I put this post together a long time ago, but when I was finished copying all those Anne Lammott colic quotes I was feeling a little horrified myself, so I hit save and haven’t looked at the post since. With all my friends having babies right, left and centre these days and making it look so attractive… I thought it was time for a little refresh on what my last baby experience was really like, so I opened this up and was instantly empathizing. The truth is that I believe colic mamas are some of the most patient and tender mamas out there. They probably spend hundreds more hours rocking, cuddling, nursing, praying, and loving on their babies than the mom of a normal baby, but for the 99% of the time they are sweet and loving, there is the 1% where your mind suddenly conjures up the most hideous visions and you scare your own self with what your brain is capable of imagining. I remember I cried when I watched the movie Marley & Me (and no, (SPOILER ALERT) not because the dog died) but when they showed the couple going through the season of colic… with the snapping at each other and the desperation… it was the first time I had seen that dynamic dramatized and it was overwhelmingly honest to my experience. And so, for that reason I will post this, in all it’s dark humour…
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I was talking with someone yesterday about colic, and then feeling kinda ashamed about what felt at the time like an over-share. You know those moments when the stark truth just kind of slides out and then you are left feeling a little exposed… but then today I happened to be reading Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions (which I don’t recommend necessarily… Anne is a feminist, universalist, democrat who mixes brilliant writing with dodgy theology and annoying political opinions, and some colourful language! But! she writes in that self-exposing, honest to the core kind of way that is hard to find, and that I love so much.), and I was suddenly reassured that I was not the only crazed colic surviver out there! 
And so… here are some quotes. Some of you with happy or normal babies will be horrified. But those of you who know the colic, well, I think its always good to feel less alone. And less evil. Or at least… not alone in your evilness. I’ll just string a few of these together…
“He’s so fine all day, so alert and beautiful and good, and then the colic kicks in. I’m okay for the first hour, more or less, not happy about things but basically okay, and then I start to lose it as the colic continues. I end up incredibly frustrated and sad and angry. I have had some terrible visions lately, like of holding him by the ankle and whacking him against the wall, the way you “cure” an octopus on the dock. I have gone so far as to ask him if he wants me to go get the stick with the nails, which is what my friend Kerry says to her dogs when they are being especially bad. I have never hurt him and don’t believe I will, but I have had to leave the room he was in, go somewhere else, and just breathe for a while, or cry, clenching and unclenching my fists. I have four friends who had babies right around the time I did, all very eccentric and powerful women, and I do not believe that any of them are having these awful thoughts. Of course, I know they’re not all being Donna Reed either, but one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness and rage.
The colic was very bad last night. Actually, it is bad almost every night now. Everyone is supportive and encouraging, but the colic still makes me feel like a crappy mother, not to mention impotent and lost and nuts. I can handle the crying for a long time, but then I feel like I’m going to fall over the precipice into total psychosis. Last night at midnight it occurred to me to leave him outside for the night, and if he survived, to bring him inside in the morning. Sort of an experiment in natural selection.
The worst night yet . Sam was wild with colic until midnight, and nothing helped. Nothing. I have never felt so impotent and frustrated in my life. I tried everything. I put a tape of summer night sounds complete with crickets n the boom box, because white noise is supposed to help. I put a wam hot water bottle on his tummy, held his feet, and made him do bicycle peddling because that is supposed to help him pass gas. I surrounded him with pillows in the baby swing someone lent us, rocked and nursed and rocked and nursed, which would help for ten minutes every so often. Then the sobbing would begin again. This went on for hour straight hours. I can’t walk him for very long because my body is still all torn up. It feels like there’s a fishing weight suspended from its highest point; the weight swings like a pendulum and drags the wound downward. The ache when I walk or stand up for too long is totally defeating. All I can do is try to breathe, deeply and slowly, and pray. We Christians like to go around thinking that God isn’t here to take away our pain and fear but to fill it with His presence, and I can feel Jesus’ sorrowful eyes on us as Sam and I walk and rock and nurse and listen to our white noise on the boom box, but still the frustration flushes through me again and again. If I had a baseball bat, I would smash holes in the wall.
I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would your most beloved mental patient relative, with great humour and lots of small treats. But it is so hard to feel that way today because I’m so riled up. I keep thinking of something the great black theologian Howard Thurman said, that we must try to look out at the world through quiet eyes. But I tell you, in the middle of the colic death marches, I end up looking at the baby with those hooded eyes that were in the old ads for the Boston Strangler.
Once Peg said that she knew God had given her this marvellous brain but that unfortunately he had put her mind inside of it. That pretty much says it for me.
I wonder if it is normal for a mother to adore her baby so desperately and at the same time to think about choking him or throwing him down the stairs. It’s incredible to be this stinking tired and yet to have to go through the several hours of colic every night. It would be awful enough to deal if you were feeling like total dog poop. When he woke me up at 4:00 this morning to nurse, I felt like I was dying. I felt like getting up to pull down the shades and wave good-bye to all my people, but I was too tired.
We had another bad night. We finally slept for two hours at 7:00am. What a joke. I feel like thin glass, like I might crack. I was very rough changing him at 4:00 when he wouldn’t stop crying. I totally understand child abuse now. I really do. He was really sobbing and the gas pain was obviously unbearable, and I felt helpless and in a rage and so tired and messed up that I felt I should be in a home. I can’t stop crying. I cried all night, along with the baby. Pammy came over and brought two sacks of groceries, and put clean sheets on our bed, and helped us both have a bath, and just in general talked me down as if I were on a window ledge. The exhaustion, the sleep deprivation, make me feel like I’m in the bamboo cage under cold water in The Deer Hunter. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but this must be what it feels like to be a crack baby. It’s a little like PMS on mild psychedelics.”
So…um… yeah. Next time you hear a baby has colic? Give that poor, crazy mama a great big hug.
