2 under Two - A Colicky Baby: What a Stigma!
Posted by Catherine on June 30, 2010I'm a mom of two boys, 17 1/2 months apart (oops!) and I thought I'd use this blog to do a little venting in a narrative I'll call "2 Under Two". So here goes:
A Colicky Baby: What a Stigma!
When you turn to the chapter about colicky babies in those "helpful" parenting books, you read things like, "3 hours of crying a day, inconsolable, fussy, cranky", etc. Not one book tells you why they cry, just that they do it for hours on end, for several months, for unexplained reasons. And the suggested solutions are, "Mylicon, shushhing sounds, rocking, walking, swaddling, and on and on". We are promised that these "spirited babies" will one day be amazing little beings, but I think they only console us with that information to ensure we won't give up. Poor moms, our job is to nurture our baby and when we can't get our baby to stop crying, ugh, the pain. And what new mother wants to admit she has a colicky baby? Who wants to swallow all of those descriptors? So you think it's something else and you try and try all the suggested solutions for the "something else" from ALL the books and even more offered from friends, neighbors, mothers, mother-in-laws, and total strangers, etc.
With my first child, I swore it was just gas pain. I spent the first 3 weeks trying to get him to digest the breast milk, massaging his belly, pumping his legs like riding a bike, burping him nearly violently, “it’s just gas pains” I would tell people. I tried Mylicon, Gripe Water, warm compress on his belly, etc. I went off dairy, then gluten, spicey foods, and was left barely eating anything. Nothing worked, and it only got worse the later in the day it was. 6pm was the “unhappy hour” at our house, except it wasn't just a couple of hours, it lasted until 10pm. So for the first 6-12 weeks of his life he was just...COLICKY. The Shame! Why couldn’t I get my kid to stop crying, was I a bad parent because I couldn't console my child? Would he suffer a lifetime of "issues"? Oh and here’s the best part, my newborn son had a cousin born 10 days younger than him, perfect, quiet angel. So now we’ve got a comparison. Shame, Shame!
Then I met a baby just like mine and aahhhhh, halleluiah! What a relief, there are other babies out there like mine, and another mom suffering just like me - wow, does misery love company! I can’t begin to tell you what a relief it was to have that mother in my life. We would vent and vent about our babies, our feelings towards our babies and about ourselves. It was such a tremendous outlet during a most stressful time, a time that I had always expected to be blissful and sweet cooing with our new baby. We survived, and only with one another’s support.
He grew up and just like the book said, he grew out of the colicky phase (unknown yet about the "issues"). Whew. And just when I thought I was out of the woods, bam! Baby number two arrives, and what do you know, he’s got gas pains too!
