Step Lively: When Baby’s Cries are Calls for Help

“Didn’t anyone tell you babies cry? Heh heh.” The on-call pediatrician mocked me when I phoned to see if he had any insight as to why my two-week old wouldn’t stop crying. I was a new mom. I knew babies cried, of course. But this felt off. My son never stopped crying. Ever.

I spent my days in darkness. We figured out the crying was a bit less if our house was dark, so we taped blackout curtains over the windows. One of the baby books we read suggested white noise, so we set our stereo between stations and blasted static.

My husband, bleary-eyed along with me, researched sound frequencies. He learned there are different “shades” of static. There’s white noise, pink noise, brown noise…you get the idea. We sampled some different melodies and found our son seemed to quiet down for pink noise. Corey retreated to his office and created an hour-long track of pink noise. He worked on a gentle fade at the end of the track so we could set it on repeat without disrupting the baby when it started over. I mean, the last thing we wanted was to startle this fragile thing if he finally managed to calm down for a minute.

We read everything. We devoured Dr. Sears and The Baby Whisperer. We looked to Dr. Karp and Babycenter and all the old Greek ladies on our street, who clucked their concerned tongues at us as we walked our…