A small note about this post, in it I chronicle what my therapist calls my, "big negative leaps." I am aware of how illogical they are, often while I'm making them. Anxiety is an evil monster that I struggle to keep from controlling my life.
There's something about being a parent that is totally ridiculous. Every time I slightly feel like I'm getting a handle on things, figuring shit out, it all changes. She changes so fast.
In Persephone's 4 month update I talk about how she sleeps awesome at night. Yet now, not as awesome. Last night she screamed for 40-ish minutes before she'd settle down for sleep. Every effort Alex and I made to comfort her made her scream harder. Frantic google searches have lead me to believe that my child's life will be ruined forever if I let her cry or if I don't let her cry, and apparently this is a sign that she will now start waking up every hour all night for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you googling baby sleep rescissions is not good for anxiety. I also spend a good 45 minutes blaming all of this on my inability to breastfeed as I often believe that breastfeeding is magic and can sooth any baby.
I've talked about this before but let me reiterate, I AM TERRIFIED OF NOT SLEEPING. So much so that I DON'T SLEEP. I hope in the future when I'm super internet famous this post will come up in google searches about the definition of irony.
She ended up sleeping for the night, waking up about an hour in and fussing for a few minutes to fall asleep. Unfortunately, the way my anxiety works is that I spent most of the night so scared she'll wake up that I wake up every hour listening for her.
So now we are at today. Persephone and I have struggled with naps for months. Eventually we got to the point where we could put her down and she'd fall asleep and reliably stay asleep for maybe 45 minutes. This morning she slept for 30 minutes, when this happened I could feel my heart start to speed up and my entire body tense. This seemed like a TERRIBLE SIGN. For her next nap she screamed for 10 minutes and then passed out. As we inched our way to the 30 minute mark I got more tense, and then a minor miracle occurred. SHE SLEPT FOR AN HOUR AND 20 MINUTES. That has never never happened before.
I was pretty fucking jazzed to say the least. Then I go to feed her and she will have NONE OF IT. She was waaaay to busy looking at shit and trying to roll around to eat a bottle. Most of it ended up on me when she learned a new trick of blowing air into the bottle. I of course now believe she will not get enough food resulting in needing hourly nighttime feedings.
So now I'm here trying to figure her out again. Will tonight be another screaming match and are we entering days, weeks, months, years of not sleeping? Or is all of this a fluke and she'll go back to being the same? Or will she adjust and I'll adjust and finally stop having panic attacks? Who knows.
I know that the way I feel isn't about her. I know that. It's about me and my brain. But I just wish I could get some kind of handle on all this. That I could know a normal for a little while. I want a normal. I understand that my normal will always be different from before I had a baby and my mom died, but let me have some kind of normal. Please.
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