"What do we do?"

Suddenly, Porshai began to cry.

Danny and I slept on a mattress in the middle of his uncle’s living room floor, with Porshai, only a few months old, lying between us.

I got up.
I made her a bottle.
I tried to feed her.
She still cried, horribly so.
I changed her diaper.
Her cry was piercing, from ear to spine.
Danny woke up. "What’s wrong with her?"
"I don’t know."
I did everything the doctor said to do.
She screamed.
Danny rocked her in his arms.
Danny asked her to "Be quiet."
She didn’t quiet.
We didn’t know what to do.
The crying was ceaseless. As was our frustration and fear.
We got dressed.

We pushed Porshai in her carriage to the emergency room.
She stopped crying.
When we got to the emergency room I told the doctor, "She’s asleep now but before we got here she was crying and crying and she wouldn’t stop. It was awful. I tried to feed her. I changed her diaper. I don’t know what is wrong with her."
The doctor examined her.
"She has colic," he said.
"What is colic?"
He explained.
"What do we do?"

Danny and I should have been in high school, anticipating with excitement our prom, enthusiastically considering which college to attend. But instead we were parents.