Hippies Have Guilt Too

The baby still sleeps with us, but not for long. I'm all for cosleeping, if the runt actually sleeps in bed with you. My runt does not. He thrashes around, pulls hair, and sticks his fingers up my nose. This week I've had two bloody noses. He also sleeps in the middle of the bed, which, because it's a king, has a big foam lump, and as a result he rolls downhill into my crevice. Then I'm forced to put my arm up around his head, or under him, or under me, or straight up in the air. My shoulder and elbow now have tendinitis and I can't raise my right arm above the level of my chest without terrible pain. And he wakes up at 5:30 every morning squirming like a worm on a hook, and scratches and rips at the various parts of my face until I push him over to Jim's side. Then he donkey kicks me in the boobs a couple times for good measure. No more you little bastard! Okay, you're not a bastard, because you look just like your dad (Indian name, Pretends to Sleep). I do call you a little asshole sometimes, but only as I'm stuffing a sock up my bleeding nose and trying to protect my boobies from the onslaught. I don't really mean it half the time.

Why have we waited almost 9 months to remedy this, you ask? Because I have hippie momma guilt. I typically try to take the progressive, Patchouli-wearing crowd route with respect to parenting (except for all that La Leche nonsense about nursing children until their first day of Naturopath school). I think hippies think outside the patriarchical box, and I like doing the things that seem to come naturally, rather than what those jackasses from What to Expect tell me. So I've just kept sticking it out, thinking my chi would somehow meld with his Chi and we would slumber as one mother-child being. But no. And now I've got a willful, highly-mobile monster on my hands. I screwed this up bad! Bad holistic momma! Bad bad bad. Now I'm going to have set up the crib and jail my little prize fighter, and I'm a little ate up about it. There's going to be some crying tonight. By me. For all the injury and lost sleep, he still smells so good and is so achingly adorable for those blissful 10 minutes.