Memory Keeper

Noah and I were walking the other day when we heard a baby crying. Like really crying. Like drowning out the traffic and the birds and the kids playing in the schoolyard across the street.

“Mom, did I cry when I was a baby?”

“Did you cry as a baby?” I repeated. “All babies cry.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he responded, vaguely dissatisfied with my answer.

I find it an awesome and awkward responsibility to be the keeper and curator of Noah’s pre-verbal history, the baby history for which his memories are murky. Over his seven-year life span he’s coaxed me into spinning some Greatest Hits. Like how the nurse, upon his emergence from my body, exclaimed, “Oh! A redhead! What a surprise!” Or the summer he was one and would wander to nearby picnickers to steal their farmers’ market berries after he’d eaten ours. Or how his first word was “hello” and he became our friendly ambassador. Or how we’d sit in a café on Rainier Avenue South and go traffic watching. I’d toss these stories out, fully formed and smooth from the retellings.

But the tough stuff, I’m not sure how or when to share that. How to say, you didn’t just cry, you wailed. You didn’t just wail, you screeched. You didn’t just screech, you exhausted and terrified me. Your cries made me wonder if it was my fault, if I had the mettle to be a mother, if it would ever end.

Colic, an old-fashioned moniker for a mystery, is diagnosed by the non-medical sounding “Rule of Threes:” an otherwise healthy baby who cries for at least three hours a day, three days a week, for three weeks. Doctors do not know what causes the crying or why is ceases, just that it does, generally by twelve weeks. If it doesn’t, then the crying might get caught up in the butterfly net of another diagnosis.

With Noah, the crying began in earnest when he was two weeks old. We faithfully followed Harvey Karp’s appropriated “Five Ss:” swaddling, side-lying, shhhh-ing, swinging, sucking. While he nursed, he was calm. He seemed to appreciate the baby bondage of a tight swaddle. A high enough bounce in my arms on the exercise ball seemed to quiet him. Until it didn’t.

We slid down the slippery-walled bucket of colic for the depth of a Seattle summer. Noah was healthy. He was growing. As he nursed, I’d marvel at how his head grew in relation to the size of my breast. He was healthy, so healthy.

But he cried. His back arched. His face reddened. He panted. He squeezed his eyes shut. He yelled in quick, terrifying bursts. I cooed and I pleaded. I consulted Dr. Google in the night hours I had, in a previous life, used for sleeping. Then my sanity frayed and my husband, Paul, rallied to get me an uninterrupted block of sleep. We sliced the night into two generous portions. Paul took the fat wedge from eight to two and I took the slimmer slice from two to seven.

We tried Gripe Water. We tried the Dust Buster (the sound sometimes soothed him, at least until the battery ran out). Family and friends took turns with Noah.

The afternoons, when it was just Noah and me, bled into one sun-soaked quilt of dazed nursing, diaper changing, sloppy swaddling, and consoling the inconsolable. I felt like a shit mother, and to be frank, I felt like Noah wasn’t living up to his end of the bargain. Could he at least have the decency to let his mother soothe him? And, more ominously, what did these early unholy cries mean for our future?

Our experience with colic followed the typical pattern: it just disappeared. One evening, around Noah’s twelfth week, I had a hunch. My faith in my maternal instinct had been pulverized in the previous weeks, so I’m not sure where I got the confidence to insist, “Noah will sleep through the night. Set up his crib.”

Noah had not yet slept on his own for more than two hours. He had never slept lying down, except on someone’s chest. He had never slept on his back. He had been wiggled and jiggled and jostled and vibrated and bounced and swung.

“Set up his crib now.”

We had a portable crib Paul snapped into place. We sang to Noah and kissed him and put him on his back. It felt like play-acting. We had never done this ritual before and had it result in a sleeping child. But tonight Noah played his role too. It was nighttime and he slept. For ten hours. He woke up smiling and babbly and pee soaked. The next night, he slept for twelve hours.

And, just like that, colic moved on. Within the month, a father friend pulled us aside and told us not to mention that our four-month old slept through the night. You know, not all parents are so lucky.

-Karen Rosenberg

Karen Rosenberg is a teacher and writer based in Seattle, Washington. She directs a university writing center and loves helping people tell their own stories. Karen has designed and delivered writing workshops for faculty, social service providers, survivors of domestic violence, people without homes, and general community members. She writes for both academic and general audiences and has a major crush on The Moth podcast.