A Letter To Myself About Surviving The Evening Scream Fest

I found this note sitting in my drafts folder from exactly six months ago. My mate Dave had just texted me from the pub (a man who currently thinks 'tired' means getting eight hours of sleep but waking up once to pee) asking what he should expect in the early weeks of fatherhood. Instead of replying to Dave with something vaguely encouraging, my brain apparently short-circuited. I bypassed his message entirely and furiously typed out this therapeutic dispatch to my own past self about the time our living room turned into an acoustic torture chamber. I never sent it to Dave. He wouldn't have understood anyway.

Dear Tom,

Right now you're staring at a half-drunk cup of lukewarm tea while your phone buzzes with a text from Dave. Don't lie to him. Don't tell him about the magical bonding moments or the smell of a newborn's head, because you know perfectly well that right now, your flat smells entirely of sour milk and quiet desperation.

That completely infuriating NHS acronym

You probably still remember the day the health visitor came round. It was raining, you were wearing a t-shirt that had been aggressively spat up on twice before 9am, and one of the twins was screaming with such intensity I genuinely thought the windows were going to crack. The health visitor, possessing the calm demeanor of someone who gets to leave the flat at the end of her shift, handed you a brightly colored pamphlet with a cheery acronym printed on the front. P-U-R-P-L-E.

I still deeply resent that pamphlet.

The whole thing is designed to reframe what our parents used to call colic. The medical establishment apparently decided that calling it colic made parents think their child had a stomach disease, so instead, they gave us an acronym to explain why our offspring sound like they're being actively branded with a hot iron. It breaks down into this incredibly condescending list. The crying is 'Unexpected' and 'Resists soothing'—which is the polite, clinical way of saying your child will scream for absolutely no reason and literally nothing you do will stop it. Then there's the 'Pain-like face' bit, where your infant looks like they're passing a kidney stone, but supposedly they're perfectly fine. It goes on to highlight that it's 'Long-lasting' and happens mostly in the 'Evening'.

I remember reading that pamphlet while bouncing a shrieking child on an exercise ball and thinking that page 47 of the parenting manual, which gently suggested I remain calm and project peaceful energy, was the most insulting thing I had ever read. We eventually started referring to our evening meltdown hours as the baby p protocol, where the 'p' stood almost entirely for panic.

Walking away is actually a survival tactic

You felt like an absolute monster the first time you did it. You remember the exact Tuesday. The screaming had been going on for two solid hours. Your shoulders were up around your ears, your teeth were grinding together, and you felt a very dark, very frightening snap of frustration bubbling up in your chest. You put the screaming infant down in her cot, shut the nursery door, and went to stand in the kitchen.

You leaned your forehead against the cold metal of the extractor fan, turned it on full blast to drown out the noise, and just breathed in the smell of stale toast for five minutes.

You need to know that this was the smartest thing you did that entire month. The books make it sound like putting a crying baby down is some sort of parental failure, but it's purely self-preservation. You have to run through the whole pathetic checklist of feeding them, smelling their bum for a fresh disaster, and checking their clothes for scratchy tags before ultimately accepting that you just need to put them in a safe space and walk away for a few minutes. They're not going to remember that you left them to cry for five minutes, but you're going to save your own sanity. It's a strictly mechanical reset for your own nervous system.

The cold feet panic at three in the morning

Then there was the physical discoloration. It wasn't just the crying; it was the terrifying evening you unwrapped the swaddle to change a nappy and saw two tiny feet that looked exactly like neglected aubergines left at the back of the fridge. You were absolutely convinced their feet were going to fall off.

You spent twenty minutes with the flashlight on your iPhone inspecting every single microscopic toe for a rogue strand of your wife's postpartum hair, completely paranoid that a hair tourniquet was silently amputating a digit in the dark. Finding nothing, you dragged them to the GP the next morning.

The doctor looked at you with that specific mix of pity and exhaustion reserved for first-time parents and muttered something about acrocyanosis. Apparently, a tiny human's circulatory system basically panics when it gets even slightly chilly, hoarding all the warm, oxygen-rich blood around the heart and lungs to keep the important organs ticking. It completely abandons the hands and feet, leaving them looking bruised and blue. The exact biology of how oxygen moves through their tiny veins went completely over my head since I hadn't slept a full night since the previous Tuesday, but the gist was that it was harmless. You just have to bundle them in something warm, turn off the harsh overhead lights, and wait for their circulation to remember how to reach their toes. Obviously, if their lips or chest go blue, you bypass Google entirely and call an ambulance, but ninety-nine percent of the time, it's just the cold feet thing.

Things that vaguely helped blunt the chaos

There was no magic off-switch, but a few things stopped me from entirely losing my mind. One of them was the Organic Cotton Baby Blanket Eco-Friendly Purple Deer Pattern from Kianao. I know, a blanket with green woodland creatures on a violet background sounds aggressively twee, but hear me out. When you're pacing the hallway at two in the morning and the sensory overload is making your spine vibrate, having them wrapped up tight in something genuinely soft matters. The double-layer organic cotton had just enough physical weight to make them feel contained without turning them into a sweaty little radiator. Swaddling them in it didn't magically stop the crying, but it stopped the frantic flailing, which reduced my stress level from a ten to a solid eight. Plus, it survived about four hundred trips through our washing machine, which is the only metric I actually care about when evaluating anything in our house.

Later on, well-meaning relatives bought us the Gentle Baby Building Block Set. They're fine. They're squishy and colorful and they don't hurt when you inevitably step on them barefoot in the dark, which is a massive point in their favor. But the girls mostly just used them as projectiles to hurl at the cat. They didn't exactly save my life the way a reliable, breathable swaddle did during those dark evening hours.

If you're desperately looking for fabrics that won't fall apart after a week of being dragged through the trenches, you might want to browse Kianao's baby blankets collection to find something that can double as a mop for your tears.

The immediate transition to the drool phase

The cruelest joke of the whole newborn phase is that the exact minute the evening screaming finally tapers off, they immediately start teething. It's a seamless transition from acoustic torture to endless drool.

When the first tooth started moving around under the gums, we basically worshipped the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy. It has these varied textured bumps that they seemed to heavily prefer over gnawing on the coffee table edge. Because it’s silicone, you can chuck it in the fridge so it gets blissfully cold for their swollen mouth, and more importantly, you can throw it in the dishwasher when it inevitably ends up covered in floor lint. I highly think buying three of them, because you'll definitely lose one under the passenger seat of the car and drop another in a puddle at the absolute worst possible moment.

So, Tom of the past, finish your lukewarm tea. Text Dave back and tell him to sleep while he can. Tell him to buy a good fan to cry into. Tell him it ends.

Yours,

Tom

A quick word before the questions

Before I sign off to go scrape dried porridge off the kitchen cabinets (because toddlerhood is a whole different genre of mess), have a look at the rest of Kianao's teething toys collection if you've mercifully graduated from the screaming phase and are now dealing with the gum-chewing phase.

The messy reality of the evening screaming (FAQs)

Is the evening screaming ever going to stop?

Yeah, though when you're in the middle of week six, it feels like a permanent lifestyle change. My GP swore to me it usually peaks around two months and fades out entirely by three or four months. I didn't believe him at the time, but one day they just sort of stopped doing it and started aggressively chewing on their fists instead. You will survive it, even if your hearing takes a slight hit.

Why do their feet look like bruised plums when they cry?

Because their tiny circulatory systems are terrible at multitasking. When they get slightly cold, or when they're expending all their energy screaming, the blood retreats to their core to protect their heart and lungs, leaving their hands and feet looking a terrifying shade of blue or purple. It almost always resolves itself the second you wrap them up warmly. Just do a quick visual check to make sure a stray hair isn't wrapped tightly around a toe cutting off the circulation.

Am I a terrible father if I just walk out of the room?

Absolutely not. If you've fed them, burped them, checked their nappy, and made sure they aren't physically hurt, putting them safely in their cot and walking into the kitchen for five minutes is the safest thing you can do. The frustration of listening to an inconsolable infant is a highly documented psychological trigger. Stepping away to breathe is actual parenting. It means you're putting their physical safety above your own guilt.

What if the crying actually means they're in pain?

This is the part that ruins you mentally, because the acronym literally includes the phrase "Pain-like face." They scrunch up their little faces, pull their knees to their chest, and look like they're in agony. My pediatrician told me that infant nervous systems are just completely overwhelmed by existing outside the womb, and they process basic things—like digesting milk or feeling a draft—as massive, overwhelming events. If you're genuinely worried they're ill, obviously see a doctor, but most of the time, they're just aggressively complaining about being alive.

How do I survive the witching hour without losing my mind?

You lower your standards to absolute zero. You accept that dinner will be eaten over the sink at 9pm. You use noise-canceling headphones playing a podcast on a low volume while you bounce them, which takes the sharpest edge off the shrieking. You wrap them tightly in a good organic cotton blanket to muffle their flailing limbs, and you tag-team with your partner the second you feel your patience crack. You survive it by remembering that it's a phase, not a personality trait.