My daughter is 21 years old now and suffers from fibromyalgia. Doctors suggested that the pain receptors from too much crying when she was a baby were fried and now her body doesn’t discriminate between normal pain and urgent pain.

In the early 2000s, there was a popular method of crying it out that seemed to work for her. The idea is that she would cry less every night, if you didn’t pick up the baby. Before this, though, she was colicky, and very hard to calm from birth until four months of age, or so. We later found out that she had a birth injury, and that could have been the cause of her pain all along…. in addition to food allergies we didn’t know about until she was three years of age.

Watching my daughter suffer and use a scooter to get around is a constant reminder of how much we did wrong when she was a baby. I have the deepest regrets that even on days we tried to do our best, we failed miserably.