I stood in the pediatrician’s examination room going through my newborn’s list of symptoms: inconsolable screaming, frequent spit-up episodes, extreme fussiness, and sleep distractions. After doing a thorough check-up, my doctor said one word, “Colic.”
Then he added, “There’s no cure, but don’t worry, he’ll outgrow it by the the end of his third month.” My sleep-deprived brain tried to do math, “Three months of this?!” Now I was the one who wanted to scream inconsolably. Where was the cure-all that would help me help my newborn?
I’d never heard of colic and I quickly understood why — every parent who’d been through colic wanted to forget they’d ever been through it. It was the evil Voldemort of the newborn phase and remained nameless and never spoken of again. The heart-piercing screams in conjunction with not sleeping was a brutal addition to my already completely full newborn schedule.
When we first came home from the hospital, my little guy was quiet
Well, he was quiet in the sense that he cried like I’d expected. He cried when he needed me (he needed me a lot), or was hungry, or sleepy. I began to recognize each cry that went along with each need. I was feeling pretty confident that motherhood was my jam, but then a strange new sound worked its way into my newborn’s vernacular — the powerful scream of a colicky infant.
The first change I noticed was that my baby became more fussy in the evening. As dinner time faded into bedtime, his fussiness evolved into the banshee-like wailing of tweens in a horror movie. His screams became incessant. His face would turn red and his legs would flail widely. I was awake in the middle of the night, rocking him, strolling, nursing, and singing classic Journey songs. Nothing worked to soothe him, and I stopped believin’ in my parenting abilities.
As the nights dragged on and on, the emotional component of my son’s cries completely overwhelmed me. My heart hurt with each wail I was unable to console. He continued to scream and I continued to feel like a fake mom unable to comfort him.
This insecurity seeped into everyday life and I couldn’t remember being so so emotionally fragile or so exhausted ever before. One afternoon I was in the kitchen drinking a glass of water, and my husband offhandedly remarked I looked tired. My sleep-deprived brain translated that as, “I don’t love you anymore.” I spit out my water and filled my cup with tears instead.
Colic was heartless, but I couldn’t let it win
My first-time parenting instincts began to kick in, and I realized my big problem had been that I’d assumed there was one proven method that would cure him. I’d overlooked the possibly that it could be a combination of strategies that I might have to invent.
I started looking for the slightest sign that a soothing technique I’d chosen worked. I noticed that the combination of nursing in a dark room followed by skin-to-skin contact calmed him for a time. When that stopped working, cradling him in my arms while gently bouncing on a yoga ball helped.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was something
As it turned out, my cure-all wasn’t one thing but a combination of strategies I created. Colic gave me the CliffsNotes version of how to let go of parenting expectations and become more flexible. At the end of my son’s 4th trimester, his pediatrician was right — his colic magically vanished. We both graduated into easier semesters with much less crying on both our parts.
