By Hayley Bukhamsin
This is one of my first ever blog posts. It’s 3 years old, which feels like a lifetime ago now. It’s a post that I hold very close to my heart, as it’s about a pretty monumental experience I had when my eldest daughter was still little. The fallout from that experience is, essentially, The Gentle Mama.
There are parts of this post that I’d write completely differently now. Now that I have 3 more years of intense, highly research-fuelled parenting experience. But I wanted to keep it in it’s original form, so that you can see the raw reality of where I was, before I became passionate about infant sleep; before I certified as an Infant Sleep Educator; before I even knew that a truly gentle sleep support option existed; before I found my purpose.
My sister-in-law has just given birth to a gorgeous little girl, her first, and asked me last weekend what has been the hardest challenge I’ve had to deal with as a parent.
A whole host of memories flashed before my eyes: cluster feeding (most memorably in a cramped car with my teenage sisters-in-law beside me, probably vowing never to have children), dealing with tantrums, regaining balance as a couple in the face of becoming parents, pushing back against non-gentle parenting advice, nappy (diaper) explosions in public (I still cringe at the thought of brunch at the Ritz, trying to casually walk to the bathroom with baby poop all over my clothes and hers, while Mr Bu surreptitiously tried to remove the evidence from the tablecloth).
But the biggest lesson I’ve learned, the one that stands out above all other challenges, is my brush with sleep training.
The 8-month sleep regression was a tough one for us, with Baby Bu regularly getting confused in the middle of the night and wanting to play for hours on end. I remember sitting on the floor of her room at 1 in the morning, playing with her by the light of the torch on my phone and sobbing quietly to myself with frustration and exhaustion.
The next day, we did some digging, found a ‘gentle’ sleep consultant and booked her to start ASAP. I was exhausted, and relieved. She promised that although there may be a little crying, it would all be fully ’emotionally supported’ and gentle. It sounded miraculous – by the end she would apparently be put down in her cot, fall asleep on her own, and stay asleep all night. A far departure from the battle to feed to sleep followed by 3-5 wake-ups that we were struggling with at the time.
After days of recording a sleep/food/activity diary, we got started. It began gently, with Mr Bu asked to take over at bedtimes as Baby Bu ‘needed to break the association between sleep and breastfeeding’. I accepted everything she was saying – she was the expert. Baby Bu protested for a few seconds on these nights, but slept quickly (probably just as exhausted as I was).
But then things changed. The sleep consultant only supplied 1-2 days of guidance at a time.
Alarm bells should have rung at this point, but did I mention I was exhausted? I was too tired to think logically about it.
The next stage was to get her to fall asleep in her own cot rather than our arms. It started with putting her in the cot, lifting her out when she cried and repeating the process until she fell asleep. Night one took my hubby 30 minutes and Baby Bu wasn’t particularly impressed. The next night we were told she could only be lifted out three times and after that, just patted and reassured verbally. I could suddenly see where this was going. It was the gradual withdrawal technique. She hadn’t explained what technique she would use in advance (it was ‘client dependent’), and we were already over a week in when I realised this.
