6 months.

6 months. Half a year. 

All at once it feels like a blink and a lifetime. 

For the first 2 weeks, there was bliss and nights spent cradling her in my arms. I did my makeup and hair every single day, feeling a surge of confidence in motherhood and my own skin.  There was a surprising lack of tears comparatively to those first four weeks with your sister, so naturally I thought I had it all figured out—felt that perhaps I had crossed over the other side of ‘someday,’ and ought to begin penning a parenting novel. 

…Until she woke up to the world and her sister and I both realized sleeplessness and split attention was going to outlast the blissful newness of it all. Until we realized the cries were full of pain, and her body was often stiff, and her eyes (as they opened) weren’t filled with the joy I knew was brewing inside her. Until there was chaos and hard and unexplainable sadness. Until there was so much for a little baby, and there was nothing anybody could do to shield her from it. 

Colic is a word people use to describe dark seasons of babies lives when they don’t know what else to say—as if naming painful, confusing, and uncertain symptoms will ease parents’ tired minds as they cling to the hope that one day they will outgrow it. Some times they do, but other times (I am assuming many other times), you have to beg to see a specialist and you have to fight to prove that you are not just being ‘dramatic’ about the cries. You have to convince the world that you know your own daughter, and you believe there is joy inside her bones that has not had the chance to fully come to life, because the joy is being strangled by pain.You have to balance the spiritual, emotional, and physical without any blogs or handbooks or pamphlets explaining the mechanism of "how." 

5 months in we began to find the answers, and she woke up to the world. A simple diagnoses & she woke up to the beauty and the laughter of the world. She woke up to the tears for reasons other than pain—and even those tears are a relief because they are solvable: Hunger, a dirty diaper, tiredness… we know those cries, and they do not destroy us, because we can rush to her aid and take her through. Our hands have become un-tied, and she has woken up. She exhibits the peace, joy, and gentleness I knew was locked beneath her pain. What I saw only in glimpses, I now see in full color. 

5 months of incredibly hard and dark days spent navigating inconsolable crying (from both her and I), defeat, and hours upon hours of researching a cure for an unknown diagnosis, but now we are on the other side of ‘someday,’ and I feel as if we are both just waking up. We are doing more than existing, we are finally living. It was an eternity, but it was also only a blink. The days we spent laying next to each other, tears streaming down both our face will not be forgotten. But now as we look in retrospect, those days are a cherished memory of bonding rather than a heavy and labored love. 

1 month spent learning your actual likes and dislikes, hearing you laugh, holding you close, and watching you digest the world with joy after a season of darkness has been one of the sweetest experiences of motherhood thus far. This bond between us has become unbreakable as we experienced the breaking day in and day out. As you battled and fought for health in your body, I battled and fought for health in my mind. Still, as we stand together as a family on the other side of someday I find myself drenched in gratitude, grounded in strength, surrounded by support. At the end of it all, I am reminded of God’s faithfulness, Goodness, and Comfort. In the middle of the darkest nights, He held my daughter and me and reminded us of the joy that would surely come in the morning. 

Happy 6 months, Skylar James. It is so very nice waking up with you. 

-RS