On Torture and Parenting

Metaphors

After E. and I smoked a cigarette each on the frozen patio steps, we went back inside and began to drink beer in great gulps. We set up the backgammon board and played with a combination of intensity and absent-mindedness, forced to count out intervals we once had memorized. Jessye Norman's voice soared to sing the last line of the third of Strauss' four last songs, "Tief und Tausendfach das Leben," but through it all, upstairs in her darkened nursery, our six-month old daughter cried and through it all we heard her. Do not think that we were being horrible, indifferent parents. We were trying very hard the whole time to be good and dutiful ones. We were practicing what the army of child sleep specialists call "Extinction," letting our daughter learn to settle herself to sleep on her own. There are many ways of extinguishing your child: "graduated extinction," or Ferberizing, as well as extensive cuddling and prolonged breast-feeding (not really practicable for working mothers), and probably some other method involving elaborate Wica rituals. Ferberizing allows you to sit with your child while she cries, talk to her or stroke her hair, everything but pick her up, and to do these soothings at intervals gradually longer and longer. Behind Ferber is the sound idea that your child needs to know you are there in order to settle herself to sleep. Behind the outright Extinguishers or whatever you want to call them, is the no-less sound theory that your child wants to be cuddled to sleep and nothing else will do, so you might as well teach her that while you are there before she's about to sleep, and when she wakes up with a genuine hunger, you are not there while she tries to sleep.

No agreement can be found among parents, and the books, for all their appearance of scientific scrupulousness, play to different fears. "Nobody knows the effects of leaving your child alone to cry," Elizabeth Pantley, author of the No Cry Sleep Solution, writes in a way that leads you to think these effects could only be terrible. T. Berry Brazelton, the parenting industry's Dr. Phil, warns that you should never reward your child for crying. We steered between the Scylla and Charybdis of good advice by consulting our friends with children. One of them, who'd read a Ferber book and then went the other way with his daughter, said, "I can't imagine letting her know you're there and not giving her what she wants. Why torture her?" That argument was enough for us. We couldn't bear to think that the sound of our voices could become a source of pain to our child. The other benefit of extinction was its apparent speed. In the case of our friend's daughter, she'd cried 45 minutes the first night, 30 minutes the next, 20 the following, then 5, and after that only a few whimpers of exhaustion. It was a cold, hard, and ruthlessly efficient way of doing the cold, hard, ruthless and needful thing of placing an infant on a sleep cycle in tune with the rhythms of life in a job-holding society. All the books agree that establishing a routine and pattern are important, and, in the manner of all self-help books, the primary instrument of both Ferber and non-Ferber is the schedule worksheet in which you note down all the times your child sleeps, for how long, and become, in short, your own home sleep psychologist. Parents need routines too, and clocking-in obsessively can be one of them.

Of course E. and I thought that these worksheets were a trick, something to do to make us feel like caring, conscientious parents as we began the process of abandoning our child to a world with no cuddling on demand. To leave your child to cry, for even a minute, goes against every instinct and social response. Not to rush and pick her up requires an act of immense will. We could do no right, but we feared that we could also do wrong. So we chose to do our duty and to feel bad about it. E. bore down and set up routines: an evening meal, a bath, a time for quiet holding and singing and reading of stories and play, and then, at the appointed hour, off to bed, goodnights said in a tone of false assurance (Another commandment of sleep therapists: do not convey your own anxiety to your child!), the lights out, the crying beginning from the time her head is laid in the crib and her arms reach up. And so we shut the door and snuck downstairs to do the things we do when we feel bad. And six nights consecutively go like this: 40 minutes, 25, 20, 25 (a momentary blip of horror), 15, 5, and up and away, and when our daughter wakes at 6am or even, occasionally, 4, she still smiles at us.

But that first night, as we diced and went for the second beer at the half-hour mark, unbidden into my mind came the thought that we were behaving exactly like the guilty torturers of history and legend, propping each other up as we went about the unthinkable. Strauss's songs blended into both a compensation for human suffering and suffering's soundtrack; a momentary understanding flickered of why those kommandants listened to their Mozart and Bach.

We were not torturers, of course, or kapos, despite the workings of my overactive guilty imagination. What separated us from them—beside our soft Persian rugs and baby blankets in rustic patterns, as against their barbed wire and wood pallets—was, of course, intention. Everything we do with our daughter is governed by love, and we wish her to become a full and free individual, capable of love in her own right. Intention, however, is a thin defense. Love has never prevented people from mistreating their children: "This hurts me more than it hurts you!" And indeed—for here is the thing—the Bush administration has relied very heavily on the excuse of good intentions in its bid to make torture acceptable to Americans. Alberto Gonzales' government memo of 2002, adopted by the Justice Department, defines torture only as an intention to inflict pain. It doesn't matter what you do to the person before you, as long as you really want the truth, or to save lives, or to save someone's soul. You can rip out fingernails to get what you want, and as long as what you want to is not to hurt your subject, you are not engaged in torture, at least not according to the impeccable mind of our Attorney General.

Metaphors are not arguments; they are collisions in a mental environment. Perhaps it was our friend's remark that first suggested an association between certain varieties of "extinction" and torture. Or perhaps it was simply being alive and a reader of the news in today's America. If you don't know that America now engages in torture and sends people to countries that also torture, someone has done a very good job indeed of putting you to sleep. If you don't know that our attorney general is an apologist for torture and our Defense Secretary an enthusiastic proponent of it, you are sleeping soundly. The fact that Americans are torturers saturates the atmosphere, even our modest trinity house in Philadelphia, and the modest peaceable lives most of us lead. The metaphor cannot help being false and exaggerated in some ways, as in the Sylvia Plath poem "Daddy" (known in our family as "Shall I compare thee to an SS Officer?"), but the metaphor also contains the traces of an actual resemblance, however distorted.