Ellyanna’s second nanny got her hopelessly addicted to bottles of formula at night, to keep her quiet. So even after the nanny left (quit/fired, more on that later), Elly was addicted to having milk at night to settle her, and to coax her back to sleep when she woke with nightmares of her first year in Little Sumba and her time in hospital.
Ibu Robin and Pak Will didn’t want to sleep full-time with a child again. They’d done that for 15 years, with their children and their granddaughter, who lived with them for a time. When they traveled, I would stay at their house and look after Elly.
I had a middle-class American upbringing, with its peculiar notions that a family should consist of four people and that children should sleep in a room down on the hall, on their own, perhaps with a small light if they have night terrors. (I wet the bed for years.) I had to un-learn so much with Elly.
Elly slept in her own little bed, just outside the main bedroom. Those nights of sleeping over to care for Elly blur into one continuous memory of wails in the dark, staggering to my feet, half-awake, bumping into the wall on my way to Elly’s bed to give her a fresh bottle of formula. I became expert at the routine of grabbing a bottle from the table as I passed, sitting and inserting the bottle into Elly’s mouth, both of us barely awake. She would be hysterical with tears pouring down her face and calmed down almost immediately as she began to greedily suck the milk. Sometimes, she would lash out at me, kicking, hitting me, until she realised it was me. She would drain the bottle, then usually hurl it at the floor or at me. I could sense she was angry, rather than sad. But the milk comforted her, and eventually she would go back to sleep.
However, with the volume of milk she was drinking, inevitably, she would pee heavily, saturating her diaper, and often wetting the bed. Then, cold and wet, she would awaken, unhappy, crying and yelling, and the whole cycle would start all over again. In the mornings, I would stagger out of bed, hand Elly over to the house staff, and fall asleep again, sometimes not waking until mid-day.
I wasn’t always handling the interruptions to my sleep well, though. I was often sharp with Elly, and this simply made her more anxious. Gradually, I was working hard to keep my temper, hold my tongue, to soothe her, to gently coax her back to sleep. Ibu Robin was a model of patience and forbearance, gently talking to Elly, staying with her until long after she had fallen asleep. I watched her, and tried to copy what she did, how she talked to the girl. But I felt like something was missing, that there was something that I wasn’t getting.
I discussed the milk issue with Robin. I was worried that Elly might develop an eating disorder later. Ibu Robin was always tired in those days, overextended, waking many nights to run to births that were getting into trouble, trying to manage a birthing centre with chaotic internal and local politics, and a volunteer system that bordered on the disruptive. The bottles are not a great system, she said, but they settle her and gets her back to sleep. Although, Robin had breast-fed all her own children, and was a strong advocate for breastfeeding. “I’ve never had a bottle-fed child,” she said. She knew how to calm a child with the breast, and that breast milk puts infants to sleep, “knock-out drops,” she called it. But she seemed as out of her depth in having a bottle-fed and emotionally-traumatized child as I was in slowly becoming a mother.
Living in Bali, watching the daily life of people here, I learned that they sleep with their children until they are 6 or 7. It was Ayu, one of Robin and Wil’s house staff who prompted me to think about co-sleeping with Ellyanna. “We always sleep with our children,” she told me one day quietly. “That way, they know they are never alone.” Ayu would come to play a pivotal role in teaching me about motherhood. She always spoke quietly, almost shyly to me, as if offering her opinion was a little assertive, un-feminine in Balinese culture.
Ayu was gently persistent. Finally, I listened and began to devise a plan. I waited until Robin and Wil were gone for a month. I told them I was planning to try to get Elly off the milk. But I didn’t tell them how. In my inexperience with children, I thought that perhaps I could sleep with Elly, but that Robin and Wil could still put Elly to sleep in her own bed. I didn’t understand the consistency that a traumatised child would need. In hindsight, I see that Robin did. Besides it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. I knew Robin would eventually forgive me, and I hoped accept what I was doing.
But, I felt that Ellyanna should come off the milk. She was not eating much during the day and she had chronic exzema.
I enlisted Ayu’s help, telling her what I was planning, as she prepared the bottles every night. “I’m getting Elly off the milk while they’re away,” I told her. “Tonight, we cut the milk to half, and and so on, until she’s off the milk.” Ayu looked relieved. “But what will you do when she wakes up crying?” she asked me. “She will sleep with me. I’ll just work on soothing her some other way until she’s over her addiction,” I said. Ayu nodded.
I thought it would take the entire month. The first few nights, Elly strenuously resisted my efforts. She demanded her milk and when the greatly diminished bottles were drunk, she demanded more milk. I resisted. I rubbed her back. She kicked me. I spoke soothingly to her. She yelled at me. I tried to hug her. She hit me. A few times, she screamed until the whole household was awoken.
However, to my very great surprise, within a week, Elly seemed to accept the new order, and within ten days she was completely off night milk. She would still ask for it when she woke, but more and more, would accept my “No” and a back rub, and go back to sleep. By the end of the month, she was sleeping through the night, and occasionally waking with a dry diaper. She also started to eat a lot more food during the day.
When Robin returned, I told her the new state of affairs, crossing my fingers in my pockets. She looked at me with something like new respect in her eyes, and accepted the co-sleeping without a murmer.
“What did you substitute for the milk?” asked Sylvia, a Canadian volunteer midwife at the birth centre, when I told her this story, much later. Yes, I thought, I must have intuitively realised that something must be substituted. “I took her into bed with me.” I replied. The women nodded, “Good,” she said. “We co-slept with both our girls. I believe it makes children more secure.”
Maybe I’m not as inept at this mothering thing as I frequently fear.
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