How I Stopped Worrying And Forced My Son To Cry It Out

When you get your baby from the baby outlet the one thing they tell you is that if he or she is crying, it's telling you something — specifically that he or she is wet, hungry, gassy or some other stuff that I can't remember right now (oh, right, tired, which I certainly am).

Then all of the sudden you realize that he realizes stuff and that he is perhaps being a little bitch about things. And that's when you start to think about "changing behaviors."

The way the baby-industrial complex works is that there is a dichotomy that those in charge set up where you either do one severe thing or another. It's distasteful to thoughtful, independent-minded people to choose a "method" and "stick to it," but that's where our polarized society is these days: You're an adherent one style or another, specifically whether you get a kid to "cry it out" or not.

One method or another is kind of a bullshit proposition — akin to the ridiculousness we see in the artificially dichotomous political world we live in — and part of me thinks that it only really serves those who are selling books or getting on television or whatnot. But you know I don't know shit from shit and, well, anyway . . .

To be clear, for quite some time we resisted what is termed on various message boards as "CIO." The acronyms on baby parenting message boards are like the acronyms on all manner of message boards: totally incomprehensible until you finally ask your partner what stuff stands for (if you or your partner ever spent much time on a wedding message board you'll see it's the same thing). So in this way, "LO" is "little one," "DH" is "dear husband" and "MOTY" is (sarcastically) "mother of the year." There's a whole list here; I think my favorite one is "BM," which in baby message board land stands for either "bowel movement" or "breast milk."

Anyway, CIO — which is not "chief information officer" but rather "cry it out" — we resisted doing anything resembling "crying it out" for some time. For one, it seemed cruel; you think an infants are capable of controlling when or when they don't cry?

As it turns out, maybe they do. Or at least eventually the parents get so burned out that they no longer give a fuck. I would say in our case it was more the latter.

So anyway, Monkey has been teething lately — a little late, I gather, but the thing with teeth is that they're eventually going to come in — so we had been a little forgiving of his wakefulness. I'm sure, without knowing how exactly, that it's probably very disorienting and painful to have this stuff going on in your mouth. So, for example, I let him sleep next to me while I sat in the bed. And then within a couple of days we had a pattern going. Some would call it a "habit." Others would call it a "bad habit." So whatever you want to call it, it happened.

So the other night when Jen was out and I was trying to get Monkey to sleep and I was sitting with him in bed while he slept and it was past 9:30 and past 10 p.m. and I still hadn't eaten, and when I tried to put him in his crib he started crying, it finally occurred to me — this was bullshit.

And when Jen got home and she was hungry and we needed to eat and we were held hostage by a baby that may or may not wake up at any given moment, it occurred to her, too: Maybe we should let the little shit cry it the fuck out.

Now we actually made it through "dinner" that night without being called away by a screaming child, which was good for him, but it did get us around the corner on this particular issue.

There's a thing that happens when you have someone over and they see you running up and down the stairs to answer a baby monitor and they're like, "He needs you to get him back to sleep?" and that's when you feel it: It's not so much "Are You Mom Enough?" as it is "You Don't Know Shit From Shit, Do You?" and you always tell yourself that you're not going to get sucked into the fucked up world of competitive parenting but then there you are, sheepishly explaining that your child is teething. A friend told us that his experience was that the first night of crying it out led to two straight hours of crying followed by approximately 30 minutes the next night and then only a few more minutes the night after. That seemed not so bad, to be honest.

So the next night as I was trying to get Monkey to sleep, I had fallen asleep in the bed with him just before 9:30 and I decided that I wanted to go back downstairs to do adult things, so I picked him up to take him to his crib and of course he started crying. And so I got him back to sleep and put him down and no sooner had I put him down then he started crying again and it was then that I decided that it the time was now to change some behaviors.

Now I had been thumbing through a book Jen got called The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night . . . OK, let me backtrack: Jen told me to look at this book and I was figuring out what applied to our situation. Not to get all "dad," but the book — like many books, actually — seems to be talking to a mother and not a father (or caregiver), so I had to filter out anything related to nursing. The funny thing about the No-Cry aspect is that it doesn't really mean that no crying will take place, just that it's not as harsh as strictly "crying it out" (and thus deserving of a back-cover blurb by Dr. Sears). I thought I remembered what whatever section I had read said, but in reality, I had no idea. So with the two hour baseline in mind, I set out to making Monkey sleep without me.

The first problem was that I had to go back to the No-Cry book to remember what it said. And while I sat there trying to read it, I realized that I didn't fully understand what it was saying in the first place. So I guess I sort of used the No-Cry method, except that I think eventually Monkey just cried it out.

And at about 10:30, wouldn't you know it, Monkey stopped crying. This was of course precipitated by a great deal of crying, standing straight up in the crib and shrill uvular screams, but he did eventually stop. And when he woke an hour later, and I returned to his crib to get him back to sleep, I put my hand on him and he immediately fell back asleep.

I was feeling pretty smart by this point, all "Who's Your Daddy?" and whatnot. So I went back to drinking beer and doing whatever it was I was doing and then went to bed after 2, only to have to get up at 3:51 to get him back to sleep. Just after 5 a.m. I went back to bed (this part was not very fun). Then in the morning, around 6:45 or so, I took him back into our room for nursing, like Jen and I discussed in advance.

We were scared that we'd create a psychopath by doing this, but when he woke up, he was the same as ever before, just as smiley and ridiculous. So I guess they don't really know what's going on. Which is good to know.

I, on the other hand, was tired as all get-out. My beers-to-hours-slept ratio would have paid out little, if any, in Vegas, but that didn't matter when we tortured our son and he awoke to remember nothing of it.

I don't know that we mastered anything in particular, but as I sit here at just after 1 a.m. the next night, I can say that it only took me 17 minutes to get him to sleep — without holding him and without returning several times to pick him up again. The two times since then I've had to soothe him back to sleep — again, without picking him up — were relatively short and painless. It's possible that we now have our lives back — at least until the next developmental hurdle.

Satisfice It To Say . . .

There's a thing people do when they reach some sort of milestone where all of the sudden they're really engaged by certain topics, where conversation about stuff like gas water heaters, the optimal level of collision coverage or male incontinence becomes really engrossing and the players turn very animated. It's this thing where someone's like, "I just had a guy come and lay tile," and the other person will be like, "Oh, wow, what kind of grout did he use?" and basically if you don't have a bathroom — or care about owning one — you're kind of like, "Can't we just talk about the latest episode of Homeland or something, you know, important that I might actually care about?"

All of which is to say, when I started reading Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough, the one thing I couldn't get out of my head was how this writer — who is a single parent with a young child — found the time to write this book.

The point of the book is not that she's a single parent but rather that she's single, period. And that the reason she's single, she explains, is that she spent too much time before she got old and mommed being a big bitch about who she would or wouldn't deign to go out with until one day only 50-plus men would ask her out.

But for the first 100 or so pages I could only perseverate on the fact that even as a single parent, she had all this time to go interview groups of women and men in bars, visit with matchmakers and dating consultants and generally do this gumshoe investigative reporting about how women in their 20s and early 30s are, before they know it, in danger of becoming old and single, or at least only attractive to prospective AARP members. Seriously, even with a nanny or or whoever, how do you write an entire book? Because all I can find time to do when I'm home with Monkey is answer a few emails and maybe finally brush my teeth at some point mid-morning — either that or eat. It sucks. And that's why I'm up doing bullshit at 2 a.m.

It was highly distracting — You can speed date and read Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb 800 times a week? Like, how? — until I finally gave in and figured that there's probably some boarding school somewhere that accepts 18-month-olds. That and I got totally sucked into Gottlieb's pitch-perfect self-deprecating style, which evokes much less scorn than straight-up pity and really does work as a tale that cautions.

The genius thing about its utility as a cautionary tale, for guys at least, is how much dudes (and bros and, yes, even jabrones) can root for this lady to tell these bitches what we've been trying to say for years, which is that they're sure as shit not gonna get any prettier, which will only make it that much harder to check out of that miserable relationship with that dickhead financial services scum once she discovers he's been cheating on her for, like, the eighth time or whatever, which is why she should lock up a good thing now — i.e., this — and give the bald, the poor, the fuzzy asses a chance — one, lousy, goddam chance — with a beautiful baby for once, Jesus H. Christ and Harry S. Truman's Syphilitic Son.

The message for the intended audience is I guess a little different, which is roughly something along the lines of when high-achieving children have been groomed to expect only the best in their education or careers, it is only natural for her to expect "the best" in her relationships as well, which is why women carry around a giant laundry list of necessary characteristics for a mate, a list comprehensive enough to ensure that no man could possibly work, or if one does, he has approximately 48 million potential women to choose from. And so women spend their optimal mating years either ignoring basically good solid men or (and) going after men who aren't good matches for them and then all of the sudden the 32-year-old who gets asked out more times each week than there are days in the week becomes the 38-year-old who guys — i.e., the solid, upstanding marrying kind of guys — wouldn't ever want to bother with.

It's common sense, but like so many self-help or self-helpful books show, there is a big market to be reminded about common sense. I should add, though, that part of the book's power is that it's — I think at least — calling out common sense that people with sense don't want to hear or think it's bad to mention, which probably accounts for much of the negative reaction to the book (or at least the provocative title). I didn't read the negative reaction because a) I don't really give a fuck what some no-sex-having bitches think when they're confronted by the truth and b) I actually don't think the book is saying what people think it's saying (though the provocative title of that and the original article don't help assuage people's skepticism).

There is a funny point in Marry Him where Gottlieb interviews some of the men in her life who probably were "good enough" but who she never ended up with. One in particular — who she was friendly with and who she says she probably should have ended up with — talks about his "settling" in ways that seem a little depressing. Maybe that's a gender thing? It's noticeable that the book's female examples generally describe feeling a stronger and stronger connection with the schlubby men they settle for but this guy — who marries a "bland" lady — simply starts focusing on other qualities: "'She's bland in ways that aren't important int he big picture,' he said. 'I'm a talker, and I love the banter, and I'm intense about things, and she's just not. It mattered more when we were dating. It still would be nice to have in a spouse, but it has so little to do with the day-to-day of marriage that it matters very little now.'" I hope this guy is a composite because his wife should be pissed the way she's described in the book.

Another small thing that you start to notice after a while is how Gottlieb is usually very careful to note that there is always "physical chemistry" in whatever settled couple she uses as an example. It's noticeable because she sort of seems to add it in as a parenthetical a lot, which makes you question how often it's actually there. You know, like, if you keep having to mention it, etc. . . . At the very least I wondered if it's not maybe always there and doesn't it sort of undercut the argument? Those are unknown unknowns though.

Ultimately, Marry Him succeeds in two ways: One, it's a huge literary feat that you, the reader, somehow by the end of the book start to feel your heart hurt for this person who is not such a huge jackass that she didn't understand that having a child via sperm donor in her late 30s wouldn't lead to dimmed dating prospects but that she — like all of us — kept holding on to this idea that she could still feel a spark with someone who was the love of her life. You feel for her. And then she admits that she is turned off by a match she is presented with because he went to San Diego State. And you're, like, wow, you're kind of an idiot, because while I'm sure the California public higher education system is under great financial stress right now, the difference between SDSU and UC-Berkeley is not that great that you shouldn't be able to just suck it the fuck up. I mean, Jesus H. Christ and Harry S. Truman's Syphilitic Son you come off like a hose beast. To continue One (above), you read this selp-helpful book thinking she's going to triumph at the end with a real nice guy and then when she doesn't it's such a huge muted-trumpet moment that you almost — not quite! — feel teary-eyed when you hear that the Mr. "Good Enough" she finally found, after hundreds of pages of trials and travails and child-neglect, was forced to move away for the good of his family. It's written very smartly that way.

Two (I nearly forgot what "Two" was) — and this is a message that Atlantic editors probably care like not at all to emphasize, which is why Gottlieb is somehow vilified — is that ultimately Marry Him is about being kind. In this case, to dumpy men with limited financial prospects but who will help out around the house and take their sons to soccer practice. On behalf of dumpy men with limited financial prospects but who will help out around the house, I want to personally thank Gottlieb for encouraging hot young chicks to get real about some of these dandies they insist on bringing home and instead indulge in the dark arts of the League of Bald-Headed Men. Thanks bro! We owe you (a bunch)! She's like a more useful Foundation For A Better Life, in that with FFABL, all I get is some jock to pick up the books I dropped in the hallway; with Gottlieb, at least I get some yoni out of the deal, you know? Seriously men, she's doing some Yeoman's work up in this heeze.

I Am Charlotte Sometimes

Back when men were boys and bisexuals existed — in 1985, I guess — it was OK to write about rich kids. I don't know when this stopped — The Official Preppy Handbook was in print for a while there — but in this economic climate especially, the last thing I want to do is ponder how a bunch of prep school jacktards perceive the world.

Such is the milieu that greets those who crack open Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction.

I always love the book review trope that sketches out [blank] [blank] and [blank], takes a paragraph break to let you take that in, then introduces the title of the book with a word like "such." Maureen Corrigan's NPR reviews hew to this cadence exactly, which is probably where it first sunk in.

Attraction follows some rich kids during their fall term at a fictional(ized) Northeastern liberal arts college where they sex, drug and abort fetuses. I seem to remember a time, not long after 1985 even, when it wasn't cool to reveal oneself as a rich kid. Maybe it was the rough-and-tumble neighborhood I grew up in, or maybe my peers had a sharp sense of self-hatred, but I just don't remember that being a thing.

Now maybe Rules actually exemplifies this psychology, which is why the characters are written as such jabrones. That's a take I haven't thought of until just now, except I'm still not sure why we should waste time thinking about them in the first place.

I should step back a little: My initial response to The Rules was wondering whether all the culture that existed in the 1980s came from rich kids, and well, what's that about? because fuck these people. It makes it look like everyone during the Reagan era acted like the cast of Gossip Girl or something. It just seems nutty to construct novels about teenagers. Today we have Lauren Conrad for that.

But Ellis (or Easton Ellis?) isn't enamored with the characters, and Of Attraction exposes how meaningless the characters' lives are as they pinball through their fall semester. The novel has this mid-1980s "grittiness" to it, where sex scenes are "painfully real" and rich people use the N-word in jokes (seriously, was that joke in the James Van Der Beek movie adaptation?). But he's also got this Evelyn Waugh-type satirical streak happening, which often gets lost amidst the full-frontal vérité. I was flipping through the book looking for one particular part that was actually funny and couldn't find it, though if you squint there are some other parts that qualify.

Part of the problem is the first-person conceit: The chapters, such as they are, flit around from the first-person perspectives of three main characters (with some extra characters thrown in there). We already know they're all clueless twats, so there's a built-in obstacle that obscures a lot of the satirical moments. Ideally, this would be third-person — or at least follow one character in the first person — so the satire would shine. As it is, it reads like a thought experiment, or maybe a first draft: Good background for the main story.

The story itself, such as that that is, has a few mysteries that emerge but which are never answered. Which, in my layman's opinion, sucks donkey dick: I know it's a "thing" to screw with our "expectations" about "literature," but come the fuck on — give us an ending, for reals. Because he was building up to it and then let us down worse than a French film, except then you're supposed to skulk out of the theater thinking you "got" it.

A final word about the morality in Rules Of — if you take away the first-personness (which you have to, unless you want to go down a rabbit hole of semi-autobiographical sleuthing), it's kind of incredible how heavy handed it all is. The drugging, sexing and fetus aborting is so over the top that you kind of start gravitating toward Flannery O'Connor, thinking that BEE is telling us something about this lost generation.

Now perhaps kids at Bennington really did do that many drugs — it was the 1980s, I suppose — so maybe he's not telegraphing anything about that. But the discussion about abortion comes off as so grisly and uncaring that you can't help but think that he's moralizing a little there — which makes it a fundamentally conservative work (like Flannery O'Connor). I only saw American Psycho, and slept through most of it (me, not him — I drank sangria beforehand), but that's the point of that satire, right? That a logically hyperbolic extension of American culture is that . . . [Wikipediaing that book] oh yeah, totally.

So ultimately it comes to this, BEE. Come on board with "consumer culture"! You do have an iPhone, right? It's high time you overpaid for coffee, rent or whatever else you have with you that makes life bearable in Texas, because it's 2012, baby, and the only middle class people left are in the Mountain or Central time zones.