Not colic yet, but...

I had a celebratory dinner that Noah's gaining and thriving and happy and healthy, and looked forward to getting if not more sleep, better, less anxious sleep.

Until he started power-nursing with real fussiness at the breast and I finally figured out he wasn't hungry, he was sucking to try to... get rid of gas? deal with his hard day? escape from an over-anxious mum? Whatever it was it quickly escalated into full-blown crying at length - like 3 hours. My mother in law took him away and sent me to bed, since I'd gotten maybe a half hour the night before plus a brief nap in the afternoon. She used to be a maternity nurse and knew some tricks to at least halfway calm him down, which I want to learn today, hopefully in theory.

The cats were quite disgusted with me: do something! they meowed.

I learned a lot about myself and the system, at least this first (hopefully not the first of many many, but certainly there will be more) night of long long crying. There wasn't any anger at Noah, which was something I'd worried a bit about, especially in myself, who am quick to anger. It is hard to feel helpless, though, and I had to do a lot of deep breathing to not tense up and make quicker motions (or clumsier, since I was really the walking dead at that point).

I think the worst of it for me is that any feeling of helplessness tends to lead to Dark Thoughts - that he's dying, that letting him cry the night before utterly broke any parent-baby bond and he'll be unhappy the rest of his life. Attachment parenting contends that a truly loved and bonded child is unlikely to develop colic (which again, this is not yet, but I wonder - both Carl and I were colicky babes).

My mind says that if you say colic only occurs in unloved babies of course when you ask parents if their babies have colic they'll say no. But my new, fragile parent-self that wanders the kitchen in the night wondering about poo and wet diapers and whether I will totally fuck my kid up and whether I would notice if he were really sick, says if you'd only left him on the breast last night he'd never have any need to cry ever, forever. And then it says and you're ruining him having these negative thoughts in his presence! (Grr attachment parenting for all the guilt. Nevertheless I am baby-wearing today.)

I wonder why parenting brings back a lot of magical thinking. Maybe it's because I'm so desperate to have it come out okay. It's not that I don't think negative thoughts have some power - they do - but I don't think they have immediate power in that way. They make me tense, and that communicates to Noah.

And I did anyway - get tense, that is. I actually willfully stepped back out of the front at one point because I was all in adrenaline-protector mode. That's hard to do while in protector mode, but other members of the system were just waiting for me to do it, so there was a push to get me to hand the baby over to them. Even so, he didn't stop crying.

It was hard to hand him over to his grandma when she offered, but not as hard as maybe I would have liked - at that point we could recognize that we needed to put our oxygen mask on first, or so the rationalization goes, but it still felt like a failure. The bleeding had gotten heavy again, and my feet were swollen, and my eyes were dry and I was really clumsy - really massive sleep deprivation, tempered a bit by worry. If I'd been on my own I'd've coped, but I didn't have to.

It was really hard on Lyria to hand him over though and she cried before we fell asleep for that blessed hour and a half. Somehow it's really not the same as handing him over to Carl. (Carl was asleep, as we'd agreed that he might need to be a backup for later in the night.)

I had the thought if we hadn't messed her up by living at my parents' some this year that Noah wouldn't have had this upset, but that's unfair. Lyr may represent an earth-godessy type to us, but she's just a person, and it's unrealistic to think that just because she often is the one with the right gentle touches that she can somehow create a charmed babyhood out of nowhere.

Magdalynn is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the best at handling Noah when he's frantic like that. She takes it as a sort of badge of honour that he's fierce and strong, where the rest of us are more in the realm of: are his bowels exploding as we speak? Is he in pain? what about his diaper? She just laughs and sings folk songs to him. The only hard part there is she has no relationship to Carl at all, and so she has a tendency to vanish as soon as he comes to check up.

In any case we made it through. He did calm down some and got to sleep around 2, although he woke often and didn't go back down easily for his 3:30 and 5 am feeds. Right now I'm wearing him in the sling and he's passed out. I should sleep, but it's daytime and it's so hard to sleep in the daytime (that's another post).

Still no poo either, but we're not to worry about that yet. If I go ahead with taking him down to work I presume he'll have a huge blownout right in front of everyone.

And I will just laugh.

Shandra