For a quiet kid, my daughter has always been loud. Eardrum bursting decibel levels have always been well within her capacity, even if she doesn’t choose to exercise that talent often.
I knew early on that she was special in the screaming department. When she was six weeks old, I bundled her up and carted her off to an infant massage class. I had read that massage can help sooth a cranky baby and adds to the mother-child bonding experience. I needed all the help I could get as a new parent, so I signed up.
About a dozen sleep-deprived and confused women knelt on the floor in a darkened room, hovering over our helpless babies who lay on their backs, shivering without clothes. I had barely gotten the hang of changing diapers but was now expected to master Swedish milking moves on clenched up little legs that I was convinced would snap in my clumsy grip. The scent of soothing oils calmed my nerves a bit as we learned how to use one finger in a wiper-blade motion over their tiny tummies to ease gas pains. Always left-to-right, never the other way. Not too hard, but with some pressure.
Infanthood had been pretty easy for me up to that point. I had a large baby, so her ample belly could hold more food and go longer between feedings. But about a week before the class started, she had started to get cranky in the early evening hours. Her once cute little baby bird noises had progressed into full-grown pterodactyl screeches around dinnertime each night. The hours between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. were noted in all the books as the witching hours, so I figured that was normal. The concept of liberally defining “normal” is a recurring theme in my parenting experience.
At that point, I was convinced that suffering through pterodactyl-like noises around six each night was normal, so I thought it was a little nuts that the class was scheduled for that time. I reasoned that perhaps they scheduled it for then to help us through a predictably difficult time.
We made it through most of the class before my daughter started to grimace and squirm and fight the supposedly soothing massage. The instructor had warned that there were limits to an infant’s tolerance for this new form of stimulation, and that we should look for signs of when they’d had enough. Unfortunately, my daughter didn’t show many early warning signs, and instead went straight from content cooing to flat out screaming. I stopped the massage and resorted to my normal routine for trying to quiet her – bouncing, rocking, patting, etc. I looked up to see if the instructor had any advice, but instead saw only looks of shock and horror from everyone in the room. Some of the mothers instinctively shielded their precious babies from the violence erupting in my arms.
I smiled and said, “You know… this is that rough time of night.” But all I got in return was the clear impression that my child was not at all normal.
“Maybe she’s hurt?” one woman asked.
“No. She does this every night.”
“Like that?”
“Uh. Yeah?”
Another woman’s baby had started to cry, but it was a tiny, muted little cry. It was more like a whimper. She tried to comfort me. “Mine is really fussy in the evenings too. Just hearing her cry like this makes my heart ache.”
“Is that her cranky cry? She doesn’t get louder?”
“Um. Well, this is loud for her. Yours looks a lot older. Maybe her cry is loud because she is older?”
“She’s six weeks. How old is yours?”
“Oh. Um. Well, she is nine weeks old.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sure her cry is normal for a baby her size.”
I was sweating, and my giant dinosaur baby was still screaming. I packed up, took her home and pulled out my books to help me redefine normal.
I still had dial-up in those days. There was no Facebook, no Twitter feed to compare experiences with friends or otherwise dilute my worries with stories of other people’s woes. But somehow I found what I needed to feel normal enough to go back to the rest of the classes with the confidence that my child was healthy and strong and a probably the least likely in the room to ever be abducted.
Confessions of a Target Mom 