Love needs no training

The sleeping babe at your breast knows nothing but this moment with you. The waking babe at your breast wants nothing but this moment with you. The giggling sighing watchful or weeping babe needs naught but love, arms and time. 

When the sleep trainers come with their fearful ways, pay them no attention, especially pay them no money. For their wiles are not for human babies who need faces, love, arms, safety and a firm anchor in an unfamiliar world. Bless them all for they are lost in this disconnected painful world where normal ways are demonised and mothers’ love parodied, denied, forsaken is but a dim glow of memory for most of us. 

Turn your face from them and heal your own wounds as you tend to the babe in your arms, on your back and in your bed. For each time we fulfill a baby’s needs, we heal the human race a little. We give a human faith in humans. We show them the world really is full of love and that they will want their world to be love filled as they grow. 

We make revolution every time we gather a baby to our breasts whether we feed them with our milk or milk from other mothers. We choose love over corporations, over cynical money makers. We choose logic and biology over myth, superstition and self hatred. 

When did parenting our children, regardless of the time, become a choice? When did it become undesirable to feed and comfort hungry or distressed babies? Take back your power, choose to parent your tiny human who is not a baby shark set free to fend for itself from birth. Surrender to our biology. Accept our need for love and nurturance both for our babes and for ourselves. And if exhaustion and lack of support strike you, seek them out for you are human, not reptile, and you are made to live in community. 

Do not give your trust to those who seek to profit from your uncertainty. Trust your baby because she knows what she needs and will let you know. Seek out other families who will normalise babies and sleep. Let go the pernicious ‘sleeping through’ myth and instead dream together, holding the babe in your arms for this is but a moment in all your long life and you have a long time once they leave home to sleep like a starfish if you wish it. You will never have this precious time again so don’t spend it fighting, spend it marvelling, loving the perfection of human evolution.