Good Mom/Bad Mom AKA whatever. I'm going to sleep.

We've changed our minds again. About sticking to our guns.

A little background about the way my crazy head works:

Women are mean. I'm one of 'em. We judge other women and share our judgments behind their backs, and being a mom and watching other women mother can bring out the worst in us. I have to be very conscious of my tendencies to judge other women, and I have learned, oh have I learned, that until you are in that woman/mother's exact situation, you better just keep your big mouth shut.

So much of what I said before I had kids I am now eating.

On the flip side, whenever other women told me stories about so-and-so's mothering, I remembered it. I remember stories about moms that people told me way before I was even pregnant. Not just the negative stories, but the positive ones as well. And to those stories, I hold myself up. Am I as good as her? Am I better? Does my kid do what hers was doing? The people who told me those stories don't need to tell me what they think of me now; I already know what they think based on the stories they told me five years ago!

This is not healthy. I pray about it.

I also think a lot of us have a specific definition of what it means to be a Good Mom. "If you do/don't do X, then you are a Good Mom." X might be what you feed your kids, whether or not you work, whether you enroll them in a thousand classes and activities, whether you allow them to watch TV, or how you discipline them, among about a million other things.

A lot of the mothering stories I heard before I had kids had to do with sleep. If you go back and read my blog from when Isaac was still a baby, you know that I was kind of obsessed with it. It was like I latched on to that one aspect of parenting and said, "If I do this right, then I can declare myself a Good Mom."

There are plenty of reasons that sleep is important, and I am proud of the fact that for months and months, Isaac has been easy to put to bed and on a nice, consistent schedule.

On the other hand, there were some times that I let my desire to be that Good Mom whose baby sleeps well direct my parenting more than Isaac's needs, personality, desires, etc.

So I'm trying to loosen up that definition of a Good Mom. And now we are faced with another sleep issue.

In this post, I said I wasn't too worried about Isaac's transition to a big boy bed--that he could do it in his own time and that he didn't need to be out of his crib just yet. In this post, I said we decided we'd better stick to our guns. Guess where those guns came from? "My child is a good sleeper. My child stays in his bed. My mothering was what brought about success."

We stuck to our guns for two days and felt ridiculously stressed out by doing it. Look closely at the following picture. It was taken during what was supposed to be naptime. Isaac had been using his alone time to pull all of his books off his shelves and throw them around, so Zach took them all out to the hallway. The Isaac proceeded to cry, bang on the door, and try to reach under it to get to them. He never took a nap that day, and we all suffered for it.
WHY were we doing this to ourselves!? I'm really pregnant right now, really tired, and anticipating some sleepless nights in the next few months. Why were we pushing so hard to change what had been a predictable, healthy, comfortable pattern?

Every mom I've talked to and every book I've read disputes the idea that Good Mothering (i.e. some specific tactic) is the key to success in transitioning a toddler out of the crib. They do it in their own time, and 20 months is really, really early.

So we came up with a game plan that we feel we can stick to and one that allows Isaac to make the transition when he's ready. We'll offer the big boy bed as an option at every nap and bed time, make it sound like it's the greatest thing in the whole world, but if he doesn't stay in it after three tries, then he'll go back in his crib.

We tried it last night and this afternoon, and I feel so much better about having let go of some unattainable, unrealistic expectation of my poor kid and my poor self! My son is sleeping now, in his crib again, and I, too, shall soon be conked out on the couch.