the family bed

All summer long, all four of us have slept together in one big family bed. The arrangement as of now goes me / 2yo / my husband / 4yo (in the baby’s crib, attached to the side of the queen bed as a sidecar). It happened this way because our bedroom is the only one with a/c right now, so we started sleeping all together out of necessity — but I don’t see it changing any time soon. Now that our boys are in our bed, I think it will be hard to peel them out, and equally hard for me to give up their little warm bodies beside me.

Before the family bed, we were siloed into two separate sleep spaces, also out of necessity. I slept with the baby in our bedroom. My husband slept with our 4 year old in his bedroom. I’ve been co-sleeping with the baby since, oh, the four month sleep regression if I’m being 100% honest. It wasn’t until after six months that we figured out the sidecar crib situation, which made me feel a lot better than bedsharing, even with the safe sleep seven followed to the best of my ability. I was a sleep-deprived anxious wreck for about two months there, dealing with my second baby who woke every hour. Our firstborn was a terrible sleeper too, but we still tried to keep him in his own crib in his own room after six months in a bassinet in our room, thinking at some point he would start to sleep better that way. He never did. It got worse and worse. Once he was one and it was “safer” to bedshare, I caved and let him into our bed. He stayed there until Ben was born, then after that my husband was his bedfellow. We all always sleep better near one another, and neither of our kids have ever really successfully slept alone.

I feel funny admitting this to people — mostly because I am so happy. I literally feel warm rush of oxytocin just thinking about how happy it makes me to wake up next to my children, to have them at arms-length all night long. I couldn’t have anticipated that I would love this so much before I had children, much like I couldn’t really anticipate much of anything about how motherhood actually feels in practice. I had so many ideas about what was normal or right or successful. I had no lived experience. And lived experience has led me straight to snuggling my kids all night, with crystal clear clarity that it feels exactly right for us.

Still, it’s not something I would tell others they ought to do. Sleep is really complicated, and essential for health. There is truly no one right way, I feel really clear on that. Everyone is different! I don’t know what is right for you. I don’t know even what’s right for me until I walk right into it, until I’m laying in bed feeling safe. I feel my way into the best things in my life. I follow my intuition, often with my mind kind of straggling behind. I fell in love with my husband that way, found my way into vocations that way, wrote books that way, and now I can see that it’s how I parent too. It makes me very picky — I simply won’t do things that don’t feel right, even if they sound right on paper. Or I do things that don’t feel right and am very miserable and confused for a while. Then, when I find my way to the next right thing, it makes me a very certain person. Yes, this must be the place.

If you’re on the same parenting substack algorithm as me, you’ve been seeing the “discourse” about biological norms for parents and babies, children’s rights, feeding choices, childcare choices, sleep, etc. I’ve been following the conversations somewhat closely, feeling like I’m watching a tennis match, not sure who I’m rooting for or if I’m rooting for anyone at all. My own parenting choices have aligned very closely with one side of the argument, but my awareness still wants to hold space for other paths. This has all coincided with birth doula training — with an organization that specifically seeks to hold space for many different choices and experiences of birth. With that lens, I have listened intently to the cacophony, hearing the raw good intent behind everyone’s argument. How can two things be true at once?

In any ideological debate like this, I think I always crave experience. How did it feel to choose one thing, and how did it feel to do what you chose? What made you choose what you did? What would it have cost to make a different choice? Choices become experiences, and experiences become stories. We weave our family stories ourselves, with choice as the raw wool being spun into the yarn of experience, each family member’s experiences crossed together, the warp and weft of life together. It is not simple! And it’s also extremely simple! That’s how I’m feeling after all the quiet thinking about this I’ve been doing in the background. I’ve been asking myself — why did I choose what I chose? What structures in my life allowed me to make those choices? What experiences came from my choices? What story is my family living now?

I was having an argument with my husband about breakfast this morning. It’s an argument in which he is objectively right — he wants our kids to start the day with a hearty and healthy breakfast at the table, and not with the open-ended cuddling and screentime on the couch with food sort of haphazardly offered at some point that I tend to default to when left to my own devices. But — experience. I like cuddling on the couch in the morning, I like watching some cartoons as we ease into the day. I’m ok with half an apple and a cup of milk on the couch as a way-in to a day of eating. It’s so real to be at-odds about this, and I am glad my husband isn’t just letting me single-handedly set the family routine without any feedback. Why is this what I default to? You could call it inner-child stuff (this is how my days started as a child). Or maybe it’s laziness (very possible). Or maybe it’s (insert magical sparkles) intuitive. Either way, It’s interesting to see my instinct there, what I have “felt” my way into, and how it isn’t necessarily the healthiest or “right” choice. I will own that I do not always make perfect choices! Do you? Still, I ask myself, what story are we making in our family? This is a raw and honest question, I really don’t know. I told him, whining in the kitchen — “I don’t want to be strict!,” surprised to hear those words coming out of my mouth, the honesty of them. Is that really how I feel? Or am I copping out of doing the harder better thing? I don’t know yet, and I expect we will land somewhere in the middle and continue to change over time. I can see the benefit of a little more structure and, ahem, nutrition — and can imagine ways to still keep that cozy feeling that means so much to me going. How to add more boundaries without being “strict”?

I do find the children’s rights part of the discourse especially compelling, because I think I’m very sensitive to the vulnerability of children and their need for their caregivers to make mutually-beneficial choices on their behalf. But, that’s the key — mutual benefit. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s true that all parents are willing to put their kids’ needs before their own — but I think it is true most families find themselves with too much weight on either side. Choices are either made too much with the kids needs in mind, or too much with the parent’s. Of course it’s not good when a kid’s most vital needs are outweighed by a parent’s (especially because kids are in so little control over their life conditions and have few tools to change things in their lives). But, a parent’s self-erasure also benefits no one. I’ve been becoming more and more aware of how very much self-esteem plays into my parenting choices, and how much it benefits my kids for me to feel good about myself and to have space within my life to be myself. I want to be as tender to myself as I am to them. I think that’s where feeling my way into big parenting choices has come into play. I lived self-sacrificially for a while, and it felt bad. Getting up six or seven times a night to go take care of my firstborn when he slept in a different room because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do, yeah that was bad for me. I honestly think it was as bad for him as it was for me — he slept so much better in our bed, hardly ever crying, only waking long enough to nurse a little and then go right back to sleep. When I think about how relieved he must have been to be near me at night, I could weep. It wasn’t working for either of us! And sleeping together worked so well for both of us. That’s where true attunement lies between child and parent — where it’s so clear that we are both feeling good in what I have chosen on his behalf. Mutual benefit. It’s my responsibility to get both of us there. And that’s something I take very seriously as a parent. It’s on me and my husband to make choices that work for all of us. And that isn’t easy to do.

We have internal guard rails for these things though. We all know how it feels to be caught in a choice that feels wrong. And our kids will certainly let us know, when they are able or feel safe to. Sometimes it is possible to make a different choice! It historically takes a long time for me to change, but I am always proud when I do it! But sometimes we are bound by circumstance, by life’s rough realness, by money or time or freedom or whatever. None of this is ever all or nothing, and we can always make amends. But I think one of my goals as a parent is to always seek that magical middle ground of mutual benefit — the choice that tends to everyone’s needs, if not perfectly then well enough. No, I don’t want to be “strict.” I think what I mean by that, as I unpack it more, is that I don’t really feel good about forcing my will upon my children, even if it’s “right.” I want them to want to comply. I want us to build our world together. If they want to sleep beside me, I want them to feel free to ask me for that. And I want to feel free to say “no,” when I need to. I want us all to have a say in what our lives feel like, on the experiences we are weaving together into our family stories. All my yarn, all of yours. This feels more and more pressing as my oldest gets older, as he asks for new and different things, as he tests all our boundaries more and more. How can I help build intrinsic motivation in him to be a part of our family’s story? How can I keep him close while also setting him free? How can I help him feel safe to choose the things that are in his power to choose?

All that to say, I am cherishing this time in our family bed, all cuddled up together. I can feel the true-ness, the rightness, deep in my bones. This is right for us, for who all four of us are as people and what we need right now. Will it need to change at some point? Almost certainly. We will feel the shift when we get there. But this morning I woke up so happy to be right where I needed to be.