Bedsharing confessions
“These are my confessions…” - Usher / me
The crib we bought was a dashing teal blue. My husband and I got it secondhand off of Craigslist for around fifty dollars or so. One dusky autumn evening we drove to a random Williamsburg side street to retrieve the deconstructed wooden panels, the nuts and bolts bagged and taped to the side. My husband did the classic-new-dad thing of staying up late that night as I, eight months pregnant and so wildly tired, slept. As he tells it, he drank a beer, watched a three-part ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, and put the crib together until 2am. It felt symbolic and significant, like a rite of passage connecting him to all the new dads that came before. The next morning we angled the crib in the corner of our baby’s room, outfitted it with a woodland animal sheet set from Target and a felted hanging mobile. It looked good! Cute and colorful and welcoming. Our lives were on the brink of an explosive change, but at least that change will have a sweet, safe place to sleep.
Our baby boy, R, was born eight weeks later into a deep and dark winter. He hibernated like a sweet little bear cub during the day. So tired, so sleepy, so cuddly; his newborn legs scrunched as he lay on our chests. I would alternate between stress-googling “can a baby sleep too much?!” and staring dreamily into his smooshy face with so much wonder and delight I thought I might burst.
But then, starting around 6pm every night, the tidal wave of my anxiety would crest and foam and ultimately crash over me because our sleepy bear angel baby would simply NOT sleep alone at night. He would not sleep in the dashing teal blue crib. He would not sleep in the brightly colored $300 woven Moses basket I was Instagram-influenced to buy. He would not sleep in the Arms Reach Co-Sleeper bedside bassinet we got off of our local Buy Nothing group. He would not sleep in the Halo BassiNest Swivel Sleeper gifted to us by our neighbors. He would not sleep in the Dream on Me Skylar Bassinet we got from someone or somewhere I can no longer recall. If we wanted him to sleep for longer than twenty minutes, we were fully and completely shit out of luck. No amount of walking, rocking, shushing, singing, swaddling, swaying, or bouncing would result in our ability to lay him down on his back alone in any of our various baby beds and have him stay asleep.
Unless…. well, unless, we did something we weren’t supposed to do. He did sleep in our arms, on our chests, in our bed. But could we sleep like that? Isn’t that unsafe? We were so scared. We were filled with fear and guilt and shame and worry. And most of all, we were simply confused. This is not how a baby is supposed to sleep, right? This is dangerous, right? But what were we doing wrong?
One day, when R was around two months old, I was curled up in our comfy old reading chair, scanning various baby guides and parenting books I had just taken out from the library in some wild, manic swoop. R was sleeping happily in his favorite boppy lounger cushion next to me. Of course he was— it was daytime! I indiscriminately opened up the book “Sweet Sleep” by La Leche League, its bright lime green cover garishly catching my eye. I had no context for this book or what its theories or ideas were as compared to any other baby sleep book, had no idea that this book championed safe bed sharing or that “safe bed sharing” was even a thing. I picked a random page and began to read.
The book described a new-to-me lens for viewing R’s nighttime struggles. No longer did his unwavering inability to sleep apart from us for more than twenty minutes even have to be understood as a struggle anymore. As the book laid out, he slept exactly how he was supposed to, like a freshly made newborn animal, craving closeness and protection, warmth and love from his caregivers. It made me realize with startling clarity that yes, of course R sleeps better next to us - it’s the biological norm! And, oh my god look here, there is a safe way to do it?! A centered alertness took over me as I continued to read. This is what I needed, it spoke to me directly as an anxious new mom and helped usher me to the mother I was to become.
We started that night following the Safe Sleep 7, a list of prerequisites in order to safely bedshare. The list includes things like the mother is breastfeeding, nonsmoking, sober, and unimpaired and the baby is healthy, full term, kept on their back and lightly dressed/not swaddled. I learned how to position myself to sleep in the recommended “cuddle curl.” We followed the rules to ensure that our bed was a safe space with our blankets tucked and pillows out of reach. The change was immediate. Not only did the baby sleep, we all slept, and for hours at a time! Once I figured out how to side-lie nurse a week or two in, it was like a rocket ship went off and we never looked back.
It is no exaggeration to say that what I read that day - now nearing 7 years later - has completely changed my life and my husband’s life and the way we parent and raise our kids. I know, so dramatic, but actually getting to sleep was only the beginning of how bedsharing changed us. First of all, we all really just loved it. We loved the cuddles and the ease of bedtime. We loved the ability to be responsive parents if he was sick overnight or had a bad dream. We loved never having to leave our bed for middle of the night wakings - most of the time we didn’t even have to open our eyes! We really loved how easy travel was with a bed sharing kid.
But more than all of that, it reorientated us as parents. We came to view ourselves and our baby as human beings filled with eons of evolutionary and biological needs and patterns. We learned it is best if we don’t try and fight them, but if we work with them. Our modern world with its ever expanding technological advancements make it easy for us to forget and disconnect from just how animal we really are. This realignment and remembering of our naturalness has opened us up and calmed us down countless times over the years. I am so grateful for that perspective shift and it all began with bed sharing.
Did we ever get whacked in the face at 3am by a tiny but mighty hand or foot? Yes, of course. Did my husband and I both cling to opposite edges of our bed while R starfished the entire center? You absolutely know it. Some nights were too hot, too crowded, too close; I was too touched out. Some nights were long, annoying, and uncomfortable - my hips aching from that sweet-sounding-but-not-always-comfortable cuddle curl. Some nights I wondered if we would ever get R out of our bed and sleeping independently. I continued to worry that this set up was looked down upon in our modern culture; I was often embarrassed to share with others that this is how we slept. But I would never, ever change what we did. I am so glad that we figured it out early in our parenting journey and continued with it for years. I am so glad that when our second child, L, came along six years later, I side-lie nursed him his very first night home, and we cuddled asleep for many glorious hours together.
R is now a very adorable 6.5 year old boy who mostly sleeps alone in his own bed in his own room. But sometimes he still sleeps with us. He knows he is always welcome. He likes to fall asleep rubbing my back or being the little spoon to his dad’s big spoon. It’s so sweet, how can we say no? And now that we’ve been around the parenting block for a few years, we know that every stage has an expiration date, and that there will be a last time for these unguarded cuddles. We are soaking them in as long as we can.
We ended up selling that teal blue crib on Craigslist when R was two. He never even slept in it once.
Omg chills ❤️
Love this…🥲 just beautiful