Thisbe's colic

Thisbe’s colic is the family’s working explanation for her persistent crying, but the condition matters as more than a label: it reveals how little reassurance the adults have to offer Heidi when ordinary care does not quiet her baby. Through Auden’s observation, the crying becomes a test of caregiving, exposing Heidi’s exhaustion and Robert’s limited response while drawing Auden into a situation she does not know how to manage.

Symptoms and Uncertainty

When Auden brings food upstairs, Thisbe is still howling. Heidi rocks her, but the motion does not stop the crying. The nursery’s open baby-care book, Your Baby: The Basics, lies on a white bureau near a stuffed giraffe, its page devoted to fussiness. Its presence makes the scene’s frustration concrete: advice is at hand, yet neither the book nor Heidi’s efforts have produced an answer.

Heidi has fed Thisbe, changed her, and held her. Because the baby continues to cry, Heidi worries that Thisbe hates her. She admits that she does not understand what she is doing wrong, then asks what colic actually means. Auden offers colic as a likely explanation, but cannot make the term useful to Heidi: it names a possibility without explaining why the crying persists or what she should do next. Heidi’s distress lies in that gap between doing everything she can and seeing no result.

The scene also establishes that the crying is not a brief disturbance that can be settled by one routine act. Heidi is holding and rocking Thisbe as the baby cries at full volume, and the effort leaves Heidi struggling to articulate what is wrong. Auden recognizes that she lacks baby-care knowledge too. Her attention turns to her father, Robert, who is downstairs eating onion rings and reading the paper, and to the immediate question of why he is not upstairs. The baby’s colic thus makes the distribution of care visible to Auden even before she knows what help to offer.

Family Responses

Robert eventually goes upstairs to check on Heidi and Thisbe, but then returns to the kitchen. Auden asks whether everything is all right. Robert answers that Thisbe is colicky, as Hollis was, and that there is little to do except wait for it to pass. His comparison places Thisbe’s crying within the family’s earlier experience with Hollis, but his conclusion offers patience rather than an intervention. The explanation seems familiar to him; it does not resolve Heidi’s uncertainty.

Auden’s feelings about her father remain mixed. She loves and admires him and recognizes that he has generally been good to her, while also judging him moody and selfish. Watching the exchange lets her see why someone might dislike him: Robert has checked in, yet Auden has already registered that Heidi was left upstairs with a crying baby while he remained below. Colic exposes the difference between acknowledging a problem and sharing its daily strain.

Robert also explains why Heidi has little family support available. Heidi’s mother died a couple of years earlier, and her older brother lives in Cincinnati with children of his own. These details do not establish that no one else could help, but they clarify the absence of the maternal assistance Auden wonders about. In the moment, the burden is concentrated in the household, where Heidi is the person rocking the baby and trying to interpret her cries.

Heidi’s response to Auden further shows how caregiving pressure reaches beyond the nursery. After opening up about not knowing what she is doing wrong, she apologizes for talking about it and says Auden should be out having fun. She then points her toward the Tip, where the women from her shop spend their evenings. The suggestion turns Heidi’s attention outward even as she is struggling herself: she tries to make space for Auden’s life, while Auden has just witnessed how much Heidi needs support.

Recurring Worry and Significance

A later passage broadens the picture from the immediate episode of crying to Heidi’s ongoing concern about Thisbe. Heidi worries about how much the baby sleeps and eats, a red mark on her leg, whether crying will make her hair fall out, and whether her bowel movements are the right color. The range of these fears shows how colic sits within a larger vigilance over the baby’s health, rather than appearing as an isolated difficulty. The narrative presents the worries as a recurring pattern, not as proof that each feared problem is real.

During a four o’clock afternoon round of coffee, Auden finds Heidi and Thisbe doing tummy time on the living-room floor. Heidi follows the practice faithfully because she has been told it helps prevent a flat spot on the baby’s head, and she praises Thisbe’s strength. Auden initially tunes Heidi out, partly from necessity, but begins to notice that something is amiss after drinking half a cup of coffee. The shift in her attention gives the caregiving routine a double edge: Heidi’s diligence is visible in the exercise, while Auden’s gradual notice suggests how easily that diligence and anxiety can fade into the background of household life.

Thisbe’s colic is therefore defined in these scenes through its effects on the people around her: sustained crying, Heidi’s self-doubt, Robert’s expectation that the family must wait, and Auden’s dawning awareness of an imbalance in care. The term offers the household a probable explanation, but not a cure or a clear instruction. Its narrative force comes from that unresolved condition, which makes the limits of advice and reassurance as tangible as Heidi’s rocking arms.