Six thirty p.m. is the witching hour at our house. That's when each day, without fail, our two-month-old daughter begins mewling and wriggling as if prodded by an invisible poker. This state eventually escalates into a non-stop, brain-piercing, four-hour crying jag.
My husband and I pass her back and forth for an hour and a half while getting our four-year-old fed, bathed and to bed. Then at eight, when we most want to collapse drooling and speechless in front of some banal reality show, the real work begins. We commence our fruitless ritual of pacifier, bottle, diaper, walking and swaddling. This provides her with little-to-no relief until, magically, we all collapse during the 11:00 Will & Grace rerun.
She's got a textbook case of colic. And it's kicking our ass.
"I never felt lonelier in my life," says my friend Chris, who is also a colic survivor. "Everyone tells you how great it is to be a mom. No one tells you how hard it can be, especially adding colic to the equation."
Ironically, we colicky couples are not alone in our loneliness. According to MayoClinic.com, colic may affect up to about twenty-five percent of babies. It usually improves by three months, but can last as long as nine.
"Having a baby is like being in a Las Vegas casino," explains Dr. Harvey Karp, author of The Happiest Baby on the Block. "There is no concept of time. New parents are unprepared and overwhelmed at the fact that it takes them all day to get nothing done. Add three or more hours of crying a day . . . The more stress you add to that situation, the more it breaks down. They used to torture people with tapes of babies crying in Guantánamo!"
Torture indeed. Constant exposure to that kind of screaming will do a number on your people skills. My husband and I start each evening shouting at each other for volume's sake and end up shouting at each other because the incessant shrieking (and our helplessness in squelching it) has frayed our very last nerve.
"Having a baby is like being in a Las Vegas casino," explains Dr. Harvey Karp. "There is no concept of time."
We then turn on each other like cornered feral cats, hissing and clawing over transgressions legit or not, instead of teaming up to help our kid through her crisis.
Sharon Verhoff, a mother of four in Ottawa, Ohio, had marital stress when colic struck one of her now ten-year-old twins. "Between the lack of sleep and hearing the baby cry all the time, we were both on edge and would snap at each other over the littlest things," she says. "It was wearing on our marriage."
Dr. Barry Lester,
head of the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, founder of The Infant Behavior, Cry and Sleep Clinic (IBCSC), at Women and Infants Hospital and Brown Medical School, and author of Why Is My Baby Crying, sees how colic beats on couples every day.
"Colic can cause serious long-term emotional consequences," says Lester. "It breaks down how the entire family unit functions. I've seen marriages break up and older children regress, all because of the tension colic brings into the home."
©2008 Vivian Manning-Schaffel and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Vivian Manning-Schaffel has written for Parents, Parenting, The Advocate, The New York Post, Business Week and a variety of other publications. She lives and works in the heart of breeder Brooklyn with her husband and two kids. She's on the web at vivianmanningschaffel.com. |
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