Little baby Fletcher spent the night last night. He is almost 2 months old and growing fast! That's a good thing! I was reminded, however, of nights with his mother 34 years ago; colic.
If you have had a colicky baby, I need not say more. If not - well, sleep becomes a memory; it is fleeting, ephemeral. You fall into the Wishful Thinking bias hourly. You know, "maybe if I hold her like this on my stomach " or "maybe if I give her a bottle at room temperature instead of warm," or "maybe if I could just be 18 again" ..... Then you pass on into let's try this again, and again, and again phase and guess what! Nothing changes!
Then the escalation of commitment bias rears its ugly head! Since it has already been 3 weeks of trying to get the baby to sleep for at least 2 straight hours without screaming in pain from the colic, you cannot stop trying to stop it. You have already invested 3 weeks of your sleep deprived time so you have to just try harder! So you look for any remotely feasible suggestions on how to make the colic go away so that you can sleep. You introduce pacifiers into the crying mouth, you try swaddling, gripe water; you rub olive oil on her stomach in a clockwise motion, eye of newt, toe of frog...you find yourself willing to spend hundreds of dollars on "products" guaranteed to soothe your baby properly because obviously you have demonstrated your utter failure to know how to do so yourself!
So now you slide into depression, despair, low self esteem, insomnia-induce temporary psychosis, stop bathing, eating, talking, what a mess! Also this because something that weighs eight pounds can't seem to stop crying, no matter what you do! Well, yes, I remember it well.
But now I am the gramma and NOT the mom. So Baby Fletcher and I managed rather successfully to make it through those night time hours. He fussed and I adored him. He grunted and groaned and I adored him. He even cried, and I adored him. Sometimes he even managed to sleep a little, me sitting in a chair and holding him close and adoring him. What a change in perspective 34 years can bring about!
