Who are “THEY” anyway?
I’m just as susceptible as the next mom to herald my child all over teh internets.
But this blog is really about me. And this post is about me.
(Imagine I just said that in a deep creepy voice dripping with narcissism.)
“They” said a lot of things when I became a new mom. I heard a lot of comments, from a myriad of sources. Perhaps when you get married you get a lot of people suddenly offering words of advice you didn’t ask for. But parenthood takes that to such an extreme level, that in my opinion I should carry around little award stars and hand them out based on the merit of the advice.
There is this classic I heard multiple times when we got married…”Don’t go to bed angry with each other.”
“Oh yeah? Did you hear that one back in ’75 when you got married? or did you just think of that off the top of your head? Here, you get a green star. For effort. No, I take that back. No star for you. ” That one isn’t even technically marriage advice, it’s Ephesians 4:26.
Or how about this one…”Sleep when the baby sleeps!”
This one gets a silver star. Because it is GREAT advice. If completely impractical. I mean, new babies sleep for erratic lengths of time, what…every two hours? Trying to nap on that schedule requires a level of lunacy that, frankly, I’m not comfortable with. I never got the hang of it. You’re going to be dead tired anyway. No need to add to the circus.
Don’t get me wrong, some of this input as a new mom was great. I mean GREAT. Other parents really do have sage wisdom…they’ve been there, and they can tell you how they dealt with x, y, or z.
But I’m 18 months out of the gate. In a year and a half, I’ve learned that no matter what people tell me or what I “learn” from whatever source, my most valuable resource as a mom is to trust my instinct.
This was an “Ah Ha” moment for me. Literally a moment of realization when I stepped back and said to myself “Oh, right I see.”
That moment came when the first time I laid Ella down to sleep for the night. In her own bed. In her own room. About 3 months ago. See, up until that point she had been sleeping in our bed. And I heard from SO MANY PEOPLE “You’ll regret it!” But I loved it. They were wrong. Shannon loved it too, especially when she got older and she’d wind up on his side of the bed snuggled up against him at 5am. It really felt like the right thing to do. We rested better, and made us feel more like a family than any other way of spending time together.
And then the time came when it felt like it was the right thing to move her into her own bed. And then move her bed into her own room.
You know what? The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
She slept happily in her own bed. In her own room. The time was right, and when I realized I’d been right…that was my ah ha moment.
I did what felt right. And it WAS right.
The reassurance that I felt when I realized that was just immense. Possibly the best thing to ever happen to my mommy psyche. I know I’m going to make mistakes, and my kids will hopefully wind up great in spite of their parents. But on the whole…I’m going to trust my instincts more.
Lesson learned.