It wasn't until my shoulders reached my ears that I recognized the noise coming from the hotel room next door: A newborn baby's wail.

Oh. God. No.

The mother of not one, but two colicky babies, I had listened to - and tried to soothe - that same wail upwards of 12 hours a day for a total of seven months. Even now, more than four years since my youngest outgrew colic, a newborn's cry makes me jump like a car accident victim who hears screeching tires. I fear being hit again.

I prepared for a long night ahead, but the crying stopped. All night. The next day, I almost knocked on their door to ask, "Do you know how lucky you are?" But I suspected they'd just give me a blank, well-rested stare. And once again, I'd feel like a big loser of a mom.

My neighbor recently confessed that the first time she saw me, pushing my toddler and baby up the street in our double stroller, she thought, "Now there's an unhappy woman." And I was.

I was exhausted from not only months of colic, but a few hundred nights of sleep deprivation, numerous stinky diapers and hour after hour of putting the magnets on the refrigerator door with my toddler, then taking them off … Then putting them back on again … Then taking them off. In fact, I didn't write the entire year my younger son was a baby. Nothing was funny.

And yet it was supposed to be the time of my life. Otherwise, why would grandmothers stop me in the supermarket to tell me how blessed I was and how wonderful motherhood is and how much I should enjoy my kids while they're little … blah, blah, blah? I thought there was something wrong with me. I didn't feel blessed. I felt blah.

Then people asked me if I was going to "try for a girl," as though parenthood was a boardwalk game where the prize is a baby. No thanks. I'll take the giant stuffed pillow that says, "Jersey Girl" on it as a prize instead. Then maybe I could get some rest.

Couldn't people besides my neighbor see how miserable I was? Why ask me if I want another child when I could barely handle the two I had? That's like asking a Titanic survivor if she was going to take up waterskiing. I was shell-shocked, and yet, people pretended nothing was wrong. And sometimes, so did I.

When my friend, Diane, had a baby five months after I did, I was thrilled to finally have someone to commiserate with in the trenches of motherhood. Certainly she'd admit that babies are rarely how they appear on Johnson & Johnson baby lotion commercials. She'd soon find out that babies cry all the time, and they don't sleep, except when you don't want them to.

But Diane's baby was nothing like mine. She slept so much I called her Rip Van Emma. You'd barely know she was in the room except, once in a while, she'd sigh before dozing back off. Meanwhile, I was so conditioned to consoling babies for hours at a time, I jumped at every squeak or grunt my son made. Diane and I were having two entirely different experiences, and yet we had the same job.

One night when my youngest was a toddler and I finally had enough energy to stay up past eight, I met another woman at a mothers' group meeting who had survived colic and numerous sleepless nights. We whispered to each other how tired we were and how hard it was to like someone who cries and cries for hours and hours. And how we cried and cried for hours and hours. And how we told no one how we felt.

When another mom joined our conversation, we changed the subject as though we had been talking about something shameful, like an affair with the mailman. Later, we pretended we hadn't had the conversation at all.

I was shopping the other day when I heard the salesclerk ask a customer, "How old is your baby?" The mother replied, "Oh, she's three weeks today." I didn't even know there was a newborn in the store. I wanted to ask her, "Do you know how lucky you are?" Instead, I left. You know, in case the baby cried.