Category: Mothering without a licence

I’m sure you’ve seen the dust-ups about breastfeeding in public recently. Bill Maher, Applebees, Facebook, even the YMCA have proven themselves unfriendly to nursing mothers just in the past couple of months.

I’m not going to add to the millions of pixels of righteous – and rightful – anger that have been dedicated to this argument already. Breastfeeding is a woman’s right, and a beautiful thing, and lunch for an innocent baby, and I find it inconceivable that there are calls for a woman to be “discreet” while nursing in a world that encourages boys to wear pants that sag low enough to show a plumber’s crack and thirteen year old girls to dress like hookers. I’ve seen some pretty disgusting feeding behaviour at the local fast food joint, and yet nobody’s putting a blanket over their heads as they cram sauce-dripping big macs into their pie-holes and chew with their mouths open. (Okay, maybe I had just a few pixels of vitriol to add to the debate.)

I had intended to post a picture of me nursing one of the boys today, to play along with the Great Virtual Breast Fest. I gave myself a week’s lead time, and left reminders for myself — but still forgot to dig out the old pictures. S’okay, though, because I like to think I’m pretty good at painting a picture with all these wordy-words of mine.

Breastfeeding did not come easily to me. It was, in a word, hell. From the first day of his life, nursing Tristan was a challenge. He was born at 9:00 in the morning after more than 27 hours of sleepless labour, and I remember being on the maternity ward with him when he was about six hours old, absolutely stupefied with exhaustion and terror, and the nurse coming in to ask me if I’d fed him. I blinked at her as the guilt swelled up for the first time in my parenting career – barely a quarter of a day into a lifetime – and told her I didn’t know how. She clucked her disapproval, shoved the baby onto my breast, and walked away.

That night, a kinder nurse used wet facecloths to torture poor, sleepy and not-quite-one-day-old Tristan into enough wakefulness to get him to latch on. We had to do this every three hours, all night long, and it took about 45 minutes to wake him up enough just to get him to latch every time. I was petrified to go home and leave behind the kindly nurse with the wet washcloth. I simply didn’t feel ready to handle it on my own.

The first two weeks of his life, we made every-second-day trips to the lactation clinic at the hospital to adjust the latch and have him weighed. I would cry with the pain every time he latched on, and he would spit up my blood after every feed. He came dangerously close to being labelled with the ominous “failure to thrive” as he continued to not gain weight. My poor husband and my visiting mother tried a few times to suggest that I capitulate and give him some formula, that I had tried my best, that he would still be fine raised on formula as millions of babies are.

And yet, I dug in my heels. When Tristan was five weeks old and had finally regained enough weight, the ped gave me permission to stop setting the alarm for myself so I could wake Tristan for a feed every third hour throughout the night. After endless tubes of lansinoh, the latch had gone from excruciating to sore, and I could handle that. And then we got thrush. That, too, passed.

When Tristan was four months old, just when nursing moved from torture to tolerable, the ped suggested we start supplementing with forumula because Tristan was having serious problems with reflux and not gaining enough weight. Oh the irony, that these large breasts of mine – a bane through my whole life from their first appearance in grade school – would betray me yet again by not producing enough milk to satisfy my son. For another five months, I gave him two bottles a day and nursed him the rest of the time. By the time he was eight months old, we were down to one ritual morning feed, more of a comfort nurse than a nutritional one, and had to spend the entire day on Christmas day at the ER when he had a wicked fever. We had nothing packed for him to eat, but somehow my beleaguered breasts stood up for the task and I managed to produce enough milk to satisfy him for the entire day.

He weaned himself around 10 months, and Simon was conceived six months later. I had hoped nursing would be easier the second time, but it wasn’t – at least, not to start. More blood, more cracked nipples, and this time a voracious 10 lbs baby who wanted to feed every two hours. No wet facecloths were ever required to entice Simon to a meal. I nursed him until he was 16 months old, a good four months after I had gone back to work after the end of my maternity leave.

Breastfeeding was never the zen, earth-mama, natural experience I had been told it would be. It was painful, physically and emotionally. It caused vicious late-night arguments between sleep-deprived and emotionally overwhelmed parents. It was bloody hard work for all of us.

And yet, it’s one of the things I most look forward to. I know the first little while will be painful, and scary. But when it settles into a routine, nursing a baby can be a wonderful thing. And I’ll nurse this baby anywhere I damn well please to do so. I’ve nursed the boys in the mall, at the park, at the community centre, in a truck stop, in a restaurant… all without the benefit of hiding under some sort of tent.

Check out the League of Maternal Justice today for some links to other moms (and dads) who are joining the Great Breast Fest today.

The title of this post is the chapter title of a book by a French author named Corinne Maier, who has written a best-selling book extolling 40 reasons not to have children. I haven’t read the book, but there was a fascinating article about it in the Globe and Mail last week.

Maier rails against France’s equivalent of the culture of the soccer mom, coining the term mèredeuf: “French speakers recognize it instantly as a contraction of mère de famille, the traditional phrase for a full-time mother, a housewife, a woman who makes mothering her career. But the contraction turns it into something that sounds like a combination of merde and oeuf, carrying the implication that these patriotic mega-moms are ‘egg-shitters.'”

As I was reading the article, I started out thinking I’d write a post refuting her 40 reasons against having children one by one, but I think that might end up somewhere between tedious and futile. (Her reasons not to have children are laid out as chapter titles, and appear at the very end of the Globe article. They include the title to this post, plus such pithy advice as:

Don’t become a travelling feeding bottle.

You will inevitably be disappointed by your child.

A child will kill the fond memories of your childhood.

To be a mother, or to succeed: You must choose.

Matter of fact, I like to think this whole blog is a sort of refutation of her theses; that blog demonstrates that motherhood can be fulfilling while it exasperates, uplifting even though it demoralizes, and it doesn’t have to mean the end of an otherwise productive life outside the home or a functioning intellect.

Maier, a practicing psychaitrist, is herself is a mother of two children, ages 10 and 13. She seems able to separate her criticism of the state of motherhood from criticism of her own children, but I can’t help but feel sorry for her kids. If she truly believes what she has written (which is not a given, mind you, as she seems to have a knack for writing inflamatory texts) then one can’t help but extrapolate some latent dissatisfaction with her children, of which they will inevitably become aware.

Of the whole article about her book, the quote that intrigued me the most was her assessment of why people choose to have children:

“Generally speaking, people who have children have them for the wrong reasons,” she says. “They have them because they’re afraid of being alone, and they want to grasp a tiny bit of immortality. And anyway, we never get that immortality. You are doing something that is very foolish for society just because you have believed something that is not true.”

Now this is an interesting question. Why did you have children? Was it always in your grand plan? Was it something you did because that’s what everybody does after they finish school and get married and establish a career and buy a house? Did you do it because somebody else wanted you to do it?

To me, it was always a given, an irrefutable fact of my life. The only thing I ever wanted to be was a mother; everything else was just a means to that end. I’ll even risk tripping over the raw edges of hyperbole by admitting that I believe having children is my higher calling, and my greater purpose in life. Granted, it’s not the only reason I’m here, but I like to think it’s a large part of it. The irony is that I’ve cultivated a reasonably successful career on the side and that the path my life has taken has precluded me from being a full-time stay-at-home mom — but I genuinely don’t think it’s diminished my ability to be the best possible mother to my boys.

Maybe seven or eight years ago, I was seeing a psychologist for a while. I had some shit to work through, left over from some of the crappy things my ex-husband said and did. One day, after I had been speaking about my childhood, the psychologist told me that when I speak about my childhood, there is a look of bliss that comes over me, and that one of the best things I could do was to raise a bunch of children the way my parents had raised me.

So I did. And I will. And while I won’t profess to be loving every minute of it, I’m pretty sure I could come up with at least 400 reasons why having children is the best possible thing I could have done with my life.

So I was reading through the operating manual that came with my kids last night (what, you don’t have one?) and I realized that there are a few pages that have fallen out over the years. Or been yanked out. Or been used to draw pictures of Luke Skywalker locked in mortal combat with SpongeBob Square Pants.

And since I don’t have the definitive answer on these questions, and since I’m just making this shit up as I go along, and since you mostly seem to – at least collectively – know what you’re doing, I’m opening these questions up to the bloggy peeps.

1. How do you respond to a three year old who insists “But I don’t WANT a baby brother!” while glancing balefully at your gestating belly? Somehow, my current response of “Too bad, you’re getting one” doesn’t seem terribly sympathetic.
2. At what age do you switch your kids over from the happy, primary-coloured, endlessly durable Ikea plates and bowls to stoneware (read: breakable) plates? And how old is too old for a sippy cup? I’m thinking twelve?
3. Is it okay to let them beat the snot out of each other? Part of me wants to quell any act of physical violence, even play wrestling, before it gets out of hand, but another part of me recognizes that they are boys, and boys have this odd need to exert their physicality, and while I don’t want to turn them into wimps I also don’t want to nursing black eyes and running to the ER for stitches any more frequently than I have to, which I already suspect will be rather regularly over the next 15 years or so.
4. How do you know when you’ve crossed the line between building self-esteem and creating an egomaniac? Is it bad to occasionally want to bust your five year old down a few pegs when it seems like he’s maybe a little bit too assured of his place at the head of the household and centre of the universe?
5. If you had a hypothetical three and a half year old boy who, hypothetically of course, took late to potty training, and then when he finally mastered it developed some really odd quirks about pooping, inasmuch as he would not poop AT ALL, in the potty nor in a diaper, without resistance and crying and hysterics at EVERY SINGLE bowel movement, and say this went on for TWENTY days, but on the 21st day, that child nothing-short-of-miraculously hopped up on the potty and pooped right in front of you, as you were hypothetically just getting out of the shower, no less, and pooped with a complete absence of fanfare as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and you nearly cried with the relief of it, and then at around 2 pm that day the same poor child developed diarrhea, and pooped in his underwear three times in twelve hours to his own complete bewilderment and dismay… would you curl up in a ball on the floor and weep for fear that this poor hypothetical child would NEVER get over his newly developed poop issues?

Clearly, I’m in dire need of an updated version of my parenting manual. Or some therapy. Maybe both.

Although Simon’s new preschool isn’t a co-operative, the parents are asked to contribute a snack on a rotating basis. Given that there are 16 kids, and the kids go three days a week, our turn in the rotation comes up every five weeks or so.

Now, I should confess here that I already suffer snack trauma from dealing with just Tristan’s snack. At this time last year, I was happily packing him simple snacks like a baggie with some ritz cracker sandwiches and juice or a little dish of grapes and some water. I was always cognizant of the choices I was making, thinking myself quite the good mother for not simply throwing in a Twix bar and a can of pop.

One day near Christmas, I volunteered for a day in Tristan’s JK class and was gobsmacked to see what some of the other children hauled out of their backpacks for snacktime. We’re talking multi-course snacks here, with various containers and utensils. These kids were eating better for snack than what I usually managed to scrape together for a family meal.

Not that I managed to improve the quality, nor even the quantity, of Tristan’s packed snack after that. I just felt like a bad mother every time I sent him off to school and tried not to make eye contact with the other parents on the playground, knowing they were whispering behind the portable and pointing out me, “that mother, the one who thinks sending an apple – whole, and uncut, even! – constitutes packing a snack” with snickered derision.

And now, it’s not bad enough that I have to come up with a snack for 16 preschoolers, but we happen to be first in the rotation due to the fact that I was stubborn five and a half years ago and insisted on hypenating the boys with my “D” surname, instead of just being content to accept Beloved’s perfectly good “R” surname and a later turn in the rotation. Hmph. I figured that might come back to bite me in the ass some day, but neither so soon nor so viciously.

So anyway, I spent many days hours minutes perusing the Interwebs and considering everything from elaborate fruit-block renditions of the pyramids to mini-muffins baked into the shape of famous Canadian authors. I pictured myself standing in my kitchen, wrapped in a pristine white apron, humming church hymns while lovingly preparing a snack that met all four food groups, boosted brain power and would teach them the alphabet in French. Then I remembered I don’t own any aprons, let alone a pristine white one, and that was the end of that fantasy.

In the end, the pressure was too much for me. I capitulated to the dark side. For a few dark moments, I considered simply sending along the 6 lbs bag of Reese Pieces we got from our excursion to the Hershey Factory last weekend, but finally settled for a tray of pre-cut mixed fruit that I snagged from the deli counter at Loblaws, and a box of animal crackers. Well, they were organic animal crackers, at least. You know, to show how much I care.