There is nothing like an inconsolable child to make a mother feel hopelessly inadequate. The shell she learns to wear against the clueless comments from strangers and the sometimes unhelpful suggestions from family and friends might work against grownups in the outside world, but when it's down to a game of one on one with your flesh and blood pre-verbal toddler who refuses to eat, sleep, or be comforted... that's when I feel totally and completely lost again.

It's only a day like this has been to send me back emotionally to the state I was in when she first came home from the NICU. The thoughts running one after another. I don't deserve her. I can't handle or care for her the way she needs. She might be better off with another mother, or at the least without me in her life. My Boy would be better without such an useless woman bound to him by a piece of paper he probably never wanted to sign in the first place. I don't deserve the emerald he married me with.

I know that these thoughts are flawed on a basic level. I know that I just have to keep breathing and get through minute by minute and this night will end. The bad case of the Icky Feelings and Snuffles that Tiff has had these past days will end, and she's going to smile and giggle and play chase-the-mama with me again. She'll reach up those precious little arms and hug me. She'll stop screaming and trying to throw her little body against the floor and walls.

In a lot of ways I've learned from the seventeen months she's been home. If I think back to the colic and the reflux (and the two of them coming together after a growth spurt when the prilosec stopped working) I can see that I'm just reacting to the situation and the tears. Right now? This is nothing. She's only been truly inconsolable for 30 hours now. I got a full 6 hours straight sleep last night before having to cope with today. I know that I'm about as exhausted as she is right now, and that once my dinner starts kicking it's way through my system I'll start feeling better- I haven't had a chance to really make myself eat anything today apart from a handful of wrinkly grapes. This is entirely because I'm depressed and not hungry.

Tomorrow will be better. I know it will. As long as I lay down now and close my eyes and try not to think how totally black and dark the nighttime seems to be.