Dear Jonas,
This week your Dad and I began the difficult process of trying to persuade you to sleep and eat with some degree of regularity. Ultimately, the point of this is to coerce you into sleeping through the night. Immediately, we want you to enjoy sleeping in your Moses basket as much as you enjoy sleeping on top of us. We feel guilty when we let you sleep in our bed because we know it’s not advisable. Now that we are parents, we fear the prospect of SIDS as we once, in our younger freewheeling days, feared other life and death acronyms.
The first night we tried to let you “cry it out” would probably be judged as unsuccessful by any outside observer. For me, your mother, it was just short of trauma. We have been reading this frustrating but reportedly quite effective book on how to convince your child to sleep through the night. I think it’s basically snake oil and that you are smart enough to learn this skill on your own, but we’re both new at this and we are also the sort of people who side with learned behavior over instinct. After spending my last ten years in graduate school fighting on the side of social construction, I could hardly make my own child the exception to nurture over nature. These phrases are reductive and I apologize. As soon as I think you are actually paying attention to the things I am reading you cribside we can start with Althusser and discuss how education is an ISA (Ideological State Apparatus). For now, just know that we are trying to inform ourselves of how to inform ourselves of your needs.
That said, I am not convinced yet of the need for us to let you scream through your disagreement with what we’d have you do. I mean, this book also says things that we don’t agree with. It has this weird homophobic introduction about the importance of a mother and a father for good parenting. Is it possible to take one part of the argument and leave the rest? Shouldn’t one part inform the other? Can it not?
Anyhow, last Wednesday I sat in the bathroom with both toilet paper and cotton balls in each ear, a glass of Rosé in my left hand and a copy of Marxism and Form on my lap. The more you screamed, the more I cried. My breasts also wept as my hormones accused me of frigid mothering. You were a fighter, of course. You screamed nonstop until we took you out and hugged you. Maybe you’re trying to tell us there is no “it” you need to cry out yet?
