Parenthood is rolling amnesia
I have a good friend who is a new proud poppa. He is currently in the middle of one of the first major hurdles of parenthood — after learning how to live like a prisoner in your own home (no sleep, no shower, little bathroom privacy) — sleep training. Now while I need absolutely no training whatsoever on how to sleep and could probably take a solid three hour nap right now after having only been awake for a few hours, babies are a bit different. In fact there’s an entire industry set up around getting them to sleep properly.
You can do the old-school CIO (Cry It Out) method developed and popularized by Dr. Richard Ferber.
Or, you can go with the new-fangled hippie “No Tears” method developed and practiced in variations by Dr. William Sears, Elizabeth Pantley and Tracy Hogg, RN.
A was set up to go the “full Ferber” and asked me what I remembered about sleep training and how Beth and I had sleep trained L. And — aside from some vague memories of rocking a restless L while singing through the best of Kenny Loggins (detailed in Become a Master of Putting Babies to Sleep) I didn’t remember all that much of the sleep training phase unless I focused with the energy of one that doesn’t have a four year old determined to use him as an in-home jungle gym. We ended up somewhere in the middle I told him, as convincingly as possible. But the truth was I didn’t remember.
That was when I suddenly realized that sleep training was the point at which I became a victim of the rolling amnesia that is parenthood. Of course this isn’t an actual medical issue, so let me explain. Rolling amnesia is a way of describing the tendency of adult human parents to forget the most horrible, terrible parts of parenthood except for perhaps some vague hazy feeling that it wasn’t all that bad really. This is the way that some forget the pain of childbirth or, in my case the terror of sleep training. And this is apparently completely and totally normal. There are few things that are so closely tied together in life as rolling amnesia and parenthood.
The rolling amnesia of parenthood will eventually rear its ugly head. It’s something that different people succumb to at different times, although I have yet to meet a parent that has escaped unscathed. So keep an eye out and maybe a tattoo machine, notebook and Polaroid close at hand, Memento style.
