How I Came to be Attached: One of Many, Many Chapters

Since starting this blog, I've been trying to write this story of how we came to be attached, what it has meant for us, cost us and how deeply it has shaped us as a family. The more I have tried to write it, the more impossible it seems to write. First, because I don't want to be judgmental or seem like I think I have all the answers. I really, truly, don't. Parenting is a bit like faith--there is the stuff you know to be true without any reservations, the stuff you choose to believe in even though you can't prove it, and then also some other stuff in a corner that you don't quite know where to put or how to face and so it just sits there in your living room, unaccounted for.

The other reason I think I'm having trouble getting this down coherently is that my views on parenting are big and circular with tendrils curling off into all these other bits of life and identity and ethics. I don't know where to start because it is all mixed together, in the same story, of me, and my out-of-sorts-edness with the middle class American world I live in.

So please don't ask me to start at the beginning. I'll just start with where I am, right now, on my couch in my pyjamas on a Saturday afternoon while Chad and Munch-Munch take much-needed naps, and church bells ringing into the fog outside.

Attachment Parenting started out as something I considered doing a little bit of and now it is everywhere in my house and no longer really a choice. AP has become necessary. We own three carriers and one stroller we rarely use. Why? Because MM refuses to be in there for more than a few minutes, just like he 's refused the swing, the crib, the playpen, and even the exersaucer. He refuses babysitters, he refuses to sleep in a carseat, he refuses long drives, and basically all other scenarios that involve him being alone or seperated from us for long periods of time (translation: more than 15 minutes). Our parenting style has taught MM beyond any shadow of a doubt that he is one of us. He has a voice and an opinion in our family.

Of course, when I say I have no choice in the matter what I really mean is that we've already made up our minds, absolutely, on a couple of things and now there's no going back. We've decided, for example, that we're not going to cry it out. I can't remember how we decided this. I think it was more of a cumulative effect--like after soldiers die in a war you have to make sure that it meant something, that it wasn't for nothing. That's how we feel about the difficult nights of missed sleep that we've already been through. If we give up now, those sacrifices wouldn't count. We've also decided we're going to move slowly and at his pace. This doesn't mean that we don't try to keep things moving--like I've tried slipping out of the bed while he was asleep at night to see if he would notice, to find out whether or not he still really needed to co-sleep. If our plan to move forward doesn't work, we pause and reevaluate.

Once you make those two decisions, you realize that everything is different and you're all alone. Nobody understands why you can't attend a good friend's bbq two hours away. Nobody understands what you can't go out to dinner in the evening after MM is asleep. Nobody understands why you and your baby are both in pieces because he was crying in the nursery and nobody came to get you.

All of this is very hard. I mean, you're already doing something incredibly difficult, almost impossible, that requires every last ounce of your resources and all you want is for someone to give you a big hug and a warm cup of tea and tell you it's going to be all right, you're all going to make it. But you never get that. Instead you get weird questions about your sex life, dismissive comments about being "that type of woman," and a whole lot of anger from people who are offended that you're not crying it out. If it is this hard being an attachment momma in San Francisco, the No. 9 attachment city in the US, I can only imagine how the rest of you are holding up out there. Courage, mommas! You really can do this.