Three Months of Colic and the Night It Finally Stopped

Every evening at around six, like a switch flipping, my son would begin to cry. Not the regular newborn cry. This was a high, furious, inconsolable scream that went on for hours, his little knees pulled up, his face purple. The doctor checked everything, found nothing wrong, and said the word that would define our season: colic.

Nobody prepares you for the exhaustion. I do not mean tired. I mean a bone-deep, hallucinatory fatigue where you forget words and cry at advertisements. My husband and I started doing shifts, walking circles around the living room with the baby on our shoulder, bouncing, shushing, swaying, while the clock crawled.

I am going to be honest, because someone needs to be. There were nights I stood in the dark and felt nothing but despair. Nights I handed the baby to my husband and locked myself in the bathroom just to breathe. I loved my son with everything I had, and I also did not know how much longer I could do this. Both things were true at once.

We tried it all. Gripe water, tummy massages, the bicycle legs, white noise, the vacuum cleaner running at 11 p.m., car rides around the colony. Some nights one thing helped for ten minutes. Mostly nothing did. The hardest part was the helplessness, the feeling that I should be able to fix my own child and could not.

What carried us was the truth that it would end. Our paediatrician kept saying colic usually eases by three to four months, and we clung to that sentence like a railing. We took it one evening at a time. We let the house be messy. We ate dinner standing up. We forgave each other for being short-tempered.

And then one night, around his twelfth week, six o'clock came and went, and he simply did not cry. He cooed. He looked at the ceiling fan and smiled. I stood frozen, almost afraid to believe it. My husband and I stared at each other across the quiet room and quietly, disbelievingly, began to laugh.

If you are in the middle of those screaming nights right now, please hold on. You are not failing. Your baby is not broken. The storm is real, and so is the morning that comes after it.