Time. It passes fast. Quite literally, it flies. Gone in a flash. A fleeting moment. Yet in the starkest of contrasts, there are moments that seem to last an eternity. Like, forever.
When a baby cries, a mother’s heart sobs. The thought of your little one in discomfort wrenches at your heart. But knowing your baby is in pain, that feels like your heart is breaking. And when your baby cries more than he sleeps, it gnaws away at your soul. Until you’re not sure whether it is day or night.
My baby suffered with reflux. The silent type. At diagnosis I thought this meant he might not make a noise when distressed. Alas, silent reflux is one of the greatest oxymorons of motherhood. There is genuinely nothing silent about it. My baby would yearn for milk but struggle to digest it; the agony of digestion only calmed by the warm soothe of more milk. A vicious and bittersweet, continual circle.
As any modern mother might do, I sought support from other soldiers fighting this baby battle. Strangers online, in chat rooms, on forums, all flocking together with words of wisdom and aeons of experience.Yet I didn’t find solace. In fact, what I found filled me with fear. Online I was reassured my baby would be better by six months. Six months! An eternity. In reality, I wasn’t sure I could take another six minutes of screaming, get to the next feed in six hours, or even make it through to six weeks of age. These poor mums were facing the most severe, most challenging situations, comparing notes online with a baby on the boob at 2:35am. Time was very much not flying. Time was dragging its ugly feet, dressed in over-sized boots.
My paediatrician was my rock. He’s the best in town. Possibly the country. On the days he upped my baby’s medication, hell, he was the most wonderful man in the whole wide world. But he is a man. He doesn’t beat a maternal heart. The one that sounds like your own heart pounding inside you, but is actually that of your baby, still playing its little rhythm in your chest as if you two were still one. He can’t comprehend how the notion you might be ‘over-feeding’ your baby goes against every instinct a mother has to nurture and provide. He wasn’t there at 2:35am when you were convinced the whole neighbourhood was kept awake by your baby’s cries. And your own. My paediatrician was my rock. My online support was my hard place. I was at my whits end. And time was still taking its sweet time.
And then it happened. That moment when suddenly I knew. I knew when it was day. And night. And how to get dressed. The days were rolling by. The weeks were ticked off. And we were getting there. We were getting by. We were actually doing ok. The magic six months my online-BFF-strangers had talked about was circled on the calendar. It was set as a reminder in my phone. It was the symbol of light at the end of the reflux tunnel. We smashed through the six month milestone like a thunderbolt. With supersonic speed everything was on the up. We had started to wean, we’d sought homeopathic help, we were steady on the meds and we were, actually, miraculously getting better.
I had been robbed of the delicious, self-indulgence of the newborn bubble. Less Springtime walks in the park pushing the buggy to the tweet of birds; more flushed face from hot tears as I bounced him strapped to me in a sling perched on a semi-deflated gym ball. But we were here. And in that one moment, the seconds that had felt like days had rolled into months and it was like I couldn’t remember our pain. I could no longer hear the screams. I couldn’t see the anguish on his face anymore. To all the victorious reflux mums gone before me who had told me “this is just a blip”, I wanted to slap them and shout “you’ll never know!” But part of me knew they did. And they were right. Annoyingly, and quite patronisingly, they were indeed right.
Time. It passed fast. It did, quite literally, fly by. Gone in a flash. A fleeting moment. And for the moments I experienced that seemed to last an absolute eternity, I will forever be grateful. My baby is better, I am stronger for having been broken and I will never again shrug when a new mother tells me she is suffering. Because her time will fly, but for a moment, it will feel like a lifetime.
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