I recently came upon an old letter I wrote to myself  two years ago. It was about my son's horrible sleeping habits. As a new mother, my son's lack of sleep training was the most troubling thing on my mind at the time and I constantly questioned whether I was doing things all wrong. Looking back at it now, I can't believe I fretted so much. My son's sleeping habits now don't seem like an issue of epic proportions as they did back then. This issue which plagued me so much eventually went away (through a combination of measures we took as parents and the fact that my son grew out of it).

As I currently deal with a new set of hurdles with a toddler who has a mind of his own, my letter-to-self is a reminder that each phase of raising my child will present with new challenges. At any given time, we're simply dealing with one leg out of the many more to come in this marathon, complete with highs and lows. I tell myself to keep things in perspective.

Here's to taking a look back and sharing something I wrote two years ago...

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And now, I find myself asking fellow mommies utterly ridiculous questions like, “What technique did you use to put your baby to sleep? CIO? Shush-pat? Modified CIO?” “What did do you if he cried upon placing him in the crib? Did you continue patting him or did you pick him up? If so, for how long?” Since when did putting a baby to sleep become such a science? Or rather, such a practiced art?

“I use a rocking sarong and play sweet lullabies in the backdrop”, responded one mommy I asked beseechingly for help. “I use an electronic rocking chair and it works like a charm. It doesn’t break the habit of rocking but at least you don’t have to do it yourself”, said another. Great…

Something like nursing and cradling my child to sleep that felt so right in the beginning has turned into a self-inflicted torment. Now I fret constantly that I’ll be rocking my son to sleep well into adulthood. I research ways to instill better sleep habits in my son. I even talk in baby sleep lingo, uttering terms like, sleep training, self-soothing, Ferberizing, and sleep consultant. My parents look at me blankly. These words never existed in their time.

I feel like we live in a generation where we try to mould a baby’s habits to suit our busy lifestyle. Add to that the volumes of sleep training books that exist, each dictating various schools of thought and causing us to overanalyze every little thing. I would argue that our mothers did all the current “don’ts” of parenting like rocking, nursing, and cosleeping, yet we ultimately learned how to fall asleep on our own. Maybe it just took us longer to get there but patience was something our parents seemed to have a lot more than us. There were no online forums, mommy groups, and BabyCenter for them to refer to. They simply did what they knew and what came naturally to them. And we all turned out alright, didn’t we? And so I continue to straddle two mental states. Sometimes fretful that I’m not doing enough to remedy this darn sleep situation. Sometimes assured in the belief that it’ll all work out on its own.