Soft and sleeping creatures
on comfort and co-sleeping
It is winter and I’m not getting out of bed. You can’t make me. No one can.
Oh, my alarm, my child, my work, the coffee machine, the school run, the cat that is threatening to pee up the wall.
I guess many things can make me.
It is winter and I want to hibernate.
I started co-sleeping with my child when he was seven months old. That was the age I finally stopped fearing I would role over and crush him in my sleep. Like many children, his bed at home is more of a display platform for stuffed animals than anything else.
A couple of years ago, a woman facilitating a pediatric first aid course gasped when I said we bed shared, and insisted he get his own bed immediately. I felt like a failure, like the stereotype of the woman who won’t let her baby go.
There was a period of time when it was just the two of us. No other adults in the house, we didn’t even have the cats yet. To put him in another room and then remove myself from consciousness felt, for lack of a better word, completely nuts.
I wasn’t afraid, as I had been when he was a baby, afraid in that panicked post-partum way that if I took my eyes off him he would stop breathing. I wasn’t afraid, but I knew we’d both sleep better in one bed. I was breastfeeding, and when he woke in the night to feed or for comfort we would both rouse, barely conscious, and drift quickly back to the land of nod. It made our waking hours all the more pleasant, having rested properly.
There are many proven benefits to co-sleeping. Bedsharing, whatever you want to call it, was/is the norm in preindustrial societies and is incredibly common the world over. Babies sleep better, feed better, improved immunity, have happier more well rested parents, the list goes on. (That is, of course, if that’s what the parent chooses. Co-sleeping should be optional. Whatever works for you is the right thing.)
I slept in my own parents bed until I was about four, and they had to kick me out to get into my own bed. That’s not uncommon. Children want to be close to their parent.
I didn’t personally feel shamed for co-sleeping when my child was a baby, well, no more than I felt shamed for doing anything with a newborn (new mothers can’t do anything right and everyone else is an expert). But beyond the baby years, or months, why are we so afraid to admit when our children still come to our beds to sleep?
Recently, I was speaking to a psychiatrist for something unrelated and co-sleeping came up in conversation. She said, children are small mammals, sleeping beside their parents is where they feel safe.
Mammals, I thought, yes, yes. We are!
All land mammals sleep close to their parents when young. Apes, our closest relatives, sleep with their babies on their bodies.
But it’s not just baby and mother who sleep close together in the animal kingdom.
A sleeping mammal can’t eat, drink, or defend itself. Yet sleep is essential in all mammals, and good sleep makes for a stronger animal. Animals that live in groups also sleep in groups. Sleeping close to others affects thermoregulation, gives increased protection both by being a larger and more threatening target as a group and the presence of sentinels in group sleeping situations. In other words, to keep warm and safe. It’s a social activity for social creatures.
Even pet cats sleep on each other, whether they are littermates or not, and on their people. My cats have about as much experience with predators as they do with flying a plane, and yet there they are, piled on each other like a stack of coats at a house party. They find warmth, comfort, and security in that arrangement.
In Milk, I wrote
Surrounded by soft and sleeping creatures. Dog, cat, baby. I am tired. I come home, again and again, to my parents’ house.
When my early motherhood was getting the better of me, and I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t adequately care for myself or my child, I returned home. To the family nest of my parents’.
I have since moved house, and live much closer to them than I did when my child was a newborn. I’m at ease, knowing they are close by, that if I need them they are there and vice versa.
It should be obvious, really, that people can’t survive in isolation. That a support network — or the less rigid term: family — is necessary for most people. I, like most of us, was raised in the age of hyper-individualization. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, move away, go to college, earn the big money. It was all about the I.
