Our now 3 year old loved her pacifiers with a devotion that is usually reserved for marriage or boy bands.
My pre-mom persona was never going to give her baby a pacifier. I absolutely hated words like: binky, nook, bah-bah, plug, paci. I would roll my eyes and secretly remind myself that was never, ever, ever going to be me.
Bless my sweet, naive heart.
We Don’t Need One
As luck would have it, our first baby was not a huge fan of pacifiers. Finn loved his thumb for a while, but a pacifier? Hard pass for him. Being a new mom, I was actually appalled when my husband told me they dipped a pacifier in some sugar water for my fresh tiny human during his circumcision procedure. I was convinced that he was going to be addicted and all those post partum raging hormones had me sobbing into my nursing bra.
Real life with a newborn hit hard and fast, though, and those jerky new baby arms were not conducive right away for thumb sucking because Finn kept pulling his own thumb out of his mouth. He wailed every time his baby coordination made it impossible for him to suck his thumb. I relented and we occasionally tried a pacifier when he was super mad or disrupting church service, but he wasn’t content, and honestly, it probably made him even angrier. In the end, even that thumb wasn’t a constant companion for him. He eventually stopped sucking it on his own; I don’t even really remember it being an issue or something we had to remind him not to do.
The Baby Who Changed Everything
As is usually the case, having my second baby, Eleanor, changed my mind about basically everything that I thought I knew about parenting. Where Finn was pretty chill and happy to watch the world around him, Eleanor was loud from the beginning. Her cries were shrill–more screams than actual tears–and she made her presence known constantly. She was not going to be ignored! We tried to get her to love her thumb the way her brother did, but she was so busy moving and flailing her arms around constantly that she could never keep it in her mouth long enough to soothe herself, even after those jerky new-baby tremors passed. So in sleep-deprived desperation, we plopped a pacifier in her mouth and wouldn’t you know it, she settled immediately. She was content to twirl my hair, or really the hair of whoever was holding her at the time, and suck on that pacifier. She did not scream. She fell asleep easily. Life became… quiet.
I developed a love-hate relationship with pacifiers. We lost them and found them on the reg. I would clean up a bin of toys or move some books around on the bookshelf and there would be a pacifier; under the bed, stuffed in a pocket, tucked in the corner of a car seat. Bedtime was a disaster if we happened to be in a paci dry-spell and it was a family affair to scour the house to see where Eleanor-the-now-toddler had last dropped her beloved paci while she sobbed dramatically about needing it so, so badly (and yet she was physically incapable of looking for it herself). They were almost guaranteed to be found in the most obscure places and I was left wondering how and why it ever got there. I started telling Finn I’d give him a dollar for every pacifier he found because they were constantly disappearing. He’d triumphantly hold one up and yell: “I just got a dollar!”
The Weaning Begins (Kind Of)
The years wore on, marked by the loss and discovery of an assortment of pacifiers in an assortment of random places, and we began to tiptoe towards her third birthday. We decided that maybe, probably, it was time to be done with the pacis. Unfortunately, potty training was a battleground we were deeply entrenched on and I decided for my own sanity (and because I read lots of things on the world wide internets) that two big transitions at one time was probably a poor idea. So, we decided to keep the pacifiers and work on the potty. After she was mostly successfully potty trained, we approached the idea of the Paci Fairy coming to get her pacifiers and leaving her a “big girl” gift. This was met with much enthusiasm and we wrote a note to the Paci Fairy, left her 3 remaining pacifiers on the table and went up to bed… where she immediately started crying and berating the Paci Fairy for taking her pacifiers because she needed them so, so badly. Needless to say, the Paci Fairy bypassed our house that night, and all the nights after.
Her love affair with pacifiers started to border on obsession. Sometime last summer my husband and I decided that we were done buying replacement pacifiers. Once they were gone, they were lost forever. We were not going to search all over the house anymore. We were firm in our stance, bold in our words. We were the adults, after all, we made the rules and we were not going to be on our hands and knees one more evening searching out that tiny piece of beloved plastic or forking over our hard-earned cash for a pacifier fix.
Oh, how I had to eat my words so, so many times. She refused to fall asleep without one; she would sob and have an epically loud, very long, melt-down if we couldn’t find one and I found myself crawling around and searching and cussing more often than not. I lamented that this was going to be my life forever…I was going to be looking for a pacifier for my sobbing puddle of a daughter in her dorm room. Dramatic much? Yeah, maybe we know where she gets it!
When It Finally Stuck
Halloween approached and my pacifier-loving three-and-a-half year old was desperate to be a Disney princess. She found a Jasmine costume and a Jasmine wig and that was it. She had to be Princess Jasmine for Halloween. In the middle of Target on a random Saturday with glowing pumpkins and spooky ghosts all around me, I got down to her level, looked straight into her pretty brown eyes and told her if she was going to be Princess Jasmine for Halloween, she needed to be done with her pacifiers that minute. As in: hand that one that you’re hoarding in your pocket over, Little Missy. She did and we bought the costume.
We struggled. For a solid week, she would ask me where her pacifiers were. She would sob at bedtime and the first couple of nights she cried herself to sleep. When I called my sister to cry myself after a particularly arduous bedtime, she reminded me that Eleanor had gone cold turkey on the one thing that she’d used for comfort for her whole life and she was allowed to grieve that transition. Honestly, that put it into perspective for me; sisters are so smart!
We came out on the other side intact and Eleanor doesn’t even ask after her pacifiers now. I don’t regret the time she had them; they were exactly what she needed to soothe herself. Sometimes I miss that little pop of plastic in her face, it’s such a baby look, and she is our last baby, after all. That pacifier was the last vestige of our house being a “baby house”… but I sure am glad that I’m not tearing the place apart in a cold-sweat at bedtime looking for a fugitive pacifier with a tiny wailing human close on my heels.