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Judy’s cries tore right through whatever dream Lorraine’s mind was in the middle of playing. She jerked, heart crashing through her chest like always, and then she exhaled. Her eyelids were heavy and the bedroom was still dark.
Beside her, Ed stirred. Lorraine reached to set her hand on his shoulder.
“Stay,” she said, voice heavy. “I got her.”
He hummed and dropped his head back to his pillow.
Lorraine blinked until her eyelids stopped sticking together like magnets and she steadied herself on the floor. She followed her daughter’s crying down the hall in a path that felt half instinctual. Some weeks ago, she had finally moved on from the stage of new motherhood that saw her crumbling into tears every time she heard her baby cry.
Only extreme circumstances brought on that level of overwhelm now.
The dim yellow rabbit night light in the corner of the nursery let Lorraine’s hands find Judy in the crib right away. Assured of her mother’s presence, Judy’s cries evolved from chaotic and screeching to smooth wailing, now begging Lorraine to provide for her.
“Come ‘ere.” Lorraine scooped her up and set Judy’s head on her collarbone. Nothing had ever woken her more quickly in her life than a five-month-old whining in her ear. “Mommy’s here.”
Judy didn’t need to be changed and hadn’t managed to somehow bruise one of her little hands or feet on the sides of the crib. Only hungry, evident by the specific sounds she made that Lorraine had become an expert at picking out, like she had learned a different language specifically intended just for her to understand.
Lorraine carried her downstairs and warmed up a bottle for the wriggly girl in her arms. She pressed little kisses to Judy’s head and whispered soft things against her soft, dark hair.
“Here, sweet girl.” Lorraine sat in the chair by the window in the living room. She held the bottle so that Judy could find it with her little hands and set it where she wanted. Judy latched on, replacing cries with muffled suckling sounds. One of her hands reached and grabbed at the neckline of her mother’s nightgown.
Lorraine hummed a distant, thoughtless melody of whatever stuck in her head from the guitar tunes Ed had plucked out for their daughter’s entertainment that past evening. Sleepy, she didn’t remember which exactly it was – just a few repeating notes bouncing around her hazy head. She picked at them, clawing at her husband’s gentle voice through her memory.
When she caught onto them, she smiled, gazing out the window at a streetlight and rubbing at Judy’s little elbow with her thumb.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…
You make me happy
when clouds are grey –
Judy whined. A sharp, strange sound that yanked Lorraine’s psyche quickly out of her warm thoughts, plummeting her stomach instantly through the floor.
Having decided she was done with the bottle, Judy arched her back in her mother’s lap and reached her hands up at the black air. Her crying resumed. Whatever comfort she had found in her mother’s arms, with something soft in her mouth to feed her, had clearly vanished to somewhere unseen.
Lorraine pushed the half-emptied bottle onto the coffee table and gathered the baby back up onto her chest. A hundred panicked worries scattered themselves around her mind and she scrambled to collect them all, desperate to examine each and find an answer for her daughter’s distress. Fever. Pain. Fear. God forbid, neglect. Loneliness.
Patting her hand on Judy’s back, praying it would help, Lorraine stood from the chair and wandered aimlessly around the room. She checked on any of the usual infant stressors and found nothing. Judy was sometimes just an anxious baby – constantly needing her parents’ presence or reassurance when faced with a new environment or stimulus – but usually Lorraine found it a joy to be needed by her daughter. To be able to help Judy feel safe was the greatest reward of motherhood, she thought.
So when her comfort wasn’t enough to soothe a non-physical woe for the tiny girl who needed her for everything, Lorraine’s heart started to quiver in her chest and swell into a lump in her throat.
“It’s alright, honey,” she whispered, over and over. “It’s alright. I’m here.”
When Judy was born, she entered the world screeching at the top of her lungs the way babies do. Despite its normalcy, Lorraine had felt the absence of her child from her body and lamented that Judy cried from the despair of separation from her mother. Lorraine spent every moment since making up for the cold and insecurity inherent to living in the big wide world.
She hated any moment that reminded her that her girl would ever feel unhappy.
Her own whispered reassurances piled on top of each other, woven between Judy’s heartbreaking cries, and Lorraine felt her mind bend and crack apart. She pressed her forehead and nose against Judy’s head and begged. It’s okay, it’s okay, shhh, it’s okay, you’re with Momma, you’re okay.
Her repetitions were useless. Judy’s sad little voice drenched Lorraine’s shoulder with something so heavy she could barely keep her knees from buckling. Tears flowed down Lorraine’s cheeks.
The mess of sleepiness and worry and despair and baby wails in her own head were too dense for her to hear Ed’s footsteps on the stairs. His concerned voice grew as he approached her, and she opened her tightly-shut eyes and blinked at him through tears.
“She won’t stop crying,” she choked. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”
Ed brought a steady hand to his wife’s back. “She’s okay. Just fussy. Let me take her, okay? You should try and get back to sleep.”
Lorraine nodded, sniffling. “Okay.”
She painfully passed Judy off into Ed’s big arms and kissed her head. Ed did the same for her as she crossed the living room to go back upstairs.
After cleaning herself up with a handful of tissues, Lorraine sat on the edge of the bed and settled herself enough to silence her hiccuping sobs.
She curled up in a little heap, close enough to Ed’s side of the bed to feel some warmth, grasping her blanket as tightly around herself as she could.
She must have cried a little more in her near-sleep. Whenever Ed returned, she felt him brush the tears away with his thumb.
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The morning came with sunlight and a breeze from the window on Lorraine’s shoulder. Ed must have opened it when he got up, letting her wake to June morning air rather than a screaming baby. Lorraine stretched out on the sheets and appreciated the change for a moment before feeling her stomach turn just a little, remembering the stress of the night.
Guilt crawled beneath her skin. It wasn’t infrequently that she felt the worry about her quality of mothering, but it didn’t usually break her the way it had just hours ago. She hated her weakness. She hated that it ever came at the expense of her ability to stay with Judy through her distress – whatever the cause.
She missed her girl. She pushed herself out of bed and pulled on a cardigan to venture down the hall again.
In the crib, her dark-haired, bright-eyed baby held her head up, on her belly, gazing up at green leaves dancing outside her window. Her little fingers squeezed at wrinkles in the bedsheet.
She saw her mother in the doorway. Her open mouth curled in a wide smile and she squealed, lurching herself back and forth on her mattress.
Lorraine smiled, unable to help it even if she tried. She leaned over the crib. “Good morning, sweet girl.”
Judy reached a little hand up in the air. Lorraine lifted her up, letting Judy sit on her forearm. Judy chewed on one hand and set the other on her mother’s cheek, giggling the baby giggles that could make Lorraine weep tears of joy for once.
“Yeah,” she murmured, taking Judy’s hand and kissing it. “Mommy’s here.”
Judy laughed, bounced a little, and let herself collapse on Lorraine’s chest, arm around her neck. She sighed.
Lorraine held her close. She felt peace and contentment radiate from her daughter’s breath, warm on her neck and steady under her hand on Judy’s back.
“I love you,” said Lorraine with a kiss to her baby’s sweet-smelling hair. “Always. Always always always.”
Floating up to the nursery from downstairs, Lorraine heard Ed once again practicing songs for his daughter on his guitar. Half-messy chords and notes turned to lyrics in Lorraine’s voice, soft on Judy’s soul.
You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.
Please don’t take my sunshine away.