There is an idiom that echoes and chases after me from deeper memories: “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” Maybe there are patches of grass on a balding bit of earth, or moss-covered rocks, and birds that warble out jubilant notes as they wing through the sun-glistened air. But if the trees are clustered so thickly that a person is struggling to find a pathway to where he or she wants to be, indeed it will be the individual trees that are commanding focus. Being in the midst of getting pressed tightly inward by an overwhelming number of details (or trees if you will) obscuring the vista, idioms fail to provide even a shallow justice by acknowledging that it can be extremely difficult sometimes to recognize the full picture from where you are at.
When Tony was a baby, we noticed pretty quickly that he needed constant motion to sleep. Constant. At first this didn’t seem like much of a problem- we used a battery operated swing that rhythmically swayed him to and fro while he slept. Of course, there were frantic late night trips to the store when the batteries died and it was discovered that our normally sweet-tempered baby would instantly awake and scream as if overcome by horrific pains until motion was restored. But it was our understanding that generally babies outgrow such needs as their bodies mature, so I wasn’t really worried by that first tree popping up on our journey.
Unfortunately, we also discovered our sweet son was growing at an astonishing rate and burned out the motor on the swing before his first birthday, outgrowing its capacity in both height and weight. Now we had a tree the size of a redwood, because he still couldn’t sleep without the motion. We did have a Fisher Price rocking play chair that still fit our little man. Andy and I would take turns depending on his work schedule rocking Tony to sleep, waking as shrieks began spilling into the air, rocking him back to dreamland, slumbering again for a few minutes until the lack of motion woke our son once more, and repeating that all through the night.
Eventually he grew so large we had to do this in a stroller. By then he was sleeping for slightly longer stretches once the motion stopped, and we would transfer him into the crib after he fell asleep so he could become accustomed to sleeping and waking up there. However, other “trees” had surrounded us. I’m going to quote one of my old Amazon reviews here so that I can put some restraint on the length of my writings for this topic. The past has a wealth of details and I could introduce each of them to describe all of the swirling grooves and splinters in the bark, the frayed and crinkling leaves- all of it. And you’d definitely be reading a forest, that’s for sure. And so, from my review of forest cello:
“We’ve been using this album off of Prime for probably over a year now, and finally I decided to break down and buy it tonight. Because it pretty much hit me, my life could not function right now without it. We have a beautiful little boy with some very specialized needs who has had a pretty rough history of sleeping through the night. In the beginning, it was that he needed constant motion. Then, it was that every little thing woke him up. Every little thing. Phone on vibrate going off two rooms down the hall? Awake. Cat meowing? Awake. Someone tiptoeing outside his door? Again, awake. And not happy awake. There was a time when I could pretty much count on getting 2-3 hours of sleep a night, and it was the pits.
We experimented with a lot of different things, but finally found that this album, cranked up to full volume on a kindle in his room, was soothing enough to him that he could sleep through it, but it masked a wide variety of other sounds going on around him. Sometimes noises still wake him up through this, like the time somebody wrong number texted me in the middle of the night at the break in between songs, or if my daughter shuts a door too loud, but I can almost always get 5-6 hours of sleep a night now, sometimes even 8. So for these perhaps atypical reasons, I love this album…”
Dan Gibson, we still play this album for Tony on repeat all night, every night- and I love your album even more with the passage of time. I left so many details out of that review because they weren’t ameliorated by music. The midnight panic attacks if he’d been exposed to new people during the day. The 3-6 hours of melt downs when he woke up wanting juice late at night where I would have to hold him to keep him from hitting his head forcefully on the wall. The hours it could take him to fall asleep between the ages of 2-6 because of how hyperactive he was before receiving his ADHD diagnosis and medication. So many details, so many trees.
I noticed that Tony liked a weighted blanket that one of his prior occupational therapists used in a clinic nearly four years ago, so I took coupons to a Joann store and purchased fabric and pellets because we couldn’t afford to buy one that was already made. The sewing was far from perfect, many of the lines were a bit crooked because I was busy enough to be rushing madly through that project, but it calmed our son and he used it for a good long while as he slept.
Over time, his sensory needs have changed and he responds to some things differently. We now experience waking from teeth coming in or being loose, sometimes he has to go potty in the night, sometimes there could be rebound waking from his ADHD medication wearing off, and noises still can wake him up- but even on our worst nights I get at least 4 hours of sleep before I need to start my morning workout, usually it’s about 6. The weekends are glorious because I frequently get seven hours and my honey covers me to take naps on his days off.
When we first noticed Tony’s path to slumber required movement, we had no idea what type of forest we were sleepwalking into. These types of struggles are quite common for individuals who are Autistic or who have sensory processing disorders. The part of the forest you may not see is that during the very worst of Tony’s sleep challenges I was fighting my own health problems. All of the many posted details in isolation you may have been reading about week by week from his early years were not separated in real life- they were going on all together at the exact same time. And there are still plenty of stories from that period that remain untold here.
I remember five years ago feeling broken and exhausted after hours of protecting our son from himself because he was upset about being precipitously awoken by some incredibly subtle stimuli. I would clutch my knees to my chest and pray to God that He could help me be enough to do it all. I am just a person, with many, many weaknesses and there were plenty of times when I felt uncertain about my ability to manage everything that was going on effectively. I could feel His love every time I felt like I was ready to fall apart, and this was just enough to help me hold it together.
Most of the time when Tony wakes in the nighttime now, he’s a pretty chipper guy. I can often just lay next to him (without touching him because he usually still prefers avoiding such contacts) and he’ll calmly work on going back to sleep. Discovering the type of forest we were in helped me and our therapy team to hew pathways to better (though not perfect) sleep skills for our little man- which has blessed everyone here with a little more rest.
