Please stop.
Please give me ten minutes.
Then guilt would follow immediately because the person I was begging for silence was my own daughter.
I loved her.
I also wanted the noise to stop more than I had ever wanted almost anything.
Both things were true.
That contradiction frightened me more than I admitted.
People like clean stories about parenthood.
You are tired, but grateful.
Overwhelmed, but fulfilled.
Changed, but for the better.
Even the language for suffering is often softened into something temporary and almost noble.
Survival mode.
A hard season.
The fourth trimester.
A phase.
Those words can be useful.
They remind exhausted parents that babies develop, routines change, nights eventually become different.
But for me, the word phase also became a kind of pressure.
If this was only a phase, then I was supposed to endure it without allowing it to change me permanently.
If other parents survived it, then I was supposed to survive it correctly.
When neighbors commented on how much they could hear my daughter crying, embarrassment joined the exhaustion.
I already felt trapped inside the sound.
Now I knew it was traveling beyond our walls.
The private chaos of my nights had an audience.
I began imagining what people thought when they heard it.
Did they think I wasn’t soothing her?
Did they wonder why she was still crying?
Did they think I was doing something wrong?
Nobody needed to accuse me directly.
Sleep deprivation was capable of creating accusations all by itself.
Then somebody would offer the familiar reassurance.
“It gets better.”
I would nod.
What else was I supposed to say?
That sentence became the future I survived toward.
Not tomorrow.
Not even next week.
Just better.
Somewhere ahead of me was a version of life in which my daughter did not scream for hours and I did not dread darkness because darkness meant another night was beginning.
I waited for that version of life like someone watching a distant light.
But waiting changed me too.
Eventually I noticed that I no longer relaxed when she became quiet.
Quiet wasn’t peace.
Quiet was the interval before the next cry.
I could lie down after finally settling her and feel every muscle remain alert.
I listened for movement.
For breath changing.
For the first small sound that might grow.
Sometimes I imagined I heard crying when there was none.
Sometimes I woke already panicked, unsure whether she had made a sound or whether my body had simply decided she must have.
That was when I stopped thinking only in terms of exhaustion.
Exhaustion suggested rest could repair what was happening.
But rest kept being interrupted, and even when I briefly got it, the dread remained.
One night the screaming had been going on long enough that I lost track of the hour.
I held her against me and rocked automatically.
