I’m wicked, but I want to sleep. Be quiet, baby

The baby screams. She scrapes away at my layers of sleep. Not slowly and gently, but like a Band-Aid being ripped off skin. Waah!

I shoot out of bed, heart pounding. Where am I? What day of the week is it? Is it night or morning? Have I been sleeping for two minutes or two hours?

I stumble into the baby’s room and pick her up. I look at my watch. It’s two a.m. I’ve been asleep for 15 minutes, and I haven’t slept for days. Or weeks. Or months.

Something is wrong with my baby. Something is wrong with me because I can’t fix the problem. I can’t help her. I don’t even know what’s wrong.

I go to the kitchen and switch on some calming classical music. It says, Relaxation Music for Baby. It doesn’t do anything. I bend over the baby swing and shush and rock her until she falls asleep.

I slump at the kitchen table, too exhausted to cry.

My baby is six months old.

She’s been screaming all that time.

I’m a stranger in a strange land. I’m still a stranger to marriage, and definitely a stranger to motherhood.

My husband goes to daven, and after a short breakfast (which I didn’t prepare for him, I was holding a screaming baby), he leaves the house. He won’t be back until five p.m.

The door closes behind him. Eight hours. Eight long, long hours. Eight hours in which I won’t sleep, will hardly eat. I won’t throw in a load and definitely won’t make a bed. I won’t cook a meal for my husband and myself, so we can sit down the way normal couples do, and eat supper.

I hold in a primal scream.

I have no family nearby. No mother to call and say, “Take the baby. I need to sleep.” No sister to call and say, “What should I do?” No one. No one. The story of my life.