Why Does She Always Have to Cry About it

Sammy’s parents wanted a baby. He thought it would be a good thing also until they got a baby. A wrinkled up old-man-looking screaming wailing baby. The one they got was a girl, they named it Sheila. She cried all the time. At first she sounded like a whimpering mewing baby alley cat. Her crying got louder, more desperate, and shrill over time More urgent, more desperate. People in the grocery store gave them mean looks that said “Why can’t you keep that thing quiet?” Sammy wanted them to send it back. “Babies are never labelled return to sender.” He was forced to listen to a couple of years of this insane crying. Why doesn’t she just tell us what she wants? Why does she always have to CRY about it? Babies don’t have words yet, his parents told Sammy. Sammy thought about this for a long time. When he was a young adult he worked in a daycare center. He taught the babies sign languages for milk, eat, sleepy, and bored. After the babies learned the sign, they were less frustrated. Thus, there was less crying, and the workers had less frazzled nerves.