Where have you been all my life, Dr. McKenna?

(Sleeping a baby by mitikusa on flickr)

Last night I stayed up late swallowing whole Dr. McKenna's Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Labratory. His article (with McDade), Why Babies Should Never Sleep Alone: A Review of the Co-Sleeping Controversy in Relationship to SIDS, Breast Feeding and Bed-Sharing absolutely blew my mind. But before I go into his discourse-exploding article, let me just give you some background.

About three weeks ago, the husband and I decided to night wean. Well, let me re-state that. I think I came home on a Tuesday afternoon and said to myself: "Enough is enough, I want to wear a non-nursing bra again and have a glass of wine with dinner and go out to a bar on my friend's 30th birthday and SLEEP, oh God, please give me sleep, for more than three hours in a row!" My brain hurt, I was having random facial muscle twitches during the day, my eyes were red and burning and I really didn't think I had another night of nursing in me. So, I decided that I was going to night wean that night. My husband was slightly surprised by my announcement when he got home but part of why we have a good marriage is he's learned to accept a certain amount of crazy from me.

So we did it. Two weeks, no nursing at night. Of course, excluding the good night nursie and the good morning nursie, in case you think we are some kind of miracle-workers. It worked. Meaning that my sweet little boy stopped asking for milk during the night after the first two days but he also stopped sleeping. After week one, the husband and I napped like crazy during the weekend, chugged sickening amounts of badly brewed coffee (courtesy of yours truly who still can not figure out how the heck to make a decent pot of auto-drip), saying to ourselves that it was definitely going to settle soon. But no . . . no, it didn't. Why? Because we just don't have that kind of baby--the kind that accepts things because we decide he should, that kind that goes along with well-laid out plans, that kind that sleeps serenely for twelve hours (or five, or sometimes even three) without a peep. So after two weeks the husband and I decided we weren't trying to win an Olympic medal for longest stretch of sleeplessness before losing your freakin mind and the best thing we could do was stop, go back to the old night nursing routine and maybe try again in another six months. The other serious reason we had for stopping was that Munchkin was seriously sleep-deprived and was hitting records lows for total sleep in 24 hours--on the worst day, about 9 and a half. We couldn't, in good conscience, or with coherent sentences, go on.

Now we are back to night nursing on demand and things are settling back into their old routines. Munchkin is still sleeping about an hour less than he should but he is taking good naps, I am back to herbal tea and the husband and I are sleeping enough to even make lofty goals like "I will exercize every now and then" again. So yes, we are doing good.

Except I had this nagging sense of failure, this feeling that we had gotten something wrong. All the sleep books I'd read (non AP) and the friends I was talking to cemented my fear that we were all going the wrong way and there were going to be physical, mental consequences for all these months of non-continuous night-nursing sleep. Then, I found Dr. Mckenna. Please, read this!

The extent to which the science of paediatric[sic] sleep
medicine and especially bedsharing research is held captive
by personal ideologies (biases) and ethnocentrism espe-
cially with regard to the culturally perceived ‘proper’ night-
time relationship between parents and their children can-
not be overstated. For at least 100 years western social and
moral values and the new sleep ‘science’ served as the basis
for defining how and where infants should sleep, rather than
what should have served as a starting point, i.e. empirically-
based anthropological research aimed first and foremost at
elucidating both human infant and maternal biological
needs, in relation to the evolved micro-environments that
traditionally met those needs. (136)

Can you believe how amazingly simple and beautiful those words are? One paragraph and there is a cannon ball through my world view. All those sleep books, all that sleep advice, all those charts and graphs on ages and hours and norms? They are all based on solitary, crib sleep. In other words, nobody has proved that eight or twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep is "normal." Sure, it happens, on average for crib sleeping infants at six months or four or whatever depending on whose numbers you're looking at and what strategies they used to get there... BUT

There's nothing clearly "normal" about solitary infant sleep, if by normal we mean "universally average." As Dr. McKenna points out:

Mother–infant co-sleeping represents the preferred and
obligatory sleeping arrangement for most contemporary
people.(141)

In fact, non-continuous, co-sleeping / bed-sharing sleep with night nursing is not only historic, traditional and natural--such terms as we are used to applying to this and other AP practices--but also modern and yes, normal.

I really should have known better than to take that sleep research at face value. I should have questioned its assumptions and starting points as I have already done with so many other aspects of today's American pregnancy, birthing and parenting. Ironically, maybe if I'd had just one full night of sleep in the past year and a half, I would have!