Love-Knowledge Baby

“Thank you for your suggestions, but please excuse me while I ignore them.”

That’s what I want to say to a lot of people.  And you know what?  I started out this whole mothering journey with a much “better” attitude.  In the beginning, especially, I was ready and willing to listen to peoples’ suggestions, their advice, and their anecdotal evidence in regards to childrearing.  I was a lot more submissive, and a lot less fierce.  I had a newborn.  I was young.  I thought I needed to listen to those who had done it all before, and so I asked.  I listened.  I nodded my head and tried it their way.

And it felt wrong.

It felt wrong when I called my mom about my 2 month old baby who was crying, and she told me to put him down and let him cry it out.  It felt wrong to watch my helpless infant lying on his blanket, his small body twisting, limbs jerking in the agony and danger of loneliness, his hysterical cries answered by my shushing voice and not the touch of my skin on his, the warmth and scent of me, the taste of my milk . . .

I’m so ashamed.

I’m so ashamed I listened to my mother that one time.  I’m so filled with regret that I let him cry at all, and I took that deep, nails-on-chalkboard feeling of absolute shame and wrongness with me as I researched for myself.  I discovered what my heart had been telling me all along: babies cannot “self sooth.”  Meeting an infants needs as soon as they arise is the basic prerequisite for humane and biologically normal parenting.

When my beautiful son developed facial eczema after early introduction of solids at 5 months old (another result of my submissive and passive parenting with a domineering mother of my own), I heard plenty of things which caused me to grow a tougher skin.  Things like, “Eeew, what’s wrong with his face?!” and “Oh, it’s just baby acne.  It’ll pass.  My kids all had that, and I ignored it.  It eventually went away.” and “That’s terrible!  Have you asked the doctors to test him for X, Y, or Z?” (all horrible diseases which have no cure) and “It’s eczema.  You need steroid cream.”

I could actually write entire paragraphs about what people said to me about my son’s skin.  Many comments were so stupid my brain rebelled and struck them from my memory almost immediately, and I’m glad not to share them.  Suffice to say, I kept a cover over his stroller and car seat when we were out (this was before I used slings), and started to get jaded about bringing Bailey to public places.

What I do know is that I used my own initiative to keep a food diary of what I ate and how it affected him through the breast milk.  I eliminated wheat.  We also did something that made me nervous, but ultimately worked out for the best; We backed off of solid foods and went back to exclusive breast feeding.  Meanwhile, multiple trips to the pediatrician supplied us with steroid creams and other things with long and upsetting warning labels.  Though I asked to be referred to an allergist, I was told he was too young for true allergies.  We should just stick to the creams.

The advice that parents of babies with eczema is confusing.  Bathe often, don’t bathe often.  Use this cream or another.  Most of those messages revolve around treating the symptoms of eczema, not finding the cause.  I knew there had to be a cause, and it was inexorably linked to food.

My food diary led us to a wacky sort of elimination diet, and all the while we got no sleep.  Bailey scratched himself bloody.  We put mitts on him, and he’d use the mitts to scratch his skin off.  All his clothes had blood stains.  I stayed up nights just holding him and applying more creams and swaddling him and nursing him.  Nights blended into days which melted into weeks.  I eliminated most of the major allergens, and I saw some improvements and then back slides.

It was a dangerous few months.  We both lost weight.  I lost a LOT of weight, but I didn’t really care about that as much as my baby’s weight loss.  Babies aren’t supposed to lose weight.  They’re supposed to be fat and happy.

So, without my pediatrician’s referral, I found an allergist who would see infants.  We looked over my food diary, and picked out the major elements and went to get blood drawn from my 8 month old baby.  They called us back and told us that he was indeed allergic to wheat, oats, rye, barley, soy, egg whites, egg yolks, and peanuts.

No wonder my haphazard elimination diet hadn’t seemed to work.  There was just too much to eliminate.  It was too hard to tell without that test.  Within the next months, Bailey’s face cleared up as we learned to adapt to a new allergen free diet.  The change was amazing, and he started gaining weight again.  I never put my normal weight back on, but I felt so much better knowing the food I was eating wasn’t going to hurt my baby (barring mistakes and carelessly read labels).

Now I’ve been Gluten Free for over two years, along with the rest of his allergens.  We’re still breast feeding and a recent blood test at 2 and a half years old has shown that he’s no longer allergic to soy, and that a whole bunch of his allergies have come down on the severity scale.  I’m now pregnant with out second child, and I know what I can do for my baby if he or she has allergies.  I can change the contents of my milk.

This all has been tremendously difficult, but extremely rewarding, but there’s something you don’t know.  If you go back and reread what I’ve written, feel free to mentally insert between each sentence that someone told me to stop breast feeding.  If we do that, we might actually come vaguely close to the amount of times somebody actually believed that it would be better for me or my baby to use formula, or just STOP nursing . . . and said it to my face.

So, forgive me if all I want to say to people who have advice for me is, “Thank you for your suggestions, but please excuse me while I ignore them” . . . but that’s the polite version.  Because I can understand why a mom would want to eat what she wanted to without having to worry about her nursing baby’s food allergies, but I CAN’T understand the choice to switch to formula just to indulge in lattes and pizza.  I can’t understand it because I know how important, how vital and irreplaceable breastfeeding is to the mother and baby.

There is NO logic behind switching from the one perfect, living and utterly changeable nourishment source to a dead and inadequate replacement during a time of stress and compromised health.  If I had followed that chorus of voices and denied my intuitive desire to continue breastfeeding, I don’t know how much worse it could have gotten.

But I know it would have been worse.  Breast milk is a supply and demand system.  The more formula introduced, the less breast milk I would produce.  My milk supply would have plummeted.  The introduction of formula into his digestive system would have irreparably altered his intestinal flora.  I was also all too aware that one of his allergies could easily be to dairy (which his latest allergy test as a toddler confirms).

So I would have been quickly losing my milk supply while trying to do damage control as he reacted to the milk-based formula.  At that point, I’m sure advice would have been to switch to soy-based formula which would not have solved any problems because he’s allergic to soy.  I’m so glad I stuck with nursing and had him tested.  I can change my “formula” to exclude his allergens and still include all the good things he needs.

What is so horrible about breast feeding?  Is it the white blood cells, the stem cells, the essential and easily digested form of DHA built for babies and toddlers, the fact that the milk changes to match the developmental stages of the child, or is it simply because boobs are icky or only for sex?  Is it the bond and love and beneficial neurological feedback that a child receives through skin to skin contact?

What is it about breast feeding that offends so many people?  Why is breast feeding seen as the problem in so many cases?  If someone can stand up and give me a rational and intuitive reason I should not breastfeed my baby, my toddler, both of them at the same time, in public, anywhere, anytime and with great joy . . . I’m waiting.

Let me hear it.

But if it’s not both rational and intuitive, it won’t work for me or my family.

And I’ll just say, “Thank you for your suggestions, but please excuse me while I ignore them.”