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.

 

 

 

Three month review

All the literature says three months is a milestone. We reached it today. Not much happened. Lionel looks like a three month old baby. The literature also says says that all babies are different. But that’s not true. They are quite similar. I’ve been looking at them.

I saw a lot of them at the council’s mothers’ group. They call it a parents’ group, but it was a mothers’ group. I went along because the maternity nurse said I should. I was the only man there. Well, there was one other man, who looked a bit like John Denver, but there wasn’t much chemistry between us.

Even though I’m sharing the parenting of Lionel in a modern and meaningful way, I felt like an intruder.

I haven’t been back.

I haven’t been back, apart from the baby first aid course, which was at the same place. This was very useful. A highlight was when the young paramedic giving the course told us that it was her strong belief that everyone has a time to go and if it’s someone’s time to go then you probably couldn’t have saved them. I know what she was trying to say, but it probably wasn’t the most useful thing I learned at the course.

So anyway, babies are all different, or not different, depending.

One of the ways they are not different is in their moral qualities. They don’t have any. You are not supposed to say “good” or “bad” baby, for obvious reasons – babies are just babies making their way into the world with varying degrees of difficulty. I have no problem with this, though there was at least one manifestly evil baby in the mothers’ group.

Even though they’re not supposed to, people say Lionel is a “good” baby. I think this really just means he’s not completely wrecked our life making his way into the world.

I’m thankful everyday.

“Every day above the ground is a good day.”

You need life-affirming mantras when you are tired.

Or just when he’s behaving differently.

That’s about it. There is lots of developmental stuff that happens in the first three months, but it’s not very interesting. I mean, it’s interesting to me, or at least important to me. Watching his neck strengthen in real time is exhilarating, for me, but sort of unremarkable from a public policy perspective.

If I was breastfeeding him, I’d probably have more to say. People have strong views about breastfeeding. I don’t. I think, from everything I’ve read, that breastfeeding and bottle feeding are about the same. Women seem to encounter hostility when they put this view. Perhaps it would be better received coming from a man. Another time.

Sleeping is the other main thing that happened in the first three months. Babies are crap at it. Even if they are good at it, they are still crap at it, compared to a grown ups. They need settling. Grown ups can settle themselves, mostly. Again, Lionel was apparently better than average at it, though I would still describe his sleeping habits as infantile, as unkind as that sounds.

Some settling advice for new players:

The prospect of an unsettled, screaming baby terrified me before Lionel was born. I read a couple of books but the advice was quite general: wait twenty minutes, give him a bath, give him a cuddle, etc. Then, two days after he was born, I discovered Dr Harvey Karp, a paediatrician from Southern California. Harvey Karp is the new Doctor Spock, and people like me have made him rich by embracing his “five S’s” formula – swaddling, swinging, sucking, “shushing” sounds, and side or stomach placement. Karp says the first three months is the “fourth trimester”, i.e. the baby is still in the womb so you have to simulate those conditions. It could be bullshit, but it seemed to work. The stuff he says about toddlers sounds plain weird, but I’ll interrogate that later. Below is a video of Dr Karp talking to my other favourite Doctor.