Why Nothing in That Drawer Worked

By Suzanne, 62 — grandmother of three, and the one who kept buying
Published August 22, 2026 · 6 min read

I bought my daughter four different things for that baby’s tummy. Not one of them helped. Two of them made it worse.

I am the grandmother in this family. I raised three. When my daughter called me crying about a six-week-old who screamed and stiffened and pulled her knees up after every feed, I did what I have always done. I got in the car and I went to the pharmacy and I came back with a bag.

That bag is the reason I am writing this.

Here is where we ended up first, so you know I am not selling you a miracle. Last week I sat in my daughter’s kitchen and held that same baby through a whole feed and afterward she stayed soft and stayed put. My daughter watched from the doorway with her coffee and said, out loud, so that is what she looks like when she is comfortable.

It took me two months and one embarrassing night to get there.

The bag

Gripe water, because my mother swore by it. Gas drops, because the box said gas relief and the aisle was full of them. A different bottle, because the internet said to try a gentler formula. Then more gas drops, a stronger dose, because I had decided the first ones were too weak.

The gripe water did nothing at all. The formula switch gave us four bad days and a rash. And the gas drops — I want to be careful here, because they are fine for plenty of babies and plenty of mothers love them — the gas drops made our girl spit up. Every time. We would dose her, and twenty minutes later my daughter would be changing her shirt and the baby’s, and the screaming would start again on top of it.

I kept buying. That is the part I am not proud of. Every visit, another box. I was the one who was supposed to know.

There is a drawer in that kitchen now. My daughter calls it the drawer. Half-used bottles, three droppers, a tin of something with a picture of a sleeping baby on it. Every one of them was mine.

The night it broke

It was a Tuesday. My daughter had the baby over her shoulder and she was doing that walk you do, and without looking at me she said, Mum, please stop bringing things.

I sat in my car outside for a while before I drove home.

That night I did not go looking for another product. I went looking for why. I sat up with my reading glasses and read the children’s-hospital pages and the paediatric associations, the real ones, and I found something that stopped me cold.

The gas drops in that drawer are simethicone. It is the most-bought infant remedy there is. And when researchers actually tested it against a placebo — a dose of nothing — in babies with colic, the babies did about the same either way. More of them settled on the nothing than on the medicine. The American Academy of Paediatrics says it plainly on its own parenting site: with respect to colic, studies suggest that simethicone does not help.

Then I looked up the gripe water, the bottle my own mother swore by. It is not a medicine at all. It is sold as a supplement, so it is not regulated the way a medicine is, and no major paediatric body recommends it, and there is no solid evidence it does anything for colic or gas.

I want to be fair. Plenty of parents will tell you these things worked for their baby, and I believe them. But sitting there at one in the morning I stopped asking which bottle was the right bottle, and started asking a different question.

What did every single thing in that drawer have in common?

They all went in through her mouth.

Every remedy I ever handed my daughter had to be swallowed by the baby and then handled by the very stomach that was already having the hard time. The gripe water, the drops, the new formula. All of it took the same door. I was asking a struggling little gut to process one more thing as a way of asking it to struggle less.

That is what I started calling it. The same door.

And once I saw it, I saw the other half too, sitting right there in the same paediatric advice I had been reading. When they tell you to put a baby on her tummy to help the gas move, the reason it works is pressure — gentle pressure on the belly from the outside. Not something swallowed. Something applied.

My mother knew that. She never had a bottle of anything. She had a warm cloth and her hand.

So the two things that had actually ever loosened that baby — the warm bath, my palm flat on her middle while she lay across my knees — were the only two that never went through the same door. They came from outside. And they were also the only two that quit the moment I got up, or the moment the water cooled.

That is what sent me looking for something that could stay.

The one thing I brought that was not in a bottle

What I found is a soft flannel belly band made for this. You warm it gently, and it wraps around the baby’s middle over her clothes, and it holds mild steady warmth and a light even hold against her tummy while you feed her, carry her, walk her. Nothing to swallow. Nothing to measure. Nothing for that gut to process. It is called the TummyHush band, and I bought one instead of a fifth box.

What changed, and what did not

I am not going to tell you it cured anything, because nothing does. Some of what we were fighting was simply a very new baby getting older, and I know that. What I can tell you is what changed in that kitchen. The feeds stopped ending in a fight. She stayed soft afterward more often than she did not. Some evenings it clearly settled her and some evenings it just made her easier to hold, and honestly the second one was worth the money on its own.

The part I did not expect was for my daughter to ask me to bring another one for the nappy bag.

Two practical notes from a woman who has now wasted a drawer’s worth of money. There are bargain lookalikes about, and with babies the cheap one is the one you buy twice, and it comes with no promise behind it. This one has a thirty-night keep-it-either-way guarantee, which after my run of receipts is the only reason I was willing to try one more thing at all. It is forty-five dollars, or three for ninety, and I keep a spare at my house now.

One plain line, because I am somebody’s mother first

Crying that comes with a fever, with vomiting, with a baby who stops feeding or is not gaining — that is not the tummy, and that is a call to your doctor today, not a thing to wrap. Talk to your paediatrician about anything that worries you. I am a grandmother with a story, not a nurse.

The drawer is still in that kitchen. Nobody has thrown it out. I think my daughter keeps it as a joke, or maybe as a receipt for how hard the first two months were.

I have not added anything to it since.