2 Weeks 2 Days

We traveled a long road to parenthood. My wife and I had a lot of time to contemplate the anxieties of becoming parents. As the due date - and then the induction date - approached, my greatest fear was something happening to my wife during labor. My next concern was something happening to our son during labor, compromising his short or long-term health. We have a number of friends with special-needs children. My wife is an ICU nurse, so the birth sample she's seen is wildly slanted towards affliction.

Melissa did not have a smooth labor (because it turned out our son had a 99.88 percentile head size), but Elias Orion Fuller was born fully healthy via a routine c-section on the afternoon of July 14th, 2022. We were exhausted but thrilled. With a lot of assistance, we'd navigated that epic road. Doc pulled Elias out, he looked around for a moment pondering, then let out a single small cry. He wouldn't cry again for several hours, prompting me to wonder aloud if we'd been lucky enough to get one who wouldn't cry much.

lol.

We entered the parenting game rather late, so we had a hivemind of recon coming in. There was no illusion that infancy would be a bundle of joy. We knew it would be difficult, especially the first few weeks. We rolled out of the hospital three days after Eli was born mentally prepared for a battle, if not physically. I was awed by the stamina of my wife, lively after five practically sleepless days and nights.

Breastfeeding an infant is quite a challenge. We settled into a somewhat jagged system of breastfeeding Eli by day and bottle-feeding him by night while continuing to pump. With me manning the night watch, Melissa's winks of sleep in between pumps can be extended to more substantial chunks. She goes to bed around 9 and gets up around 6, pumping twice and waking up ready for battle. The boys - Eli, Bailey the dog and I - reside in the basement grinding bottles, World Series of Poker, Netflix and DVRed football games until dawn. 

Like most newborns, Eli is a fairly nocturnal creature. Melissa would often note how he liked to start partying (kicking her abdomen) right when she went to bed. I found myself struggling to get Eli back to sleep between some feedings. His eyes would open wide and we'd stare at each other for a while. Sometimes he'd clutch my finger with a surprisingly resolute grip. Perhaps I'd read to him for a bit, play pacifier tug-of-war or walk around the basement. Precious stuff, until the crying began. With increasing frequency, I had trouble consoling him. I did all the things: diaper check, swaddling, swinging, shhing, white noise, bouncing, jiggling, walking, talking. He only became more and more inconsolable - and so did I.

The only thing that ever worked was feeding him again. The books and docs said to aim for feedings every three hours, but they also said to feed him prodigiously until he'd regained his birth weight - which still hadn't happened two weeks in. I figured he wasn't getting enough food during the day and was trying to compensate with cluster feeds at night (I'm still suspicious this may be a factor in the timing of his meltdowns). I grew pretty convinced feeding was the issue, as he always took the bottle and usually guzzled its contents down. I repeatedly presented the evidence to Melissa, but she didn't really buy it. Instead, she  questioned the effort and competence I was putting into consoling him.

This pissed me off more than anything Melissa has ever done, I think. I'm down here in the basement taking a nightly beating so she doesn't have to, and she accuses me of apathy?! But if our roles had been reversed, I probably would have reacted the same way. Eli doesn't have these meltdowns around her. Perception is one's reality. Surely the clumsy husband must be mangling something.

*Fortunately* Eli did melt down in front of her yesterday after dinner, and this time she couldn't console him. Finally she saw what I've been seeing - not my account of it, but a real, live, screaming, thoroughly inconsolable infant. When I got up today, Melissa told me she thought Eli might have colic.

Beyond the birth-related stuff, colic was one of my biggest parenting anxieties. About 1 in 5 infants are afflicted with it. Colic is essentially inexplicable and incurable. Fortunately, it has no effect on the child's longterm well-being and almost always dissipates after 3 to 4 months. Basically, colic is a ~3 month sentence of hopeless, earsplitting crying.

After reading up some more on colic during the day, I am convinced Eli has it. His behavior identically matches accounts of colic. Psychologically, today was good news/bad news. It was a great relief to realize Eli isn't melting down because of something I'm doing wrong. Melissa and I now see the situation eye to eye. We stand together ready for this battle. Together our power is greater than the sum of our individual resolves. 

On the other hand, I am staring down the barrel of roughly ninety nights of screaming, hysterical misery. This blog, compiled in the dark hours of the night in between tantrums, will chronicle my unwinnable battles against the scourge known as colic.