Parenting terminology often comes swaddled in kindly reassurances. This, I’ve realised, is a deliberate ploy to distract new parents from the nightmarish brutality of day-to-day life. “Baby blues”, for example, is a cute way to describe the terrifying mental and emotional shutdown some mothers experience after birth. Then there’s CIO (Cry it out) which is the practice of making your child go to sleep by leaving it to scream for several hours until it realises that nobody is coming and nothing will help and that the universe is an uncaring void of infinite loneliness.
Somehow, though, the term night terrors managed to slip through unchanged. By some obscene quirk, nobody at any point has ever thought to sugarcoat the term. Even though the term night terrors is legitimately one of the scariest things in the English language. Even though the term night terrors simultaneously sounds like a banned 1980s horror movie and an unlistenable teenage death metal band. Even though, if you whispered “Watch out for the night terrors” to any living adult as the sun went down, you’d be guaranteed to find them three weeks later as a shriek-mouthed, sleep-deprived corpse crouched down against some bins. Night terrors, for crying out loud. That has to be an oversight.
Having said that, I think I might have just experienced my first brush with night terrors. If I did, I take my hat off to whoever coined the term. It is astonishingly accurate.
Here’s what happened: at 11.45pm last night, my son started screaming. Full-blown hysterical screaming, like he did when he was a newborn. We picked him up and he kept screaming. We changed his nappy, he kept screaming. We tried feeding him and winding him and checking his teeth, but he kept screaming. My wife, in a state of abject panic, frantically kept pulling his nappy off because a midwife once told her that a leading cause of screaming in babies is hair wrapped around the end of their willy. There was no hair. He kept screaming, until his throat was raw. Until I was worried that the neighbours would start pounding on the walls again. Until all signs started to point to something having gone seriously wrong.
The whole thing was an immense pile-on of fear and confusion and helplessness. It lasted in one form or another until 3am, by which point we were all keeling over with exhaustion.
From what I’m able to tell, it did seem like a bout of night terrors. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t awake. He didn’t know we were there, let alone that we were trying to help. He doesn’t seem to have any recollection of it. Apparently – thanks to a petrified midnight Google – it happens when babies transition through sleep phases and is likely to be because he didn’t nap enough during the day.
At this point in a kid’s life, you can sometimes trick yourself into believing that you’ve got all the answers; that everything will simply be a variation of what’s gone before and that experience will get you through. Then something like this happens and you’re back to square one. Still, at least we’ll know what to do next time. And the time after that. We’ll solve this. Unless I disintegrate from exhaustion first, which is a distinct possibility.
