Screaming Baby

When my son was 4 months old, he giggled. When he was 6 months old, he crawled. At 8 months, he was pulling himself up and pre-walking. By the time he was 9 months old, he was screaming at me.

It wasn’t just that he screamed because he was upset. It was that I would walk into the room, and he would look at me, and he would open his mouth, and out would come this high-pitched shriek that lasted until he ran out of breath. Then he would keep trying to shriek for an extra couple of seconds before he would figure out that he had to breathe in again, and then he would take a gasp and start over. His face was purple.

My son did this when I walked into the room, when I walked out of the room, and for as long as I was in the room. Sometimes he would crawl toward me while he did it. He didn’t do this for his father, or my parents, or anybody else. Just me.

My baby challenged my gratitude

This started on the Friday after Thanksgiving, right after I had spent my first night away from home and away from baby. My husband was working the full day on Friday to pick up some extra hours.

Baby James

Usually he only works three days a week: Monday evenings, Wednesday evenings, and Saturday mornings. I work as a full-time High School Latin teacher, and we tag team baby duty. So, I had baby duty both Friday and Saturday, and my son spent both days screaming at me whenever he wasn’t sleeping or eating.

I tried ignoring him until he stopped screaming. I tried cuddling him. I tried putting him in the play pen or the jumper. Every time, he screamed until he passed out or I stuck a bottle in his mouth.

On Sunday, my husband and I tried to do baby duty together, as we usually do on Sundays, but my son continued to scream at me. On Monday, I came home from work to take baby duty while my husband went to his job, and again, my son screamed at me, very clearly directing every last purple-faced, ear-splitting shriek at me.

An attempt to escape

On Tuesday, I didn’t want to come home. I had made dinner plans with friends about half an hour away, and rather than going home to relax between the end of the school day and the beginning of dinner, I went on over to the shopping center where we were meeting and found a bookstore. I picked up a coffee and walked purposefully over to the parenting section.

There, I found dozens of books about infants and baby psychology and the chemistry of an infant’s brain. They were full of statistics and pediatric jargon and sprinkled with quotes from real-life parents who had real-life infants. None of them told me anything I didn’t already know.

By the time you’re a parent, you don’t need to be convinced that things like discipline and bedtime and tickle fights are good ideas. That’s obvious. What you really need is a reminder that whatever it is your child is putting you through does happen to be normal.

Then I found this little yellow book called “Father to Son” by Harry H. Harrison Jr. It’s about 360 pages of quotes from real-life parents with real-life children, without statistics and jargon. I also grabbed “Mother to Son” by Melissa Harrison and Harry. H. Harrison Jr. These are the ones I walked out of that store with.

So, I bought these books and I went to dinner, and finally I had to go home. I sat in my car for a couple of minutes, gathering myself. I was going to walk up the stairs to our third-floor apartment, and I was going to open the door and come down the hall, and he was going to look up at me from the playpen and shriek at me again. But he wasn’t going to do this forever, and one of these days he was going to smile at me and on that day I was going to play with him for two hours and let him sleep in the big bed with me and his father instead of making him sleep in his own crib.

Home Again

After a great many deep breaths, I picked myself up and walked up the stairs to our third-floor apartment. I opened the door and came down the hall, and he looked up at me from the playpen.

And he smiled.

So I played with him for two hours and I was so tired by the end of it I think he did end up sleeping in the bed with me and my husband, but I don’t quite remember. I was too happy and too exhausted.

I’ve decided since then that what I have is not a 9-month-old infant, but a 9-month-old teenager. His body is full of hormones, growing rapidly, and always hungry. And if you let him scream his guts out today, he’ll be fine again tomorrow, or maybe the next day, or definitely the day after that for sure.

Now, we are working on the screaming. He’s learning that when he screams he doesn’t get any of my attention, but that if he stops screaming or can spit out some form of the word “mama”, he can have all of my attention for a little while. I’m learning that just because he’s screaming at me, even if he turns purple, it’s not my fault, he doesn’t hate me, and the world isn’t ending. He’s a baby, and I’m his mom, and sometimes, in between the giggles and the crawling, this is just what that looks like.