Experts vs Inner Rhythms

emerging from our latest sleep regression

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Lately it’s not fully dark in our house until close to 10 pm…and our toddler is on a similarly wild schedule. It started the week before the summer solstice. All of a sudden our two year old would not go to sleep until 10:00 pm. Then it was 11:00 pm, then midnight.

It was likely a combination of some sort of developmental leap and the long body of sunlight that simply wouldn’t leave our house until the deep of the evening. But the brutality of not having a single moment to oneself (let alone going to bed at your own bedtime) began to wear on me, culminating in a night-long fever in which I sweat through all the bed clothes and woke up to the power blowing out like a gunshot, all the lights in the vicinity blinking out in darkness.

It felt like the power-surge of too much wakefulness, busyness and sunlight finally blew all the circuits, the high-beam headlights of the last few weeks giving way to the tiny twinkles of fireflies in the dark cove surrounding our home.

Amazingly, that same night, my daughter finally went to bed at a normal hour and, blessedly, slept through the night.

The spell seems to have finally been broken…

but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed. 

It’s hard enough feeling the pressure of no sleep, no sleep, no sleep. But then there’s the other pressure…

The pressure of—“a two year old should be going to bed by 8 pm” or “at her age she still needs a nap” (even when naps lead to exorbitantly late bedtimes) or “if a child can’t put themselves to sleep, there’s a problem.”

We’ve been down this road before. Sleep was so harrowing the first six months of my daughter’s life we worked with several different sleep consultants. She screamed for what felt like hours every time she fell asleep. Even if she was being bounced, even if she was nursing, even when it was pitch dark with the sound machine on and mama humming a song. The last sleep consultant we talked to reassured us that this was just her way. We weren’t doing anything wrong, and it wasn’t going to change. It was just time to help her get to sleep without the circus that was draining us all.

So we sleep trained in two minute increments. It ripped my soul in half sometimes, and I never could leave her for long, but she got to the point where she could sleep without being bounced on the ball (a feat that had literally started to tear my body apart).

She’d do well for a while, and then she’d backslide. So we’d called the consultant again. But the advice was always the same. Kids needs consistency. They need routines. They need structure.

So we’d try and try and try again.  We’d nail it for a few weeks, then something would shift. She’d get sick or family would be visiting, or the seasons themselves would simply change. We’d force ourselves into consistency, but life would refuse to meet us.

And so, at some point, we gave up.

Not that we don’t still try for a routine. We do. But we gave up trying to be perfect.

Experts say that there is an unalienable rhythm to things. Children should go to bed by themselves by 8 pm and wake up at 7 am. Eat, nap, eat, repeat.

But then there’s the reality that some times of the year we have sunlight clear until 10 pm. Sometimes naps just don’t make sense. Sometimes children need to be held.

We try keep to some prescribed rhythm, but meanwhile the world has an entirely other cadence.

There’s the fireflies that rise from the forest floor starting at dusk. And afternoon showers that bring refreshment just when you thought you might drift off. And blue moonlight pouring like milk through the skylight.

And if we linger long enough in this unchartable twilight, we’ll see the gap between this idea of an outer “expert” that we so enshrine in our culture— and the simple, complicated, exquisite system of simply trusting the inner tides.

I often think about how we were designed.

Not how we’re living now, but how we, as human beings, were designed to live.

When I needed to bounce my daughter to sleep three times a day it felt arduous, excessive— especially when I saw other mamas have their babies just fall asleep next to them on blankets.

But then I thought about it… wouldn’t all babies have evolved to feel safest in motion? Strapped to their caretakers back as they harvested seaweed from the shore or acorns from the forest floor? Wouldn’t this just have been how we were designed to fall into slumber? Not necessarily at a certain time or hour, but in the moment when we were tired and our mother was moving and we felt safe enough to drift off?

So maybe—the thought would always bring me back to— my child wasn’t such an outlier. Maybe there wasn’t actually a problem. Maybe there isn’t anything to “fix” at all.

Similarly, when we were in the middle of sleep training with our daughter, I often asked myself—did our ancestors keep their children to strict sleeping schedules? Did they watch the sun move religiously through the sky and stop everything they were doing to make sure their child napped at the prescribed time? Did they forfeit their entire evening to try and try and try again to get their children to go to sleep by themselves?

Somehow, I highly doubt it.

Living close to the earth and the rhythms of our bodies, we likely just trusted our children to sleep when they needed to—strapped to our backs, out harvesting roots, sidled next to us by the fire while we mended a hole in our shirt.

We trusted our children. We trusted the world. We trusted that the peak of sunlight on the longest days means the rhythm changes. We trust that times of storms lead to new plateaus of calm. We trusted that balance returns.

As our family finally gets to the other side of this particular sleep “progression,” and as the light officially beings to wane on the other side of the solstice, but still gathers in heat on the western side of our house till late in the evening, I ask myself—

When did we stop trusting the earth?

When did we stop trusting ourselves?

When did we stop trusting our children?

I don’t know the answer, but I struggle with it often.

I have trouble trusting the process. Knowing that everything is a phase. That the hardship will end. That change is the only constant.

I have trouble trusting that I’m doing enough.

That I’m giving my daughter what she needs to thrive, even when I know, on most days, that there is nothing more I can give.

I have trouble trusting that the earth of the life we’re creating for her is sustainable enough, attuned enough, nourishing enough.

I have trouble trusting what I know inside, what rhythm is arising from this organic moment, versus what I fear some projected, externalized expert might say.

But then, there’s the handful of blackberries we gather on our evening walks.

There’s the sound of her breathing next to me as she finally, finally falls asleep.

There’s my body, laying in the last rays of the sunset, the world in balance for just a single moment.

There’s nighttime and there’s fireflies. Sensitive, glittering, bright.

And I think, I can trust this.

I can trust this.