Colic is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with, and if I was twenty and not the thirty-five that I now am, I’m not sure I’d have the tools to cope with it. Although ‘coping’ is a relative term: as I said in my last post, all you can do is survive.

When you’re not experiencing it, colic is a very easy thing to dismiss. ‘It’s nothing to worry about, just a bit of colic,’ is what you hear from health professionals, while people whose kids are grown and gone reassure you that it passes, so don’t let it colour your perceptions of parenting.

Nobody should ever use the word ‘just’ alongside ‘colic’. It’s like saying falling down a flight of stairs is ‘just a little tumble’. And the fact that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel is no practical help when you’re standing at the coal face in the dark. This might sound melodramatic, and if I weren’t the one going through it, I might roll my eyes and say, ‘Oh get on with it, nobody ever said it’d be easy.’ But the unlikely truth is that an eleven pound baby that can’t verbalise, move, or consciously plan her behaviour can dish out punishment like a professional.

A colicky baby doesn’t cry. Crying is dainty, purposeful and reasonable. A colicky baby screams an angry, pain-filled shriek of accusation and exasperation. The volume, tone and pitch seem perfectly calculated to inflict pain, set your teeth on edge, and rattle your nerves. And the duration – hour after hour after hour – saps your strength and your ability to think clearly. You can’t eat, talk, go to the toilet, read, watch TV, listen to music, or in any way relax because you’re subjected to a continuous assault on the senses.

And assault is what it is. While Asperger’s Syndrome is often portrayed as a social condition, many of us are afflicted with sensory issues from extreme sensitivity to surprising insensitivity. Lizzie has no sense of smell, very little sense of taste, and while she is oversensitive to touch, she has an incredibly high tolerance of pain. But like me, she has hypersensitive hearing, able to hear whispered conversations from several rooms away. This means that when Izzie screams, it causes us physical pain and a rush of adrenalin that befuddles us even further.

Worse are the emotions it stirs up. People liken those of us with Asperger’s to Mr. Spock from Star Trek – logical, unemotional beings who live in our heads, not our hearts – and they’re right, but not in the way that they think. Because the Vulcans are not unemotional creatures, but are in fact so emotional that they’ve had to come up with a way to control and overcome their passions. I think that far from being unemotional, people with AS feel emotions too much, and so force them down and try to operate at the level of intellect. This means we don’t understand our emotions, don’t know how to control then, so do our best to keep them at bay.

Colic unlocks them.

Lizzie can cope with a crying baby for around three minutes before it becomes too much. She feels overwhelmed, afraid, guilty; she gets upset. Why is Izzie crying? Why can’t I stop it? I’m a bad mother; I can’t deal with this; I’m not good enough. Lizzie’s heart pounds, her body goes into defence mode, and she hands the baby back to me and leaves the room. It damages her ability to bond with the baby and her involvement in Izzie’s care. I catch her crying when she’s by herself. It means we’re floating around a diagnosis of something with the initials PND.

This isn’t exclusive to parents with Asperger’s, of course. Colic is well known to heighten stress and cause anxiety, postnatal depression, self-esteem issues and relationship difficulties. You feel helpless. You feel frustrated by your inability to do anything to help. But you know it’s not the baby’s fault, so you take it out on each other.

As a couple, during a bout of colic you communicate by shouted niggles and pointed digs, because you’re both stressed and tired and you can’t hear one another or have anything like a reasonable conversation. You start to think about how unfair it is that the other person is eating dinner while yours is getting cold, or that they’re having a nice relaxing bath while you’re gritting your teeth against a tornado. It’s no wonder it puts such a strain on relationships. By the time it’s finished, it’s so late that you collapse into bed and the last thing you want to be is an attentive partner. Cuddle? I just want to be left alone.

Given Lizzie can only cope for around three minutes, when Izzie cries for a solid eight hours, I bear the brunt for seven hours and fifty-seven consecutive minutes. Her screams make such an impact on my mind that I even hear phantom baby cries when she’s fast asleep. It’s lonely trying to console a colicky baby, a nightmarish fight for survival that breaks your heart in two.

But survive I must and survive I do, even if I despair sometimes, even if I’m driven to tears, because I’m a dad, and that’s what dads do. The true measure of a person is not how they cope when everything’s going well, but what they do when it’s all falling apart. I knew going in that I’d have to walk through hell for my daughter, and it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

One day it’ll be over and I can wear my scars with pride. Until then, I just have to keep fighting, and remember what it is I’m fighting for.

This. Always this.