Screaming Babies

I (we: Erin and I) have a new baby as of 6 weeks ago. I think by now we know that she is kinda fussy. I don't know if I will go as far as to label her 'colicky' but she cries a bit. This weekend she got a sniffle. Not terrible but enough that her breast feeding tapered off because she could not breathe well. Turns out the bottle works better than the breast when she can't breathe through her nose very well. So she spent some time screaming this weekend and ... I struggle with this.

I don't know how else to say it. I really struggle with this. I work with mostly women being a nurse and female nurses usually don't stray too far from a certain ... personality type. I won't go into it further but suffice it to say that most of them are good mothers and this is also their 'style' of nursing. They mother. So I have heard certainly enough advice and possibly too much from my working cohorts about babies. Some is of great use. Some feels like an bird telling a fish how to ride a bicycle: pointless.

I have taken to wearing hearing protection while she is crying in earnest. Erin thinks this is ... a suspect behavior in a father but I know other men who do the same including her own brother. There is something maddening about the noise she makes that turns my ability to maintain love and patience for my daughter to mush. At some point without my ear muffs I just want to break her in half. TOTALLY irrational? Definitely. Shaken Baby Syndrome makes sense now. I am not justifying it but I do understand the urge. A patient of mine said "Oh, I wanted to chuck mine in the woodstove more than once." They estimate that annually 50,000 babies get shaken hard enough to sustain some damage and 1/4 of them DIE. Holy Shite. That's a lot of shaking. I get it though. Scary. So I am trying to practice just putting her down and walking away.

An old friend says I am 'cranky' about the whole crying thing. That would be an old friend who is a mother of two. Politely I would respond: THWWWWWWP! Call me a wimp, roll your eyes in motherly indignation, bask in the glorious female role imperative that you take inconsolable, screaming babies in stride without any real struggle. Let me congratulate you! You are more of a woman than I am! I am not a woman. I am a man and this man struggles with it.