Then she turned 3 weeks old and it all fell the hell apart.
Colic hit her like a steam engine. She'd spend the day sleeping for the most part, but come 4:30 and she'd scream blood-curdling shrieks until at least 10:00pm. We'd dance, we'd sing, we'd try every device and liquid on the market to calm her. At the appointment where we discovered her milk protein allergy, the pediatrician told me that it very well could be the source of her misery and that avoiding dairy could solve our problem completely. I cut dairy out completely and her stomach began to regulate, but the screaming continued.
And continued...and continued...and continued...
I loved (and love) my child with every stupid fiber of my being but I was finding it really hard to like her some days. With that came incredible guilt--guilt for not constantly enjoying the magic of having a baby, for thinking far too often about our life before her.
The colic eventually faded, but she was still incredibly fussy. She gave up the daytime sleeping and the majority of my day was spent trying to pull her back from the edge of crank. It was demoralizing, both because the screaming rang in my head as a constant reminder of my failure and because I hated that she hated life so much.
When you have a fussy baby you hear plenty of advice and lots of "it gets betters." While they were well-intentioned, it eventually got wearing since none of the traditional fussy baby advice worked for us:
Have you tried the swing? Amelia has tolerated her swing long enough to fall asleep exactly one time. Every other time she is impressed for approximately five minutes and then is ready for whatever is next, mother.
How about a pacifier? I've never heard of a kids who didn't like pacifiers until I had one. At this point I can only get her to take the pacifier when she's in the Ergo and her hands are pinned below her, as she brings her hands up to her face a lot and pops the pacifier out.
Take her for a ride in the car! I have also never heard of a baby who hated the car, but I have one. She tends to run warm which is part of the problem since carseats hold heat, but other than that I have no idea why a trip longer than five minutes makes her scream as though she's being torn limb from limb.
Put her in the carseat on top of the drier! Turns out this trick must have worked a lot better in the 1980s when driers vibrated a lot more. Our drier doesn't get warm on top nor does it vibrate enough for her to notice that anything's different.
The only thing that worked consistently was if I carried her around, dancing, with music. Remove any one of those factors and the screaming continued.
I remember reading a post written for new mothers that wished them the peace of a "mute button," something that would calm their child for even a few minutes. It seemed that my daughter had nary a one, or at least one that was easy and allowed me to do something aside from stare at her. She was thankfully a breeze come nighttime, if that counts as a mute button, but our days were incredibly long.
Along with the frustration of not being able to calm your baby comes a fear that something isn't right, either something physical or something...deeper. I'm not super proud of this but in the darkest, most frustrated moments I was worried that something was fundamentally wrong with my kid. That maybe she was the one child for whom it never would "get better" and that she was born just hating life and hating me. Before I had a kid, I remember assuring friends with similar fears that everything was surely fine. I remember wondering how they could ever actually worry about something so illogical. Turns out when you are at the end of your rope, staring at a child in your arms that has been screaming non-stop for hours on end, your mind goes into some pretty weird places.
Luckily at around 4 months, the smiles became more frequent. We got a few laughs. We started to have days where both of those things outnumbered the screams, days where the hours of colic seemed a distant memory or another person's kid that someone told us about. I'm still not confident in my abilities as a mother by any stretch of the imagination but I figure we are learning together. I might not know how totally how to be a mom yet but Amelia sure as hell doesn't know how to be a person.
If you are reading this and you have a colicky or fussy baby (I find many mothers are loathe to say the word "colic" for some reason. My hairdresser told me that her son was VERY close to having colic, which as my mom pointed out is like being "a little bit pregnant.") I won't tell you that "it gets better" even though it most assuredly does. When people told me things like "wait until 4 months/6 months/1 year, then it's totally different," they might as well have told me "it's really hard until they graduate college" for how far away it felt. All I can tell you is to take every day second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour. Know you aren't alone, reach out when you need to, and pick a safe vice (mine was Liz Lovely cookies heated in the oven).
I found that it also helped to find another parent with a similarly-aged child you can vent to, Someone you can text in the middle of the night, someone who won't judge you for saying things like "why does my husband WALK SO DAMN LOUD" and "THIS KID WON'T SHUT THE HELL UP," who doesn't return your vents with admonishments or humblebragging about how magical they find the experience. These parents will be invaluable. I don't know that I would've made it through months 1-4 without them.
Above all, remember that though babies are kind of dicks sometimes, your baby is not defective. There's a reason nature made them cute, and in the case of biological children, there's a reason they often look like the person you may have actually chosen to spend your life with.
And continued...and continued...and continued...
I loved (and love) my child with every stupid fiber of my being but I was finding it really hard to like her some days. With that came incredible guilt--guilt for not constantly enjoying the magic of having a baby, for thinking far too often about our life before her.
The colic eventually faded, but she was still incredibly fussy. She gave up the daytime sleeping and the majority of my day was spent trying to pull her back from the edge of crank. It was demoralizing, both because the screaming rang in my head as a constant reminder of my failure and because I hated that she hated life so much.
When you have a fussy baby you hear plenty of advice and lots of "it gets betters." While they were well-intentioned, it eventually got wearing since none of the traditional fussy baby advice worked for us:
Have you tried the swing? Amelia has tolerated her swing long enough to fall asleep exactly one time. Every other time she is impressed for approximately five minutes and then is ready for whatever is next, mother.
How about a pacifier? I've never heard of a kids who didn't like pacifiers until I had one. At this point I can only get her to take the pacifier when she's in the Ergo and her hands are pinned below her, as she brings her hands up to her face a lot and pops the pacifier out.
Take her for a ride in the car! I have also never heard of a baby who hated the car, but I have one. She tends to run warm which is part of the problem since carseats hold heat, but other than that I have no idea why a trip longer than five minutes makes her scream as though she's being torn limb from limb.
Put her in the carseat on top of the drier! Turns out this trick must have worked a lot better in the 1980s when driers vibrated a lot more. Our drier doesn't get warm on top nor does it vibrate enough for her to notice that anything's different.
The only thing that worked consistently was if I carried her around, dancing, with music. Remove any one of those factors and the screaming continued.
I remember reading a post written for new mothers that wished them the peace of a "mute button," something that would calm their child for even a few minutes. It seemed that my daughter had nary a one, or at least one that was easy and allowed me to do something aside from stare at her. She was thankfully a breeze come nighttime, if that counts as a mute button, but our days were incredibly long.
Along with the frustration of not being able to calm your baby comes a fear that something isn't right, either something physical or something...deeper. I'm not super proud of this but in the darkest, most frustrated moments I was worried that something was fundamentally wrong with my kid. That maybe she was the one child for whom it never would "get better" and that she was born just hating life and hating me. Before I had a kid, I remember assuring friends with similar fears that everything was surely fine. I remember wondering how they could ever actually worry about something so illogical. Turns out when you are at the end of your rope, staring at a child in your arms that has been screaming non-stop for hours on end, your mind goes into some pretty weird places.
Luckily at around 4 months, the smiles became more frequent. We got a few laughs. We started to have days where both of those things outnumbered the screams, days where the hours of colic seemed a distant memory or another person's kid that someone told us about. I'm still not confident in my abilities as a mother by any stretch of the imagination but I figure we are learning together. I might not know how totally how to be a mom yet but Amelia sure as hell doesn't know how to be a person.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
If you are reading this and you have a colicky or fussy baby (I find many mothers are loathe to say the word "colic" for some reason. My hairdresser told me that her son was VERY close to having colic, which as my mom pointed out is like being "a little bit pregnant.") I won't tell you that "it gets better" even though it most assuredly does. When people told me things like "wait until 4 months/6 months/1 year, then it's totally different," they might as well have told me "it's really hard until they graduate college" for how far away it felt. All I can tell you is to take every day second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour. Know you aren't alone, reach out when you need to, and pick a safe vice (mine was Liz Lovely cookies heated in the oven).
I found that it also helped to find another parent with a similarly-aged child you can vent to, Someone you can text in the middle of the night, someone who won't judge you for saying things like "why does my husband WALK SO DAMN LOUD" and "THIS KID WON'T SHUT THE HELL UP," who doesn't return your vents with admonishments or humblebragging about how magical they find the experience. These parents will be invaluable. I don't know that I would've made it through months 1-4 without them.
Above all, remember that though babies are kind of dicks sometimes, your baby is not defective. There's a reason nature made them cute, and in the case of biological children, there's a reason they often look like the person you may have actually chosen to spend your life with.
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