The 'C' Word....
The dreaded C word…you all know the word, it’s bold, it’s potent, it makes a statement and it instantly makes you feel like you’re in the “other” category. Yes, the word I’m referring to is the dreaded Colic (what did you think I meant?!)
When child No. 2 was born we felt this immediate beautiful bond. Fresh off my peaceful home birth I was radiating with this sense of, fuck yeah, well look at us go. Our older daughter took to her new brother like a duck to water, all nurturing, sweet and filled with pride. That’s precisely the moment when things started to take a severe nose dive into ‘ugh, what the fuck did we just do to your lives?’ ville. It always begins with an excuse as any good loss does…’oh, it’s just the jaundice…it was a rough few days on peds’…’oh he’s just having a hard time getting his latch sorted out’. As the weeks wore on it became this slow pain setting in…like someone slowly peeling off a scab. I had to face the facts. No, this was not just the jaundice, this was not a bad latch…this was something else. Something was seriously wrong.
There was no consoling him, there was no snuggling him, there was no peaceful newborn sleeping on momma’s worn out tits. There was nothing but squirming and screaming and red faces and hysteria and it was brutal. To be fair, there was indeed more than just simple colic at play after biting the bullet and giving breastfeeding the old heaveho right out the door (after a breast reduction at 20 I only had enough milk to feed a hamster). I thought formula might be the answer. Alas, all the formula seemed to do was upset him more. I began scouring the internet (as you do) in search of what could be causing my son to turn into Linda Blair within 5 minutes of starting a feed. After reading article after article on milk protein allergy I began to think I had this in the bag. I hi-fived myself for doctoring the shit outta this and bought him some hypoallergenic formula which contains of course, no milk protein. Problem solved!!!! Yah ok.
The pain of it is that I had my hopes right up as high as they could go that as soon as I got this milk issue under control he would fall into that blissful infant that I had imagined I would have. Expectations are a real bitch sometimes. Yes, the hypoallergenic formula helped but he was still a total prick and there was just nothing I could do about it. The worst part of having an infant with colic is the moment someone tells you there’s nothing you can do. When my doctor said it, I thought ‘Don’t fucking tell me that, if you tell me that again and I actually believe you I’ll kill myself’. The only thing that got me through was the vain hope that if I kept researching and reading and talking to other moms who went through it that I would happen upon this magical cure that would ‘fix’ him…that and netflix. But that isn’t always how it goes, as moms who are going through it know. So just stay with it because I feel you.
xo Kristin
#colic #newborn #pregnancy #momming #parenting #parenthinghumor #survivalmode #BadMomKristin
