So I’ve been doing a little reading about parenting. Not much, mind you, but a little. A little about Attachment Parenting, a little Ezzo and Ferber (the antichrists of the Attachment Parenting world), and a handful of blogs by parents of both twins and singletons.
I’ve decided I must be a horrible person. Attachment Parenting sounds impossible to me.
First, because I don’t really want to co-sleep with the twins. It’s not because I’m afraid that I’ll crush them, or anything like that. It’s partially because one argument against it--that the babies smell their mother and wake up more often--kind of makes sense to me. It’s also because I’m a difficult sleeper, in the best of circumstances, and I promise I’ll be the worst kind of mother if I’m not at least moderately rested (I know enough not to expect well rested). I think they should be in the room with us, at least at first, even possibly in those “attach to the bed” bassinets, but not in the actual bed. I must confess, though, that if we were only talking about one baby, instead of two at once, I could reconsider.
Secondly, I’m going to return to work as soon as my job needs me to. I admire the hell out of Mother of Twins and Indigo Girl and I am so impressed with their ability to be home all day every day with their twins. I’m not cut out to do that. I’m afraid if I’m left alone, all day every day, with screaming babies, I will turn into Susan Smith and drive my children into a lake. Plus, I’m the only one in my house with a full-time, outside-of-the-home-job—the job that will be providing cool things like health care benefits to these kiddos. My husband is a freelancer, and my schedule is a little unusual, so we’ve figured out a system with only part-time day care or nanny time, so that I can work and my husband can continue to take care of his mother with Alzheimer’s. I’m so scared that this makes me bad mother material. I also realize that once they are here, and I’m madly in love, that returning to work will feel like tearing out my heart. But staying home isn’t an option.
Thirdly, and this is the worst thing possible—I’m just not sure about exclusively breastfeeding. I’ve studied it, I’ve read lots and lots about it, and I’m still just not sure that it will work for me. I certainly plan to do it for the first few months, especially when they first come home, but after that, I’m not sure. We’ll get a good pump, and I’ll pump my gonzo boobs to death (they really are huge now, I can’t IMAGINE what they’ll be like with milk in them), but we may give them bottled breast milk just as often as we put them to the breast. Even worse, if we need to, we might even supplement—gasp!—with formula. I’m going to let circumstances, not the ideals of the La Leche League, determine what we do.
I don’t object to wearing the babies in a sling, in fact I think that rocks, and I would love to be able to home school. I want to answer their every cry and be there for them when I can. But the rest…I’m just not comfortable with.
What’s wrong with me? My mother was a hippie, for Christ’s sake. I should be so all over this stuff. I do know this—if I lived in a village or commune type setting (like my mom and I did when I was 5 and 6), where there are lots of mothers, and everybody breast fed everyone’s babies, I could do it. In that kind of setting, there is constant support and love for both mom and babies.
But I don’t live in a world like that—I live in a house, in a major East Coast city, and my husband and I are going to be doing this primarily alone, with a little help from friends.
Ezzo (the Babywise dude) and Ferber (the train-your-baby-to-sleep-on-a-your-schedule dude) don’t sound all that wacko to me. My neighbors did the Babywise method, and it’s amazing how well behaved their son is, and how easily he goes to sleep at night. Of course, they are also ministers in some wacko Christian cult, but you know. They are very pleasant people.
As in all things, I imagine that my primary goal will be to strike a balance with all these different parenting methods, and to try to just be the best mother I can be. After all, what else can I do?
