Surviving Colic and Watching Cry-Baby 1990

Dear Jess from six months ago. You're currently sitting on the cold linoleum of the laundry room floor at 3:14 AM. The dryer is tumbling a single wet towel just to generate enough white noise to drown out the ringing in your ears, and the infant strapped to your chest is screaming so loud the neighbor’s beagle has started howling in solidarity. I see you. I know exactly how much your lower back aches right now, and I know you're desperately scrolling your phone trying to figure out what's wrong with your child.

I'm writing this to tell you to put the phone down, close the browser tabs about infant gut microbiomes, and go into the living room. Turn on the TV, queue up a streaming service, and decide to watch cry-baby 1990—yes, the utterly unhinged John Waters musical starring a very young Johnny Depp—because you need a distraction that has absolutely nothing to do with motherhood, and staring at the wall is starting to make you hallucinate.

I'm just gonna be real with you, past-Jess. This third baby is not like the others. Remember when Hunter was born? He basically sleep-trained himself at six weeks old. He'd coo at his mobile, eat his milk, and drift off to sleep like a little angel in a catalog. Bless his heart, he made us think we were actual parenting geniuses who had cracked the code to child-rearing. What an absolute joke we were. The universe saw our smugness, bided its time through baby number two, and then sent us this tiny, furious dictator to humble us into the dirt. We thought we knew what we were doing, and now we're spending half our gross income on gripe water that doesn't even work.

Stop reading internet advice at three in the morning

If you read one more article telling you to put the baby down "drowsy but awake," I think you might actually throw your phone into the toilet and flush it. I'm giving you permission from the future to completely ignore that phrase forever. Whoever came up with "drowsy but awake" clearly had a baby like Hunter and not a baby who treats the mattress like it’s made of hot lava. You spend forty-five minutes bouncing on a yoga ball until your thighs are burning and you've hummed the entirety of the Fleetwood Mac *Rumours* album, and the second her butt touches the bassinet, her eyes snap open like a haunted doll.

And let's talk about the tracking apps. Delete them. Right now. You're logging every wet diaper, every ounce of milk, and every minute of sleep like you're an accountant auditing a failing business. It's making you crazy. The app is judging you with its little red bars showing that your kid only slept for twenty minutes instead of the recommended two hours. You don't need a pie chart to tell you that you're sleep-deprived and your baby is angry at the world. Just delete the app, throw out the charts, and accept that for the next month, time is a meaningless construct and you live in a permanent state of twilight.

My mom keeps calling and telling me I need to put rice cereal in the bottle or rub whiskey on her gums. Look, I love Grandma, but her survival tactics from 1988 are a fast track to a trip to the emergency room, so we just nod on the phone and say "that's an interesting idea" before immediately doing the opposite. I actually asked our doctor, Dr. Miller, why this baby cries so much, and you know what he said? He shrugged. He literally just shrugged and said sometimes their digestive tracts are immature and sometimes they just get overstimulated by being alive outside the womb. It has something to do with motilin levels and gut flora, or maybe human babies are just born three months earlier than other mammals because of our hip size, so they're genuinely furious about being evicted from the hot tub. Whatever the science is, the medical consensus seems to be "good luck, she'll grow out of it."

Why we're obsessed with 90s camp right now

So back to my very specific movie recommendation. When you've a literal cry-baby shrieking in your ear, you need sensory overload of a different kind to keep yourself awake and somewhat sane. I don't know why, but watching the campy, ridiculous clash of the "Drapes" and the "Squares" from the 1990 film *Cry-Baby* became my anchor. It’s colorful, it’s loud, the music is catchy, and Johnny Depp’s character shedding a single tear is exactly the level of melodramatic nonsense I needed to relate to my infant's nightly meltdowns.

It’s PG-13, which means it’s just inappropriate enough to make you feel like an adult, but not so intense that you've to pay close attention to the plot. You can bounce around the living room, swaying to the rockabilly soundtrack, and for a hundred and twenty minutes, you aren't obsessing over whether the baby is latching correctly or if her poop is the right shade of mustard yellow. You're just a tired lady watching teenagers in leather jackets make terrible decisions. It's deeply therapeutic.

If you're also deep in the trenches and need some retail therapy while pacing the hallway, go browse Kianao's baby sleep collection so you at least have something to do with your free thumb besides panic-Googling.

The gear that actually helps (and the stuff that doesn't)

Since I'm talking to my past self, let's talk about what we're honestly spending our Etsy shop profits on. We're on a budget, and I refuse to buy eighty-dollar sleep sacks just because an influencer swore by them. However, I'll tell you that the Kianao organic cotton swaddles are worth every single penny we scraped together for them.

I know you're currently fighting with those stiff muslin blankets that loosen up the second she kicks her little legs, resulting in her waking herself up by punching herself in the face. The Kianao ones are different. They have just enough stretch that you can wrap her up tight like a little burrito, but they breathe well enough that she doesn't get sweaty in this humid Texas heat. Last week, we had a blowout so catastrophic it breached the diaper, the onesie, and the swaddle, and I almost cried throwing it in the wash, but the fabric washed completely clean and stayed soft. It's the only thing that gets us past step one of that whole "5 S's" method everybody preaches about.

Dr. Harvey Karp's 5 S's—Swaddle, Side/Stomach, Shush, Swing, Suck. The doctor handed me a pamphlet on it like it was a magical spell. It kind of works, but I think the science is a little shaky on the "mimicking the womb" part because my womb definitely didn't feature a ceiling fan and the muffled sounds of a true crime podcast. But you do what you gotta do.

Now, I'll say I also bought the Kianao silicone pacifiers, and I'm honestly completely neutral on them. They're gorgeous, they're safe, and they look adorable in photos, but this particular baby of ours treats pacifiers like I'm trying to feed her a lemon. She will furiously suck on it for about twelve seconds before spitting it across the room with shocking velocity. Sometimes, if I hold it in her mouth with my pinky finger while doing deep squats, it buys me ten minutes of silence. It's fine. It's not a miracle worker, but it's a solid tool to have in the arsenal.

What *is* a miracle worker is babywearing. I swear, the only reason human beings survived as a species is because ancient moms strapped their babies to their chests and just kept walking. Whenever the witching hour hits and she's completely inconsolable, I shove her into the carrier, pull it tight, and start doing chores. The movement and the body heat knock her out almost instantly. It’s heavy, and my shoulders hate me by the end of the day, but it’s better than listening to her cry until she chokes.

Give yourself some grace, seriously

I stopped drinking dairy for three days, got incredibly resentful of my husband eating pizza in front of me, and then caved and ate a massive bowl of ice cream—and guess what? The crying didn't change at all, so don't torture yourself with extreme elimination diets unless the doctor genuinely runs tests and tells you to.

Look at the state of our house right now. There are clean clothes piled on the dining room chair that have been there since Tuesday. There are three empty water cups on your nightstand. You haven't washed your hair in a medically concerning amount of time. I need you to understand that none of this matters. The baby isn't going to remember that the floors were dusty during her first six months of life, and your older kids are honestly just thrilled to be eating cereal for dinner because it feels like a party to them.

Your only job right now is survival. If survival looks like swaying in the dark while a 90s cult classic flickers on the screen, then you lean into that hard. The crying does end. I promise you, from the future, the colic fades. One morning, you'll wake up in a panic because she's been quiet for five hours, and you'll run to the bassinet to find her sleeping peacefully. You'll survive this.

Before you dive into my messy answers to the late-night questions you're definitely searching for, take a second to sign up for Kianao’s newsletter at the bottom of their page—at least get a discount code for the gear that's going to save your sanity.

Late-Night Google Searches, Answered by a Tired Mom

How long does this "witching hour" screaming really last?

For us, it peaked around six to eight weeks and was an absolute nightmare from about 5 PM to 9 PM every single night. By three months, it started getting shorter, and by four months, it mostly disappeared. Just keep telling yourself it's a phase, because it honestly is, even when it feels like a life sentence.

Is it safe to have the TV on with a newborn in the room?

My doctor basically told me that when they're this tiny, their vision is terrible anyway and they can't even focus on the screen across the room. Obviously, don't park them two inches from a blasting television, but having a movie on while you bounce them in the dark is absolutely fine and usually just is extra white noise.

What if my baby absolutely hates being swaddled?

Our baby fought the swaddle like a feral cat every single time we put her in it, but the second we got it secure, she would instantly calm down. Sometimes they hate the *process* of being restricted, but they need the actual restriction to stop their startle reflex from waking them up. Keep trying different fabrics until you find one with the right stretch.

Did cutting out dairy or caffeine honestly stop the crying?

I tried cutting out milk, cheese, and my morning coffee all at once, which just turned me into a raging monster. Unless your baby has other things to watch for like weird rashes or mucous in their diaper, dietary changes often don't do a darn thing for normal colic. Talk to your doctor before you make yourself miserable for no reason.

Is a movie like Cry-Baby too loud for baby sleep?

Honestly, babies in the womb are used to noise that's roughly as loud as a lawnmower, thanks to your blood flow and digestion. Rockabilly music and exaggerated movie dialogue at a normal volume isn't going to hurt them, and it might even soothe them more than a dead-silent room would.