I like browsing through second hand book stores (or I should say Dr. BrownEyes loves browsing through second hand book stores and I’ve come to like it over the years). How is that going to work when everyone only reads ebooks on their eReader? And I like to see what people read on the train; I like to know whether they read a book that I really like or if they read some crappy news paper, and when they have an eReader I cannot see that (similar to the book case-projector, people should announce what they are reading on the back of their eReader I think).

But ask me again in two years and I’ll probably own an eReader too…

Feeling better

When I was pregnant, I would sometimes call my mom and wine a little about how sick I felt, how tired I was and how much I was panicking about how things would be with a baby. My mom would usually respond by asking how often I had thrown up, or how long I had slept, and when I would say that I hadn’t really thrown up yet, but I felt really sick all day, she would tell me that there were tons of other people that felt a lot worse than me (usually with anecdotes of people she knew that had experienced something a lot worse). This did not usually make me feel better.

However, I noticed that I do the same thing myself. Recently I read “Our babies, ourselves” from Meredith Small. It’s a really good book that talks about how your cultural background shapes the way you parent, and that a lot of things that we find perfectly normal (like have a baby cry a little, or have a baby sleep by herself), is found absurd in other cultures. In this book I read about the Ache, a group of hunter-gatherers in Paraguay. The Ache mothers will for the first year of their babies’ lives have them sleep in their laps, hunched over to protect their babies from danger. Not only during the day, but also during the entire night. So that means that that year, they only sleep sitting up with a baby in their laps . Often when I’m awake at night because 7 month old BlueEyes is awake or wants to nurse I think about those women, who completely sacrifice themselves for their baby. To me, that has been one of the hardest parts of being a mother: the fact that often you have to ignore your own needs, or at least have your babies’ needs come first. But whenever I feel sorry for myself that instead of hanging on the couch I am nursing a baby to sleep, I think about those women and imagine them sitting on a hard floor with baby in their lap the whole night and I feel better.