Our First Year in Crying

The following is the fifth in a series of posts about our first year as new parents. I am writing through the lens of the Seven Baby B's of Attachment Parenting, by Dr. Sears.

This is what Dr. Sears has to say about the Belief in the Language Value of your Baby's Cry

A baby's cry is a signal designed for the survival of the baby and the development of the parents. Responding sensitively to your baby's cries builds trust. Babies trust that their caregivers will be responsive to their needs. Parents gradually learn to trust in their ability to appropriately meet their baby's needs. This raises the parent-child communication level up a notch. Tiny babies cry to communicate, not to manipulate. (See Crying and Cry it Out)

I am so grateful to Randalin for starting these posts on her blog. If she didn't, I don't think I would have really taken the time to reflect and examine my style of parenting. These posts have helped me look at the parent I've been and think about the parent I want to be.

The other posts I've written so far were the easier ones. This has been, by far, the hardest. I've been thinking about it for the past few weeks, and am only writing it now, one week before Cole's first birthday. Why has this post been particularly hard? Because of the subject matter. If any of you read this blog when Cole was a newborn, you'd know that he was colicky. He cried a lot. So that time is not so much a blur that I can't remember, but little moments in time that I can't forget. 

I can't forget holding him in every which way, only to have him cry harder and louder. I can't forget how I'd bring him outside and walk him back and forth, back and forth underneath the eaves of our front porch. It was only then that he'd calm down for a little while. I can't forget my frantic, pleading phone calls to Keith at 4 p.m. telling him he needed to come home NOW, only to have Cole calm down enough for me to remain sane until Keith came home at 6.

Half the time, I had no idea why he was crying. Half the time I thought I did, but wasn't sure if I was right. Most of the time though, I would shake my head and wish I could call Dr. Sears and ask him why I couldn't get my colicky baby to like to be worn.  (Because everyone knows that if a baby is worn, he cries less, and fusses less, and sleeps better, yada, yada, yada.) Truly, the only thing that Cole liked was when we held him. And we did a lot of that for the first three months of his life.

His crying obviously has evolved, but the advice we get about how to deal with his cries doesn't. (More on that in my post about baby trainers). I am much more in tune with what he wants now than I was when he was a newborn. The only other newborn I had ever held before Cole was Allison's daughter, Juniper. So when we had Cole I was totally clueless as to what he was crying about. It's not as if my doctor knew either, but for some reason, I felt like I was a failure as a mother because I couldn't figure out that what he wanted sometimes was to breastfeed or to sleep or to, simply, burp. But now, because his crying has evolved by the way I respond to him, I can usually understand, by the way he cries, what it is he needs or doesn't need. And I say "usually" because this is not ALWAYS the case. I wish it were, but sometimes, he cries and cries and I don't know exactly what is bothering him. I still sometimes think to myself, I wish he could talk! I am sure no Attachment Parent is perfect and knows exactly what their child wants at every moment of the day, so I am not going to beat myself up over this fact of our lives.