FTF: "Up and Screaming" by Sarah Hoffman
Sarah Hoffman is the mother of a pink boy and a girl whose favorite color is yellow. She writes for national magazines, newspapers, and radio, and speaks publicly about raising her gender-non-conforming son. She uses a pseudonym to protect the safety of her family.
If you haven't visited Sarah's blog, you are missing out. Her humor, insight, and charm make her writing a true joy to read.
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"Up and Screaming"by Sarah Hoffman
At birth, Sam was blue—but the doctor was not worried. He pinked up quickly with oxygen and gave a hearty cry. In the hospital, he seemed normal, with only a few small oddities: he picked up his own head an hour after he was born, and he refused to stay in even the military-crisp swaddle enforced by the three nurses who tried. Within moments, he broke free of the blankets, flailing his arms and crying.
The real crying didn’t start until the ride home from the hospital—Sam howled all the way. After that, there was no car trip when our first-born child didn’t scream from the second he was put in his car seat to the second we removed him. He cried, too, in the stroller, the swing, the bouncy seat, his crib. Most of the means new parents have of soothing their screaming infants were lost to us, and so we held him. And sometimes he cried even then.
Our doctor told us Sam was healthy, merely “sensitive and intense.” The next doctor concurred. The doctor after that told us Sam had a behavioral problem and we needed to set limits with him. He was five months old.
Sam would only sleep at night if we held him on our chests, and even then only in 15 to 30 minute stretches, from which he woke up screaming. My husband Ian and I took turns holding him while the other slept.
Crazed with sleep deprivation, I called my therapist, who told me that I needed to hire a nighttime babysitter. I couldn’t do it—I couldn’t hand my baby to a stranger when something was wrong, when he needed me. Which meant that Ian and I quickly became incapacitated: unsteady on the stairs, unable to work, unsafe to drive.
My therapist said: It’s OK for Sam to be up in the night screaming. He’s a baby, and he will get through this. It’s not OK for you to be up in the night screaming.
I couldn’t, in my sleep-deprived haze, see the reason in this.
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