According to paediatrician Dr Caroline Fertleman: “A perfectly healthy baby can cry up to 12 hours, pretty much non-stop.” Just let that sink in for a moment. Let that twist through your shoulder muscles like concrete, let it wind around your heart like poison ivy, let it pour across your cheeks, heave across your chest and run through your blood like lead.
The cries of a baby, specifically of your baby, can tear you limb from limb without breaking your skin. They can undo your skeleton into a pile of twigs and plunge your heart into the darkest depths of despair. But the fact is that your baby will cry. It just will. You are not a bad parent. This isn’t your fault. It’s not their fault either. But all babies cry and all parents must suffer it.
Anyone who tells you that their baby, or most hilariously that you as a baby, didn’t cry is a liar. OK, let’s be charitable: they may have forgotten. They may be remembering you as a chubby, sunshine-smiling six-month-old. They may have had a nanny, so missed those fretted grisly evenings and agonised morning screams. They may just be trying to reassure you that babies don’t cry all the time, or that the crying stops. They may have post-traumatic amnesia and have simply blocked it out. They might, of course, be smug liars trying to reassure themselves that they were better parents than you. In which case you have my full and total authority to pee on their shoes at your next convenience. But they are wrong. All babies cry.
The reasons are, on the surface, utterly prosaic. In my flat we call them the big five: hunger, wind, tiredness, a dirty nappy or physical discomfort. The last is a sort of umbrella term for all life’s rich tapestry of suffering when you’ve just emerged from the sloshing, warm water world of an amniotic sac into the bright lights and hard surfaces of human life: too cold, too hot, a rough towel, a finger bent back in a babygrow, a forehead accidentally thunked against a collar bone, the itch of washing powder, a too-tight nappy, a scratchy clothing label, teething, a sticky eye, colic, nappy rash, the scratch of a baby nail across a soft cheek. But, there will be times, times without number and ripe with anguish, when you can’t locate any of the big five. Your baby will be well fed, their nappy with be box fresh, they’ve already done an almighty burp, they had an hour nap just half an hour ago, their clothes are loose, the room is mild, you’re rocking them, singing, walking up and down like a beleaguered sentry … and yet still they cry.
Of course, if there is something serious – your baby goes suddenly floppy, turns a strange colour, is vomiting without stop, then you must call a doctor or go straight to A&E. But very often there’s nothing like this. There’s nothing serious. So you try singing, try white noise, try bouncing, try to mimic the sounds of the womb with a hairdryer, a spin cycle on the washing machine, a loudly ticking clock. You take them for a walk around the block in the cold, pressed close under your coat, you lay them flat, hold them up tall, push a nipple into their red and bird-like screaming mouth, stroke their face, push their knees up into their belly to release any trapped farts, you put them in a cot, in a moses basket, in a sling, on your chest, you try distraction, massage, a bath, you’ve rocked and walked and rocked and walked until eventually, inevitably, you’ve wept too.
I have a lovely baby, a cheerful, interested, happy baby who sleeps and eats and shits like a natural. Several times, particularly at the beginning, I had to hand him over to the nearest person, go into my bedroom, close the door and howl. I once cried for so long that I had to change my own baby’s clothes, right down to the vest, as I’d soaked him through. I have called my mother in the middle of the night and cried because my baby’s crying is ripping through me like copper wire, only in the morning to realise what this must have been like for my poor mother: the sad-squared sound of your baby crying about her baby crying. Sorry, Mum.
There are, you may read, different types of crying, and those better versed than me can identify them easily: a hungry crying is rhythmic, relentless and will not stop until they are fed; a cry of pain is sharp, high-pitched and may seem to come from nowhere; tired crying is haphazard, with strong throaty cries interwoven with grizzling or moaning; emotional crying, whether in fear or sadness, can sound like terrible soap opera acting and comes with equivalent “sadface” expressions. I can sometimes recognise these, often can’t. And so find myself waving a tit into a face red and creased with anguish or winding a yawning baby or walking up and down in the dark for two hours before I think to check their nappy.
Sleep deprivation, loud unpredictable noises and physical discomfort are, as we know, all common instruments of torture that have been used down the centuries and across the world. And so a crying baby, in many respects, bears all the hallmarks of torture itself. You may feel dejected, exhausted, upset or guilty. But they are not trying to torture you. They are not malicious, they don’t hate you and you are not to blame yourself. You are not a bad parent or a bad person and you do not have a bad baby.
Your baby is crying because they are a baby. They are helpless. They are young. They don’t know any other way. The fact that you care, that it’s horrible, that their crying elicits fear, distress and action in you is the very point, I’m afraid. Crying, fear, response and love are a feedback loop between parent and baby that beats to and fro like oxygen through the blood. It is hard, but it is also necessary. So hunker down, pull up from your deepest reserves, reach out for any help you can get, brace yourself and remember: they always stop crying eventually.
• Nell Frizzell is a freelance journalist
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