Tonight L cried as he hasn’t cried before – loud, awful wailing that brought T and I to incredibly high levels of stress! It is so unbelievably sad when you cannot make a baby feel better, and even worse when you recognize that the cry is different. More urgent. Accompanied by true tears in the child’s eyes. So difficult to deal with!
A crying baby is something I was able to take easily before I was a mom. When it wasn’t my baby it wasn’t a big deal, even if the crying was severe and sad. But suddenly when it is my own little tyke, different cries enlist different emotions in me. Some cries I know are transient, close to happiness, able to come to an end soon. Other cries – like the wailing I heard this evening – seem neverending and increasingly terrifying. I checked his temperature because the cry was so different, listened closer to his breathing. Thankfully everything seemed normal.
In the end I think it is terrible gas that was probably the culprit, accompanied by a hunger that couldn’t be met with the intermittent pacifier or my pinky. Whenever I offered the breast he would wail even more and it took a lot of coaxing to finally get him to feed. The other things that helped tonight was a nice rub to his belly, “shhh”-ing, and moving his legs back and forth and up and down. And then a nice sit-down in his changer – which is officially his favorite place in the house. Who knew that a rubbery green thing would be the most comfortable thing to my little guy – superior to pillows? Of course, not superior to mommy and daddy’s arms which are also great soothers. In the end the final soother was a song I often play for little L each night. We listen to A.R. Rahman’s “Tu Bole, Main Boloon” from Jaane Tu . . . ya Jaane Naa and dance the fox trot. I lead and we sway back and forth in the dim light of the bedroom – where L sleeps next to us in his bassinet, and I sing along to the best of my Hindi-remembering-and-pronouncing abilities. Of course, I hardly know the meaning of the words that I sing, maybe a few bits and pieces but the context and full story of the song still challenges me. Yet we both become calm and he drifts toward happiness. Then I fed him, much more still and calm and he drifted off lazily to sleep and was easy to put in the bassinet. Not so easy in the day time of course – then he wants to be held. But in the night he will let us lay him down.
For the rest of the evening I spent time cleaning up the home, covering some cake truffles in chocolate, folding laundry (my daily/every-other-daily task) and surfing real estate and cloth-diapering websites for fun, and generally being lazy. L’s cousins and uncle and grandmother and great aunt are visiting tomorrow, and we want the house to be more or less spick-and-span before the baby-and-pizza fest.
Hopefully the zealous cloth-diapering bug in me will disappear. Seriously I need more important things to be fascinated with. Only when I write a list of the tasks I want to do, do I start any of them. And during these times unfortunately I spend more time writing the tasks than doing any of them and I wind up woefully behind. So perhaps I was more productive tonight than I actually thought. Good night!