These days, whenever I go out in public with Lucy, at least a small handful of people will stop us to make some variation of the comment : “She’s such a happy baby.” I smile, nod, and encourage her to give her chubby-fisted clumsy little wave that melts hearts across America like silly putty on a warm night (take my word on this one, you do not want to find out for yourself how melty silly putty can get. Your kid’s sheets will never be the same).

Or maybe it’s just my heart she does this too, but in any case, it’s cute. I mean, seriously cute. There is something  magnetic about a baby at around eight months of age.  It’s as if they are right at the cusp of being able to move around on their own and explore the world, but there is this brief window of time where they can’t quite do it yet, so they must instead draw the world to them with their sparkly eyes, crooked barely-there tooth grins, and utter delight at having found small, meaningful ways of communicating with the natives of this planet. You will wave to Lucy and she will wave back, grinning with pleasure at her success, then she’ll catch a glimpse of her fist in her periphereal vision and turn her hand towards her face, looking at it all wide eyed and shocked as if she’s thinking, did I do that? Is that thing mine? Her world is so absolutely chalk full of wonder at this age, and people will literally cross the street to peak into the restaurant window and soak up just a little bit of that wonder.

It’s not unique to Lucy, I know this because the exact thing happened with our son at this age. Still, every time someone calls her “a happy baby,” I savor it for a moment before tucking it away in my mind as a little bit of hope and healing.

Back in The Dark Days, it was hard to believe this day would every come. Lucy was our second baby, and all of our friend’s second babies were flexible, mellow little creatures who fit somewhat seamlessly into their parent’s already busy toddler-centric lives. I remember clearly this moment early in my pregnancy when we were over at our friends Lisa and Shasta’s house.  Cari, Lisa and I were all in the kid’s bedroom playing with the toddlers when Shasta got home and came into the room and said: “How long has the baby been sitting alone in the other room?” We all looked at her blankly for a moment, like, what baby?

Those who know me best know that I actually have a streak of deeply-rooted pessimism, and in that moment I did not think: Our second baby will be just like that.  No, quite on the contrary, I thought: no way will we have it that easy. I just had this hunch that because Lucy was our second baby, but my first pregnancy, there would be some critical piece of genetic information she would miss about the need to fit flexibly into our already chaotic lives.

Sure enough, after seven ridiculous days of early labor and regular contractions, Lucy arrived with a bang. She flew out, catching everyone but me by surprise. I knew full well I planned to push her out with that one big push after waiting half an hour for the midwife to make her way to our hospital room. I just didn’t realize this wasn’t clear to everyone else, and that there were some critical instructions- like the role of little pushes- the midwife hadn’t had a chance to share yet.

We knew there was meconium in her amniotic fluid, so we waited anxiously for those first few seconds before she cried as the NICU team hovered in the back of the room, prepared to whisk her away. Then, she let out this incredible, blood curdling scream, and she basically just didn’t stop.

For the next three or four months, she screamed. She screamed that first night in the hospital while all the other tiny newborns curled limply against their mother’s chests. She screamed on the short ride home, and she screamed that first night home. She screamed so loudly that at the apex of a particularly vigorous yell, the little nightlight in our bedroom suddenly turned into a spotlight. Unbeknownst to us it had a special feature designed to light your way to safety when the fire alarm goes off, and Lucy circa one day old, barrel chested with big, strong lungs, was louder than a fire alarm.

Sometime before the nightlight kicked it up to full alert, but after I had already kicked Cari out of the bedroom for the infanticidal gleam I sensed in her eye, Lucy and I lay side by side in the middle of the bed, staring at each other. She, clearly confused and in pain, and me, at an absolute loss for what to do. Then, she reached out her small little hand to grab mine and looked at me imploringly, as if to ask, will you help me? 

From that moment it was Lucy and I against the world, and boy did it feel like the world was against us. All of Cari’s attempts to point out that something wasn’t right and babies don’t normally scream for six or seven hours at a time, fell on deaf ears. All I heard was her saying that something is wrong with the baby you birthed, because mine didn’t scream like that.

We hadn’t expected the screaming, but what we really hadn’t expected was the sudden emergence of this “mine” and “yours” divide. When Logan was born, he was ours, ours ours, and we were fiercely proud of his equal attachment to both of us. But when Lucy was born, Cari felt acutely the difference in her instantaneous, hormone-drenched bond to Logan, and her feelings towards Lucy, whose screaming remained unfazed by Cari’s best efforts at bouncing, shushing, rocking, humming, pleading. This infuriated me wildly. She was perfect and there was Nothing Wrong With Her. She was fierce and strong and healthy, and so so screamed a lot, what’s wrong with that? Babies cry. We hadn’t wanted a passive, compliant little girl, anyway, right? We wanted her to be able to find her voice, and boy had she.

Our neighbor, who works for CPS, came over to check on us on several occasions, and I thought, how strange is that? Doesn’t she know that babies cry? Wherever we took her, people made comments like “Oh, my, she’s awfully upset, isn’t she?” or, “My goodness what a set of lungs she has!” I would give them a thin lipped smile-grimace that dared them to keep up their commentary.

And then one day, about three weeks in, she stopped. She stopped screaming, she stopped eating every ten minutes, and she actually slept. She napped for three or four hours. She stayed asleep as I took her to Logan’s soccer class, and she stayed asleep as we took him to dinner afterwards. She was this sleepy, peaceful little newborn, and we did what any reasonable parent would have done in our situation. We called Kaiser. “Something is wrong with our baby,” we told the advice nurse. “She is sleeping for three or four hours at a time, and she is waking only to eat and then going back to sleep. She hasn’t cried more than ten minutes all day.”

“Does she have a fever, diarrhea, or vomiting?” they asked us. “Is she limp, unresponsive, pale?”

“No, no, no, but you don’t understand. Something is wrong with her. This is not like her!” At some point during that conversation, as I listened to the advice nurse struggle to understand exactly what the problem was since we were reporting that our baby was acting exactly like a sleep newborn should, I realized that we had a situation on our hands. And the situation was not that Cari was trying to say something was wrong with Lucy because she didn’t love her, the situation was the something was wrong with Lucy.

The medical definition of Colic is the rule of threes: a healthy, well-fed infant who cries more than three hours a day, more than three days a week, for more than three weeks. I read this, looked over at my healthy, round cheeked, red-faced, screaming little girl and thought: Three hours a day? Three days a week? That’s nothing! What is this nonsense? Lucy cries at least twice that much…. And then I finally reached the end of denial.

Now that I was ready to accept we had a problem, I moved full force into Solving It. I spent hours reading about the causes, cures, and prognosis of colic, and frankly, the research sucks. Over and over again, I read that by definition colic means they don’t know what is wrong with the baby, and they don’t know what will help it. All they know is that eventually it ends. In the area of what it might mean for long term outcomes, health, maternal-child relationships, or the big T (temperament), I found basically nothing.

That was the big one for me, temperament. We put a lot of stock in it. When Logan was born this wonderful, soothing nurse who was a temperament specialist came and evaluated Logan and shared with us this story about how babies are born into the world the way that they will be in it, and how she saw triplets born, one curious and alert, one screaming, and one sleepy and reluctant to come out. Then she saw them three years later for a follow up and they entered the room that same way: one curious and calm, one screaming and tantrumming, one dragging along behind the others, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

Now, this was very helpful for us when our son came into the world wide eyed, contemplative, and curious. It gave us lots of hope and warm feelings about our future while we struggled through the crawling parade of sleepless nights. Never mind that he quickly turned into a delightful holy tornado of constant motion as a toddler, her message stayed with us none the less. You get what you get, when it comes to temperament, and you know what you got right out of the gate.

To be perfectly, brutally honest, it looked like what we got with Lucy was an absolutely gorgeous, healthy, amazing little girl who was going to give us hell for the rest of our days. Cari said Lucy’s motto was “protest first” because she protested any change as soon as it happened. She screamed when you put her down and when you picked her up. She screamed when you didn’t fed her, and she even took her mouth off the boob to scream between pretty much every swallow when you did. If it was between the hours of 3 pm and 10 pm, she was screaming. Often, when I looked at her, the lyrics: “she came in like a wrecking ball” played unbidden in my mind, although I wouldn’t admit this to anyone, especially Cari, until much, much later.

Each night while Cari got Logan ready for bed, I walked Lucy up and down our street in the Ergo, one hand on her butt and one against the back of her neck, doing a walking/bouncing/swaying combo while alternately shushing and ohm-ing, glaring defensively at anybody who passed, daring them to make some comment about the strength of her scream. I barely saw our son in those early months because I was so desperate to help our daughter stop screaming. I went from putting Logan to bed every night of his life to sneaking in for quick hug and a kiss after Cari had put him to bed, the desperate wail of Lucy pulling me quickly back out again.

After Cari went back to work, the sense of Lucy and I against the world only intensified. I was learning to differentiate her cries, and the one we heard from 3 to 10 pm was clearly not frustration, hunger, or exhaustion- it was pain. Something was hurting her, and I was on a mission to find it. Each day, as the clock inched closer to three, my dread would grow, knowing the Dark Hours were almost upon us. I would try desperately to get her to sleep so we could miss at least an hour of it, laying her in her swing, turned up on high, my hands resting on her belly and against her check, my thumb holding in the pacifier, trying to apply a constant pressure yet not fall over as the swing rocked dutifully back and forth. When she finally gave up her screaming and dropping into sleep, I would inch away, carefully avoiding any squeaky spots in the hardwood, tiptoeing a wide arc around the swing and holding my finger to my lips to silently shush the dogs, my eyes sending death threats towards them if they so much as jangled their collars. That was the first time I felt truly crazy, silently shushing our dogs as if they could understand me, telecommunicating to them that I was willing to rehome them or worse if they woke the sleeping baby. We were in a full on war here with this unknown enemy named colic, and I would take no prisoners.

Then, in those few stolen quiet moments, I would begin to research. Most of my reading pointed towards tummy troubles, which seemed supported by the fact that she while nursing Lucy would swallow milk, scream, swallow milk, scream. Some people said Colic was related to acid reflux, others said gas, oversupply of milk, overactive let down, too much foremilk, or allergies to foods in the nursing mother’s diet. The common theme was that something was wrong with my milk, something was wrong with me. I was poisoning my baby. I decided on a full force approach to what was quickly reaching a state of emergency. To get her to fall asleep at night, we would give her a triple-hitter of prescription antacid medication, gas drops, and homemade potent gripe water. Then, I would nurse Lucy to sleep, keeping her in an upright position to prevent reflux, but while also leaning back to prevent overactive letdown, without switching sides to prevent too much foremilk, all while standing up and rhythmically bouncing in the laundry room with the drier running as background noise, because otherwise she wouldn’t nurse or sleep at all. After an hour of two of this, it worked like a charm (mostly). There was nothing to it. Really, I’m being serious. Compared to the diet stuff, it was a piece of cake.

With the help of my trusty internet research, a poll of other moms at our Kaiser group, and a trial and error process that involved removing any foods that I’d eaten in the hours (or days) leading up to a particularly bad screaming episode, I developed a successful elimination diet: No fruits, vegetables, dairy, dairy bi-products, spices or seasonings, hummus, beans, flax seed, soy, quinoa, and caffeine. For those of you keeping score, that pretty much leaves unseasoned meat, unhealthy bread, rice, and almond or coconut milk. This isn’t exactly an inspiring diet to survive on yourself, let alone grow another person on, but any variation from it would result in an epic screaming session that would leave me wracked with guilt for the pain I’d caused my baby. This was the second, the third, the fourteenth time I felt crazy.

It’s hard to say, with a little distance from the situation, if she was really sensitive to all of those things, or if I just wound up eliminating all of the foods I regularly ate one by one because she cried after I ate them. But, regardless, it gave me enough of a sense of control over the situation to survive, and eventually, gradually, it passed. The crying stretches shortened, the volume turned down. The shenanigans needed to survive each bed time lessened, and finally, with great fear and trepidation, I began to eat again.

Just as the kind temperament nurse had been the voice of Logan’s babyhood that helped us survive his seven sleepless months, I gained a new voice for Lucy’s babyhood. One day while walking through the library with Lucy, a beautiful elderly Native American woman approached me and said: “I’ve been watching your baby, I hope you don’t mind, and I couldn’t help but notice how incredibly alert she is. She is so aware of the world around her. She will be a genius. The weight of guiding that genius will be your burden to bear as her mother, but it will be worth it.”

It has absolutely been worth it. As the months tick by Lucy’s colic becomes a smaller and smaller portion of her life. People have been calling her a happy baby for more months now than they marveled at the incredible pitch of her siren-cry. But “happy” is not the full story, nor should it be. She is still strong willed, opinionated, funny, social, smart, and observant. She is sensitive to her environment and quick to offer her thoughts on any changes in it. Right now, she has set all of that will and determination on learning how to crawl. She will get on all fours, rock studiously, flail her limbs in various directions, and then push back to sitting and clap, delighted at her incredible progress. We are too.