How I Came to be Attached: Ch. 2

So how did I get here? As with most things, change didn't start with a bang and a flash of light. That would have been easier in some ways, but how many of us have that story? I started reconsidering the way I'd always planned to raise my baby--the way I'd spent my afternoons in high school and college raising other people's babies--when there was something tiny, smaller than a lentil growing inside of me. People are always saying how you shouldn't raise a baby by a book but I needed books, direction, some kind of plan. For those of you who have been pregnant and taken stock of your life in that particular way, you already know what I'm talking about. You go through a process of dreaming, fantasizing about you and your baby in that rocking chair then you watch "Bringing Home Baby" and you freak out.

Just kidding (although that show is a bit of horror movie packaged in a chocolate box).

The more I read, the more I questioned what I'd seen and what already seemed "obvious"--nurseries, bottles and cribs. I think the cracks really started to appear when I read Happiest Baby on the Block and Dr. Karp's idea that newborn babies are happiest in scenarios that feel like the womb. They want to be tightly held together, they want skin, lots of skin, they want the smells and sounds of mommy talking, walking around the apartment, her heart beating close to their cheek as they nurse. All of this made sense to me. Why wouldn't babies feel safest in an environment that mimicked their old home? Why wouldn't they need a gradual transition?

After that, I suppose it was just a slippery slope into attachment parenting land. Once you decide that you're going to try and see things from a munchkin's perspective, the obvious falls apart. Here's what I used to believe and preach all over town:

• Babies cry. It's just what they do.
• You have to teach your child to self-soothe--it's an essential, fundamental skill that is best learned young.
• Teaching your child to sleep on their own is a gift they will thank you for for the rest of their lives.
  

While my baby grew from the size of a lentil to a chickpea to a fuzzy peach I read and I read. My sister directed me to the Sears family library and the cracks grew into gaps that couldn't be glued shut. I questioned whether babies slept in cribs instead of arms because it was safer or because the middle class had expanded and so had people's houses. I questioned whether crying was really the same as self-soothing. I questioned why it was so important to everyone to wean exactly at one year--earlier was failing and later was just plain weird. More than anything, I wanted to know how all these parenting norms had become so rigid, so certain, so singular. Where was cultural difference? Where was personality? Where was regional variance?

Of course, these differences existed but the norms, the "how to" books and the parenting magazines—in fact, public space--largely did not reflect it. You couldn't say in a restaurant that you were planning to breastfeed between two and three years. You couldn't describe a nursery without a crib. You couldn't find a bed rail for your family bed that didn’t contain strong words about the ills of infant co-sleeping (although explain to me why these same bed rails were offered for queen and king size beds?) In other words, the options out there were not really presented as options: there was the right way--the obvious way--and then things only espoused by the unsound, the obsessive, the unenlightened mother.

Except of course for Sears and Pantley and the other warm attachment voices. Sears reminded me that attachment style parenting is not some new, outrageous invention but rather a philosophy based on the oldest of days and most traditional of mommas; a time before womb-noises mps3's and vibrating bassinets. It enlightened me about global practices—most of which include some kind of baby-wearing and tight sleeping arrangements. It helped me see that attachment parenting is what most mommas do if someone isn't telling them not to. There is nothing instinctual about cribs and bottles--they are learned behaviors. Rocking, nursing, responding to cries--these are our instincts.