Doin' it rong, cos I don't like right

I read advice columns sometimes, but sometimes I should really know to leave well enough alone and stop at the title. This morning I made the mistake of reading this one, and it's possible I took it a mite too personally.

Amy is a favourite blogger of mine, and has three boys: Noah is a few months older than my Monkey, Ezra is just a month older than Mabel, and - well, there ends our uncanny bloggy connection, as she just had Isaac (Ike) this past June, and I - I'm fine, thanks all the same. She's a great mom and gives good, heartfelt, well-reasearched, and sensible advice.

On the other hand, her boys, so far, have been great sleepers, and neither Noah nor Ezra was as devoted to the boob as my children were/are. (Since Ike is only two months old, I'll give him a pass.) This particular entry in her advice column isn't even about sleeping or breastfeeding - it's about a toddler who asks for a midnight snack - but, of course, I was able to read deep into the subtext and divine that, once again, I'm doing it All Rong.

Of course I am. This is not news, it's just that I prefer to leave these things unsaid and not have people blare them onto my laptop right during my quiet time. Of course Mabel wakes up multiple times a night and demands to nurse, because I have programmed her to do so. Of course she's not going to change this habit of her own volition, because it's too cushy. Even though I constantly find patterns where patterns are not and decide, for example, as I did last night at 3am, that she's dropping a waking all on her own - she normally wakes at 10 and 12 and 3, but last night she woke at 11 and then not till 3 - it's probably not really true. Anyway, then she latched on again at 4.30 and didn't seem to come off till she got up at 7.30, so it wasn't really an improvement.

But have you met my daughter? Maybe you haven't. She's feisty. She's loud. When crossed, she goes full-on Exorcist. When crossed and tired, she's ear-splitting and tragic and I just don't have the resources to deal with that at 3am. She's strong and determined and will be a great woman to have in your corner in a few years' time, but right now she's in nobody's corner but her own because a) she's 2, and b) at 3am, who isn't?

And you know, it doesn't matter. I don't care (much) that I'm doing it all wrong. I'm not dropping from exhaustion because I co-sleep for half the night and my body is perfectly used to it. I'm not wasting away from all the breastfeeding, and I get to eat a bunch of good stuff without putting on weight. In a few years' time, both my children will be grade-schoolers, running around with their friends and barely giving me the time of day, and I'll have new things to be doing wrong, like homework enforcement and peer-pressure defence and computer time and figuring out when it's reasonable for a kid to have their own phone these days. And nobody will be asking me how long it took before Mabel slept through the night or when she weaned or when she potty trained.

So yes, I'm a sap, and a mug, and maybe some day I'll start doing it right. But I doubt it.