Crying.,Or, Your Boss Doesn’t Hold onto Your Leg Whining While you Cook

Over the decades of babycare manuals, while the crying has remained constant, the multiplicity of meanings attached to it has expanded. And, from the quaint explanation of yesteryear (‘they need to stretch their lungs’) to the stern warnings of today’s baby gurus (‘every cry is a communication’) you can be damn sure of one thing: We are biologically programmed to respond. No matter if you get carpal tunnel from rocking that baby in front of a white noise machine, or wear your car out from driving around at the Witching Hour –you’re gonna do what it takes! And why? Because you know that every cry means something (no matter if we can’t figure it out, or haven’t agreed on what it is) and because allowing an unmet need to exist in your child’s fragile infancy is tantamount to child abuse.

Having survived one colicky (read: inconsolable) infant, however, I have some radical advice to offer you: Sometimes biology really isn’t destiny. Sometimes babies cry because it’s what they do; ‘birds fly and babies cry’. Of course, when he cried I would still leap to respond, ticking off the options (nurse/burp/change/rock) until, bleary-eyed, I would stare mutinously at the still-screaming infant, muttering ‘whaddya want, kid? Some late 19^th century French poetry? A crash course in Advanced Algebra? WHAT??’ But sometimes I just couldn’t respond, not because I was too exhausted (though I was that, too) but because I literally couldn’t. Jack, you see, cried every time we lowered his little baby bottom into the car seat. Cried fit to bust, as if we had stuck pins and needles all over his little self. At the beginning we tried everything (because you must - ‘every cry is a communication’ - unless you want to raise a psychopath), from playing white noise to wrapping him in a T-shirt that smelt of me, to nursing him just before we went everywhere, but to no avail. Four months on and he was still going strong, but by that time, I just turned the radio on loudly and ignored it. I mean, seriously, what was I supposed to do, stop driving anywhere?

The baby books don’t talk about that.

Eventually, of course, he grew out of it. At five months, he merely fussed every time we put him in the car seat, nearly a year on he quite likes it as long as the trips are short and I play some groovy tunes. Occasionally we’re so freaked out by the sound of silence in the back seat that I turn around and rub his little head, just to check that he’s still alive.

Now we have different problems, though. Now we have a tiny leg-hugger who hangs all over me while I move, lumpenly, around the kitchen doing craven, selfish things like fix us both lunch rather than read ‘Brown Bear’ for the 8 millionth time that day. I’ll bet your boss doesn’t do that to you, though – hold onto your leg and whine about where your unfinished report is (much as he might like to).