Roughest Night Yet

They tell you that having children is hard. They tell you that having children when you're a single parent is especially hard. I'm smart. I knew it was going to be hard. However, I was very unaware that "hard" could be taken completely to another level.

The time is now 10:09pm. The past hour has been quite good. However, between 5pm and 9pm there was nothing but solid screaming and crying. Some of the crying came from me, but most of it came from him.

He wasn't hungry. He wasn't wet. He wasn't dirty. He wasn't being eaten alive by zombies. I can't explain just what made him refuse to sleep and therefore throw fit after fit after fit. I've never heard a kid shriek like that before for no apparant reason. I did the hardest thing I've ever done: I sat on the couch the whole time and cried myself. If his shrieking was different, I ran in there to check, but then I left. Most of the time when the crying was intense it was because he got stuck on his back. He truely cried and screamed for four hours. At first when I would go into the room, he would stop crying when he saw me. As soon as I would walk away from the crib he would throw another fit. However, it soon became a war of wills. Who would break first? Would I give in and pick him up and hold him for five hours, or would he finally stop crying and let himself go to sleep? (Did I mention that there wasn't ONE tear during this rant)?

Well, I won. And it was bittersweet.

It's really easy to find yourself slipping into a scary place when you're all alone with a baby who won't stop, and this is behaviour that is happening every day. It's so frustrating. I'm so scared that I'm going to mentally damage him in some way. But I just didn't know what else to do. He finally gave out around 10pm and he's sound asleep.

Like I said, this is really, really, painfully hard.

But it won't last forever, right? RIGHT?