Today was a bad day.
Maybe it wouldn’t have felt quite as miserable if the day before it had not been similar. Or if those two days hadn’t followed so many others just like them. Since the unhappiness of Max started a few weeks ago, I haven’t wanted it to be true, but the fact of the matter is: Max has colic.
Colic, that stupidly all-encompassing word that just means “crying a whole lot and for a long time.” It’s not an infection you can treat with medicine or drops to the ear. You can’t rub a salve on the part that hurts. No one really knows why some babies are fussy for weeks (or, oh god, months) on end. The theory is that maybe their systems just haven’t matured and so dealing with all the functions of existence are difficult: digesting, sleeping, feeling, etc. I get it. I do. It’s hard to be alive sometimes. Still, my sympathy is flagging.
As irrational and absurd as I know it is, there is part of me that worries we caused this somehow. Like we haven’t been chill enough as parents and so have passed on some anxieties to this sweet baby, who can’t handle the stress. And we perpetuate it with our frantic attempts to soothe him, day after day.
Also, it makes me sad. It makes me sad that the worst time of day for him is the exact time his big brother and sister get home and so dinner/bath/bedtime ends up being a grim march toward shuffling them off to their rooms so we can focus on the other kid who needs our attentions so acutely. And, what do they know of this new brother, except that he squalls? Most of the hours they spend with him, he is red-faced and squinched, making too much noise for them to want to hold him, or play with him, or hear their TV shows, or read bedtime stories, or tell us about their day. Not that we have much patience to listen. They deserve better than that, and so does Max. And frankly, so do L and I.
Not to mention that nothing can get done. NOTHING. The dishes teeter, caked with food, in the sink; the diapers overflow their bin; the emails go unanswered; the thank you notes remain unsent. Today for the second day in a row I did not shower, adding new sweat to dried sweat, hair greasy and stiff in places from some unidentifiable goo. Every time I passed by a mirror when pacing and pacing the house, Max in arms, I would see the bulges over the top of my waistband and feel disgust at myself for not looking better. At six weeks postpartum! And I know that’s crazy, but my ability to think rationally about things is the first thing to go at about minute 10 into the multiple wail-a-thons. At minute 20 I despair for things ever to be normal again. And at around an hour or so, my anger comes out.
Anger. At a baby. What kind of assholery is that? But it’s there all the same, and once you feel it, you hate yourself for it. More than once I’ve put Max down on our bed and simply walked out of the room, shaking with rage at the fact that I can’t make him calm. But hey, kettle: You can’t keep your own self calm. Why the resentment toward pot? Because, that’s why. And so we shed tears together in separate places.
And then I worry: what if no one wants to be around him? What if they just think of him as “that fussy baby” who disrupts the peace? People don’t ask to hold a crying child. Wailing infants are not passed around groups of friends so everyone can get their turn. How will anyone get to know him? How do we get to know him, either, when all of our energy is being spent trying to get him to be quiet, calm down, go to sleep? The periods of happy interaction seem too few and far between. They are there, but just not often enough to recharge my tired emotion muscles, sore from keeping it together for a baby who cannot keep it together.
Right now we are deep in the land of discontent, and it consumes my days, chewing me up and spitting me out, until I start feeling like this incredible blessing is a burden. But even so, I fall into to bed every night hopeful that the morning sun will burn away the fog, revealing the view I know is there, peeking through on the other side.
Editor’s note: We’re traveling back in time a bit to recount the first few months of Rachel’s life as a mom of three. She lives with her husband and brood in Decatur. She blogs at yestertimeblog.com.
