Well, I'm exaggerating slightly. She did sleep well last weekend, but on Monday, yesterday and even today, she wouldn't nap. She'd take 15 minute catnaps and that was it. It also didn't help that she didn't sleep really at night. Between 1:30-3 a.m. on Tuesday night, she was up. She was up last night every hour on the hour and wouldn't fall back asleep.
Needless to say, Jeff and I have no fuckin' clue as to what's going on. I took BD to a peditrician yesterday and he said she was in perfect health and even her stitches looked good. I have no clue if she's changing her nap schedule, if it's a growth spurt, remanents of the surgery's impact or whether she's just fuckin' with us.
A blogger that I've begun to read -- Her Bad Mother -- managed to mix Socrates with parenting in a wonderful observation:
The ancient Greeks had a word to describe the condition of being at a loss: aporia, άπορία, from a poros, which means, roughly, to be without a passage or a way. It is to be without direction, without resources, to have no way out. It is ordinarily used in a philosophic context: the Socratic stance is the aporetic stance, the assertion and demonstration that one does not meaningfully know what one thinks one knows; that one is, in fact, at a loss with regards to the thing that he thinks he knows, and so in the condition of aporia. From this, it is hoped, one will be filled with the desire to pursue knowledge of that thing (and, if one is truly philosophic, the desire to pursue knowledge more generally and fully.) Aporia, then, from a Socratic perspective, the perspective of the philosopher, is a good thing.
From the perspective of the new mother (whose aspirations to philosophy took a baton to the knees with the birth of WonderBaby) the condition of aporia, in its most mundane, prosaic form – the form of “WTF?” that rears its ugly head when you realize that whatever it was that you thought you knew about sleep/breastfeeding/shit/whatever has been reduced to the most shadowy and mistaken opinion and is now hindering your laborious climb out of the Cave of Ignorance that is new parenthood – sucks hard.
Granted, she was talking about swaddling and transitioning from a bassinet to a crib, but it's the same feeling. I have no clue what's going on. There's no pointers, no direction and while I keep telling myself that each day will get better or that this is part of parenthood -- that fumbling in the dark as you try and make everything all right for someone who can't communicate what's going on with them -- that doesn't help when you're exhausted, cranky and it's 3 a.m. and you've only slept for two hours.
It's not just hard on us, but also BD. She's been so tired, cranky and worn out that it's like she need to sleep, but keeps waking up for some bizzare reason. I'm now at the point where I'm contemplating pouring rum on my nipples to get her to sleep.
I got no clue. And it's hard. I don't know what else to do. I know it will end -- eventually. But until then, I'm still fumbling in the dark, seeking solutions.
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