Not the kind of memory you forget.
Not something that fades with time.
It was sharp. Constant. Unrelenting. Like a siren that never powered down.
Twenty hours a day.
For three months.
No matter what I did, it never stopped.
I named him Ethan.
At first, I thought I was doing everything wrong.
Maybe I wasn’t feeding him correctly.
Maybe I wasn’t holding him right.
Maybe I was missing something every mother was supposed to instinctively know.
But I wasn’t a first-time mother.
I had read the books. Attended the classes. Prepared the nursery carefully.
Still, nothing worked.
Ethan cried until his tiny body shook.
Until his face turned red and wet and exhausted.
Until I thought he would break apart from exhaustion alone.
We went to doctors.
Then specialists.
Then another hospital.
They checked everything.
Reflux. Allergies. Neurological issues. Sensory disorders.
Every test came back the same.
Normal.
“Some babies are just difficult,” one doctor said gently.
Difficult.
That word made me want to scream.
Because “difficult” didn’t explain the way he cried like something inside him was
burning.
It didn’t explain the way silence never came.
Not even for a minute.
Not even in sleep.
My husband, Daniel, lasted four weeks.
I still remember the night he left.
I was sitting on the nursery floor, rocking Ethan while he screamed against my
chest.
Daniel stood in the doorway for a long time without speaking.
Then he finally said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
I didn’t even look up.
“You can’t do what?” I asked.
“This,” he said. “The crying. The no sleep. The constant … nothing helping.”
I remember laughing once.
A short, broken sound.
“You think I can leave?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
Then he said the words that split my life in two.
“I already am.”
And he was gone.
My mother came next.
She lasted three days.
On the third morning she stood in the kitchen, holding her coffee like it weighed too
much.
“That baby is not normal,” she said.
I stared at her.
“He’s just a baby.”
“No,” she said quietly. “Something is wrong with him.”
That night she packed her bag.
“I can’t help you with this,” she added.
And then she left too.
After that, it was just me.
And Ethan.
And the house that never stopped echoing with crying.
There were moments I stopped recognizing myself.
Days blurred into nights.
Nights dissolved into something worse.
I stopped showering properly.
I stopped eating.
Sometimes I would stand in the kitchen holding a spoon and forget why I was
there.
Once, I found myself sitting on the bathroom floor with Ethan in my arms, both of
us crying at the same time, and I couldn’t tell whose sound belonged to whom
anymore.
Sleep became something theoretical.
A memory from another life.
On the worst nights, I would walk around the house holding him, whispering
apologies I wasn’t even sure he could understand.
“I’m here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
And still, he cried.
Always crying.
Until I began to believe something terrible.
That maybe I was the problem.
That maybe something inside me had broken him before he even had a chance.
I remember one night standing in the shower fully clothed, water hitting my face,
trying to remember how I got there.
I remember thinking, If I disappear for just one minute, will the crying stop?