The Tit offensive

I’ve been trying to imagine not having a head.

This British architect named Douglas Harding said that when he successfully imagined not having a head, he experienced selflessness, with all the benefits that entails: an inner peace, the end of the constant mental chatter, etc.  It sounds easier than meditation, but I mustn’t be doing it right because I’m still feeling tired and agitated.

Babies cause tiredness in grown ups. There’s no getting around it. They have to eat every few hours and they can’t feed themselves.

This won’t be new information for everyone.

It’s nearly six  months and Lionel has started eating solids, so at some point soon, the whole 3 am snack will end, I hope.

“I love peas and the Atlantic Monthly”

He has been breastfeeding, which I think makes tackling sleep deprivation a bit more difficult. Not because babies sleep better on formula — though apparently they do — but because it limits parents’ ability to share the feeding.

I knew there was a lot of heat around the the whole breastfeeding issue before Lionel was born, so I googled, “the case against breastfeeding”. This is what you get.

The Atlantic Monthly piece from 2009 at the top of the google was the first thing I read carefully and it’s probably coloured my views since. But I love  and trust the Atlantic Monthly. If the Economist is “conventional-wisdom-spewing crack for anglophiles”, then the Atlantic Monthly is some other kind of crack.

The author, Hanna Rosin, writes about having a bad time breastfeeding and reckons that the evidence for “breast is best” isn’t very strong: it helps prevent an extra incident of gastrointestinal illness in some kids — some bad shitty, vomity days — but not much else. The claims made about IQ, obesity, etc., all look a bit questionable. There’s a relationship between better health and breastfeeding, but it’s not causal, and it’s impossible to factor out “confounding variables”, blah, blah, blah.

I knew this article wasn’t the last word on the science, but I shared my quickly acquired expertise on breastfeeding with my wife. Evidence is important to her because she is a sort of scientist and won’t normally accept my assertions at face value, even when I use a very authoritative tone.

She still breastfed. I think mainly because it was relatively straightforward for both him and her. We haven’t talked too much about it. Talking too much about anything can be hazardous. You always end up saying stupid stuff. Perhaps HBO was invented so couples wouldn’t have time to say too much stupid stuff to each other.

How much difficulty would we have embraced had it not been straightforward? Lactation consultants? I’ve read some are so committed to breastmilk that they will seek out wet nurses. We wouldn’t have done this, though I don’t know enough about it to ridicule the option, as silly as it sounds to me.

At some point I might have put my footdown — whatever that looks like.  I’m probably on the same page as this guy, even though he sounds like a whining little bitch. His message: don’t kill yourself breastfeeding; it’s good, but dropping the baby on its head because you’re tired is much worse. Formula might be less-than-perfect but we accept less than perfect for lots of other stuff.

I know there are lots of evil reasons offered for why men have issues with breastfeeding, as well as some weird ones; like being jealous of the bonding that goes on between a mother and baby and wanting to have your own breasts. I’m fairly certain none of these apply to me. The main way that I am evil is in my love of convenience. If there was a feeding patch that you could stick on a baby — sort of like a Nicorette, except that it slowly released all the nutrients that babies needed through the night — I would be tempted to use it some nights, and possibly every night. That’s a pretty ugly thought if you unpack it, but even good parents, it seems, have ugly thoughts from time to time.

And maybe the drive for convenience and efficiency is where some of the real heat in this discussion comes from. It’s not just about breastmilk being better for you, a claim that appears difficult to establish. It’s about evil people like me who might put efficiency ahead of a more decent, caring society. The breastfeeding mafia can’t afford to give ground to the machine because the machine would have mothers — especially mothers with small bargaining power — back at work after two weeks.  A society that supports breastfeeding supports all sorts of good public policy, like longer maternity leave, family friendly workplaces, etc.

I suppose I have a lot of time for that pro-breastfeeding sentiment, but can understand why memes like the one below cause so much aggravation:

Encouragement, or bullying? I mean, from the baby’s perspective, surely it’s 100% about food.

I don’t want to contribute to the “mummy wars”, and I’ve probably said lots of ignorant stuff in this post that will upset people. That’s not my intention. I just read stories about women buying formula in a supermarket while other women walk past and whisper, “breast is best”. Maybe this doesn’t really happen, but if it does then something is a bit wrong with the pro-breastfeed message.

 

 

 

Yarra’s vaccine bullies

 

Born skeptic

We vaccinated him.

We joined the herd. We took him to the council run immunisation session where the hard-faced ladies stabbed needles into his fatty little thighs.

We now benefit from “herd immunity”, so I’ve read.

I was always going to vaccinate Lionel, but I can’t say that’s because I’ve looked closely at the evidence. It just seems to be what sensible people, like my wife, do. Plus the people who don’t do it sound a bit frantic, or live on the Gold Coast, or both.

If I think about it, this methodology probably drives much of what I do: what are the sensible people doing? Maybe do that.

You can’t make your own mind up about everything.

A basic level of trust in our institutions also means I tend to take government health warnings at face value.

I know this is not entirely good. I know it reflects an unhealthy respect for authority. I know in some ways it makes me the sort of person who is more likely to dob in my neighbour to the state security services.

Incuriosity and conformity. These are the qualities that informed a decision that is probably in the best interest of my child. There will be more along the way.

I haven’t bothered to read what vaccine skeptics have to say. I haven’t looked at the studies linking autism to vaccines. I haven’t taken the trouble to read people’s stories. I don’t intend to. Their lonely voices will remain lonely.

The City of Yarra, where we live, is full of these voices. It’s a pocket of low immunisation, the newspaper says. That’s because Australia’s affluent inner city suburbs are home to a special kind of idiot. That’s what I think, though I know it’s more complicated.

Yarra’s vaccine sceptics think people like me are bullies. I’m not entirely uncomfortable with the label in this instance. It’s what herds do, don’t they? In fact, the first bully was probably a bull. (Do bulls live in herds? They always seem to be alone in paddocks.) That’s not important. The point is that social pressure will always feel a bit like, well, pressure; i.e., not very nice.

Should we apply that pressure gently? Or should we be a bit more coercive as we are by withholding family payments etc …?

I don’t know that the latter approach – economic incentives – will work for all the self-described vaccine sceptics that inhabit my neighbourhood.

I suspect these are mostly nice people who have just been overexposed to the internet and don’t trust anything but compelling personal stories. There may also be some schemers – people who want to avoid vaccination risks and so just free-ride on the back of herd immunity.  These people are more fuckwit than sceptic. Why there are more of these people in municipalities like the City of Yarra, I don’t know. It seems at odds with the collectivist ideologies to which many here pay lip service.

I try as much as possible to avoid any human contact, so I haven’t met either type of person yet, but I now probably will because parenthood forces you out into the world. That’s a downside, but I’m adjusting.

If you are a vaccine skeptic, and you bother to read this, my own not so compelling story, then I will engage with you, and try not to bully you.

Service and delivery

The baby was born. Our baby. It was a boy. We named him Lionel.

Lionel was delivered at a hospital. I don’t know why we say babies are ‘delivered’. I can’t think of a more misleading way to describe the process.

Everyone at the hospital did their job. For all their shortcomings, hospitals at least seem to be full of people who can more or less do the job they’ve been trained to do.

I was expecting bad things from midwives. They practice midwifery, which sounds cruel and pre-modern. They were just fine.

The local government nurses have also been good. They visit you when you have a baby, weigh him and leave literature about breastfeeding and SIDS.

Like most people working with babies now, our nurse was highly enthusiastic about breastfeeding, even to the point of suggesting we not keep formula as a back-up. “It’s like having chocolate in the fridge: too tempting”, she said.

This didn’t sit well with me, but I think I’ll write about it at a later time, after some more reflection. Challenging the value of breastfeeding seems to invite hostility which I’m not in the mood for.

Anyway, we seem to be doing everything correctly, mostly. His sleeping and eating patterns appear consistent with everything I’ve heard and read.

There is exhaustion but also joy, which I hadn’t factored in. (That is all I will write about joy on this blog, which will have a narrow, technical focus).

I have delayed the full implementation of my parenting philosophy.

Actually, I don’t really have a parenting philosophy. I read two books, Baby Love and Things they never tell you. They were both helpful and useless in their own way. Lots of tips, but nothing doctrinaire.

Three minutes out

In search of something more instructive, I am reading about different theories on the internet — attachment, authoritarian, holistic, consensual, continuum, etc.

I like some bits of all of them, but there’s usually one thing for each that rules it out.  This attachment parenting looks interesting, say, but we are not co-sleeping. I fall asleep next to him sometimes but this is not the same.

I will keep searching.