Spiders and screamers

Beasty feasty. Pic by the talented Erica Barraca. 

I wonder how many people have hidden me on Facebook since this baby was born. Because it's all a little too sweet. My pics, the kind words from everywhere. I am guilty, all those chubby baby cheek pics. But there are things, of course, that are less obviously lovely about newborns. One of them is the screaming.

Sometimes I am afraid of our baby. Less so now than I was a week ago, but still. He senses my fear like a bee or a horse, and it makes things worse. Mostly I fear the evening hours when he can't be consoled and we pace through the house with him. With pacifiers. Without pacifiers. Feeding. Not feeding. Over feeding. Enduring the shrill cries of someone who doesn't know what he wants but needs us to listen.

We listen. We shush and rock and sing and walk. Mike takes him into the basement so I don't have to hear the screams for five minutes and then I play the piano and all of a sudden: he crashes. It's over, he is asleep and will reset overnight and be an angel in the morning.

After, I crawl into bed and feel like I'm the one who just went on a crying jag. What did we do wrong? I ask my husband. If only we would have given him his bath later, or not let him sleep so long this afternoon or not eaten garlic for dinner.

In the heat of the juicy diaper changes and the red faced screams I snap at my husband to do something very specific that he should have read my mind about. Later if I remember, I will apologize. He is not the enemy. Impatience is the enemy.

For a while after the baby was born, I was having nightmares. I still dream often that the baby is sleeping in bed with me (which he never has been) but that I'm losing him in the covers. I wake up groping for him. Another dream: I was back in the hospital on the morning we were discharged, but the baby had crawled back inside me. Push him out again! yells a nurse. Someone is waiting for your room!

That one was sort of funny, really.

I am learning about control. How little I have, and how much my reaction matters.

A spider reminded me.

Not a dream: I was driving to my mom's house last week, the baby sleeping in the back seat. I felt normal. Like before the baby. Singing along with the radio, bebe cooing in his seat. Then, a spider the size of a silver dollar dropped down in front of my face. Inside the car. Right there. It was a big spider, brown and black with a bulbous body that says "I am full of baby spiders." Going 65 on the highway, I began to panic and swerve.

The baby. Don't panic. I realized my reaction was all that mattered.

And so while muttering my favorite curses, I rolled down the window, took aim and swatted the spider as far onto the expressway as I could. Shaking, I drove to a parking lot and stood in the rain, shaking out my coat, checking the baby and the back seat. A bouquet of grocery store flowers for my mom lay next to the baby, where the spidey probably hid out. Something nasty from something nice, I thought.

Really, though, that spider was exactly where he needed to be. In front of my face, where I could deal with him directly, not in the backseat nibbling on my baby.

I stopped, then, telling myself I was doing it wrong. Any of it. Life is spiders on the highway. We have to remember we are equipped to deal with them. My fat, sleeping baby is evidence that we are doing a good job.

I am laughing more during the evening shit shows and crying jags. Not stressing about eating some garlic. And tanking up on sweet cuddles and play during the day to deal with his fussiness at night. Like a wise man said, I am the decisive element. 

(That being said, how did you comfort your fussy baby? We are open to suggestions. Unless it involves driving around in the car. There might be a spider in there.)