COLIC by Joseph Gross
I close the door to our office so Angela can’t hear the screaming. So she can sleep. The force of Sofia’s scream contradicts her tiny plump body, rages with a shocking power, her fists and legs thrashing. I imagine the flow reversed – papers, books, chairs, monitor, me, the room itself would disappear into her open mouth. A pistol shot in an airplane’s cabin. A black hole.
I hold Sofia face down on my arm, then upright against my chest, then cradled away from me with her head in both hands. I try something called the Vertical Bounce. I sing to her. I take cotton from a box next to the computer, stuff some in each ear and sit down to play online poker while she erupts in my lap.
It doesn’t matter if I’m dealt good cards or not. I stay in every hand because I need distraction and because the game is for virtual money, anyway. The real benefit is that players can speak to each other via the comments bar at the bottom of the screen. Communication with the outside can dull Sofia’s arrhythmic intake and shriek, which vibrates my face when I lean close. If no one will talk I change tables.
Occasionally, I land at a table of players who all seem to know each other and who fill the comments bar with a stream of sexual innuendo and suggestive code, which, after a few intriguing minutes, sends me in search of another table.
I look for tables with handles like Texas Grandma and Fixin to Nap. Players that don’t get mad at a guy who types comments with one hand and often doesn’t notice when the game’s action is on him.
The cotton offers just enough of a barrier that I manage to lose ten or fifteen minutes this way. I play some six-handed games with a talkative group that includes a trucker from Louisiana, a retired elementary school teacher in Baltimore and a German law student. When I mention, as I always do, that my eight-week-old is screaming, X-Skoolteecher writes, “Been there, Done that. lol.”
This is all I wanted. The granny avatar and cheerful Web slang imply that she survived the screaming, positive outlook intact, and went on to complete a long, if undistinguished career.
The German law student, whose avatar looks young and wears glasses, writes, “Why would you not go to her with comfort? Why do you play games while she cries?”
I look at Sofia as she screams into the crook of my arm, as her snot and tears run onto my sleeve and I wonder if I’m a monster. But she isn’t hungry, she isn’t cold and she isn’t lonely, and I will be sorry if I wake up Angela for another round of nipple biting.
“IT IS YOUR PLAY AGAIN _ BIGDADDY” the trucker writes and that’s me but I wonder if I should doubt what I’ve inferred from the avatars of my tablemates because when I look at my own, the one with the shaved head and the earrings, nothing about him looks confused or terrified.
Sofia has infant colic. Dr. Morris Wessel’s definition of an infant with colic has held for decades: “one who, otherwise healthy and well-fed, had paroxysms of irritability, fussing or crying lasting for a total of three hours a day and occurring for more than three days in any one week for a period of three weeks.” Sofia has enough paroxysms of irritability for a gang of babies.
Dr. Wessel, in his landmark study, reviewed the most plausible causes of infant colic – allergy, immaturity of the intestinal tract, congenital hypertonicity and the “transfer of tension from the adults to the infant.” The study was designed specifically to test for the effects of allergy, which had seemed the most likely cause of colic to Dr. Wessel, and to me as one of a long line of allergy sufferers. Family history of allergy was not found to be a decisive factor. Other studies have suggested lactose intolerance and some of Wessel’s cases were improved when specific foods were removed from the mother’s diet. Our pediatrician agreed with the allergy theory, so my wife has, one at a time, stopped eating eggs, milk, cheese, wheat, red meat, shrimp, broccoli, asparagus and oatmeal. Sometimes, Sofia will scream less on a certain day and we’ll say, “It’s the broccoli!” and broccoli is banished from the crisper forever. Sofia then resumes her regular screaming schedule as if the promise of a broccoli-free existence were unbearable.
To me, the immature digestive tract is an attractive cause of the colic. Attractive mostly because “immature” implies a process that will end. Sofia’s stomach does seem tight when she screams, the center of her upset, and the way she pulls up her knees and kicks like she’s warding off a hyena seems to suggest gas pain. So we give her gas drops. They come in a little dropper bottle and taste like grape soda syrup. Sofia does not at all seem to enjoy the taste of grape soda syrup.
When I screamed constantly as an infant, the doctors told my mother that I had an underdeveloped nervous system. This is essentially what Wessel and others call congenital hypertonicity, an unusual sensitivity of the central nervous system. Wessel cites a suggestion by F. C. Neff that the paroxysms of irritability are a prolonged “outgrowth of the startle reflex.” It is crushing to think of Sofia in a state of nearly constant disconcertion, every new smell and sound a jolt of confusion to her tender cortex. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that my sadness for her is based on my own continual disconcertion. Simply, I can commiserate. I am beginning to wonder whether colic is the human condition – suffering without pathology other than sentience – and whether the babies that sleep and coo are just too dull to realize what they’re up against. This will be my theory: colic is the result of genetically inherited intelligence.
The trouble is with the fourth possible cause. Dr. Wessel concludes that the potential connection between family tension and infant colic is too strong to ignore and merits further study. Like most couples, we have tension – over work schedules, in-laws, basic communication – and this is not surprising, but the idea that we are the cause of explosive unhappiness in our baby cuts deeper than any previous disagreement.
Of course, I want to blame Angela. Post-partum depression and the physical turmoil of pregnancy and birth have drained much of her good humor. Sofia’s painful and confusing attempts to latch onto her breasts, the lack of sleep, the loss of control over her own body – these are tensions created by Sofia’s beautiful and stunning appearance. The logical step is to blame Sofia. To resent her.
While the scientific literature tends to address the causes of colic, most of the health education available on the Web and in parenting journals focuses on the resulting dangers. The medical scientists make connections with their theories; health magazines almost all say, “We have no idea what causes colic.” They say, “It isn’t you.” They say, “Your baby is normal.” They council you, however, to keep an eye on yourself and your partner because infant colic often leads to child abuse. It is not generally the quiet, contented infant who is thrown against the wall. I have had my own paroxysms of irritability brought on by fatigue and the repetition of screams. I have held Sofia late at night, when she has woken me too quickly from a moment of sleep on the couch, and felt my arms, my arms, pull her too tightly to my chest, felt a horrible satisfaction at exerting my adult strength against her rebellion, at hearing her cries amplify. At those moments, I go upstairs to wake Angela.
I’ve become insensitive to violence in general during these weeks of infant care. When Sofia finally quiets down at night, I like to lie with her on the couch and watch televised bouts of late-night masculine savagery. Shows dedicated to boxing knockouts, Muay Thai kick boxing, cagefighting. My sense of the fighter’s desperation, my shame at our collective blood-lust, feelings that once kept me away from these shows, are gone. They’re shot. They took a roundhouse kick to the temple and accepted the cool truce of the canvas.
I click away from the poker game as Sofia has only intensified her fury. I stand and try the Vertical Bounce again. The screaming has become fibrous, a green thorny stalk that explodes from her throat and blooms into every open space.
Holding her face up on my arm I reach to spin the ceiling fan. “Look at this,” I say and, surprisingly, the spell breaks; the stalk withers and recedes. I feel like I can see my daughter again – her poreless, elastic skin, her dramatic lips that curve the way her mother’s do, her eyes, normally blue but now almost entirely black in the dim room, each still reflecting the fan’s paddles as they twirl. This gives her the look of an entranced cartoon character, whose rotating eyes show that their owner has slipped the confines of normal sight, that the hazards and intuitions of madness are in effect.
As children, my friends and I were obsessed with spinning. We held out our arms and spun until we fell. We crashed, dizzy and euphoric, into table corners, walls, each other; we were changed. We begged our fathers to hold us by our wrists and spin us in the yard, legs swung out, faces down to see the leaves and grass blur by, the shoes of the other kids waiting. During the spin it was almost impossible to think about anything else than the rushing of air over skin and the intense though bearable pain of the grasp. The pain was important too, a necessary sacrifice for the transcendence of the spin, the natural thrill when it was your turn for Mr. Wolf to grab your wrists roughly and hurl you into orbit.
The Wolfs were our next-door neighbors, our fenceless backyards distinguished only by a huge silver maple. In late summer the maple would shed its seedlings and they would spiral down to the grass where Nate Wolf and I often collected them into paper bags. We called the seedlings “helicopters,” for the way their unbalanced shape made them turn as they fell – the hard end housed the actual seed, which you could peel apart and stick to your nose for a horn; the veined, translucent wing clearly designed for flight. It took a lot of helicopters to fill a bag.
The Wolfs had a small balcony on the second floor that looked out on the backyard and after a thorough helicopter-gathering one of us would carry the full bag through the house up to the porch and empty the entire thing over the upturned face of the other. The few seconds that it took for the helicopters to float down was kaleidoscopic mayhem – different speeds and directions of rotation, bits of light popping through, the unavoidable junk landing in our eyes as we fought to keep them open.
More than spinning I guess we were obsessed with dizziness, with alterations, with anything different. I remember once asking a friend why people love fireworks and he said, “Because usually there aren’t any.”
But of course, there are always stars. And maybe that’s what this part of life is about, a part where I learn to love more ordinary beauties – uninterrupted sleep, clean sinks, the simple absence of Sofia’s scream. I’ve spun the fan several times to hold on to this calm, hoping to see the drowsing of lids, but the way that Sofia has begun to squirm on my arm and pinch her light eyebrows suggests that my relief is about to end, that we’re circling back to screams again before either of us can get to bed.
I tell myself that screaming is a symptom of life, that at least we haven’t woken Angela yet, that at least we’ve lived a little more time together, time that no one will remember but me, moments I hope are landing softly like coins in an enormous, distant fountain, even as the nights turn around and around and around.
Joseph Gross’ work has appeared in Salamander and Fourth Genre.