I think the first time I saw the word 'colic' was in a James Herriot novel, as a teenager. As far as I was concerned it had something to do with sweating colts in damp horseboxes - nothing at all to do with sweet new babies. Then my daughter developed it in in 2004, and everything turned upside down.
Colic is apparently diagnosed when a baby cries for 3 hours a day or more, on 3 days of the week or more, for 3 weeks or more. I've spoken to other mums of colicky babies and they all agree with me - oh for a mere 3 hours a day! Our kids cried a lot, lot, LOT more than that.
My daughter began crying for no apparent reason when she was about one month old. For long stretches of the day she was obviously very miserable, but nothing we did could calm or soothe her. No amount of rocking, swinging, shooshing, nursing, or swaddling helped (and when things got really bad we tried all at once, with the blinds drawn). The crying only stopped when she finally fell asleep, and this she found very (very) difficult to do. One babysitter quit after a week: most babies, she told us, half-apologetically, half-self-righteously, sit peacefully in their buggies, crying only when they need something specific - a change, a bottle, a cuddle. But this -! She'd never seen (or heard) anything like it in her life. The door banged behind her; my husband and I looked at each other. What now?
Colic is supposed to end at three months. For us that magic day came and went, and still the crying continued. I read anything I could get my hands on to try to understand what we were going through, and came increasingly to believe the 'neurologic' account of colic - i.e, that some babies have a neurologic immaturity which causes them to be hypersensitive to stimuli. This potentially explained why my daughter's crying fits typically began after fifteen minutes of wakefulness. It was as if that was all her poor tiny brain could cope with before the sights and smells of the world caused overload.
Then, at five-and-a-half months, the crying thankfully began to pass. It didn't happen overnight, but slowly we found we could open the curtains again. At last she could not only cope with life, but actually enjoy it. Colic is a terrible rite of passage for a first time mum, and Sleepless Nights is the only novel I know of to talk about it. It tries to treat this difficult experience seriously and honestly - but with plenty of humour as well.
Twins, by comparison, were a walk in the park...
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