Competitive parenting again

[ailbhe]

Posted to a breastfeeding community earlier today, where it was actually a relevant comment, believe it or not:

Ten points for exclusively breastfeeding from the breast for the first six months through AT LEAST two bouts of mastitis, two of drug-resistant ductal and surface thrush, both nipples chapped to bleeding point, tongue tie, GERD and severe dairy, wheat, soy, egg and hydrogen intolerance.

Lose a point if you only had six or more of the obstacles mentioned.

Lose two points if you only had five or fewer.

Lose three points if breastfeeding was easy.

Lose a point for every month during the first six when the baby was given a bottle of your own EBM, even if you were having chemo.

Lose two points for ditto if the milk was donated.

Lose your parenting license forever if it was formula.

Gain seven points for exclusively pumping for the first six months. Another point for every months after that you exclusively pumped UNLESS you vaccinated UNTIL 12 months.

Gain half a point for every pint of milk donated for free to a milk bank.

Lose a point for every time you went to NIP and chickened out because you thought someone would yell at you or try to send you to the bathroom.

Gain a point for every time you had state legislation changed to make NIP permissable whereever the mother otherwise has a right to be with her baby.

Comments

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

This is why I stopped reading breastfeeding communities very very early on. :)

[ailbhe]

I still read them because, well, several of them need a little voice of reason. This was inspired by someone who had been belitted for not exclusively breastfeeding her daughter - because she'd gone back to work and fed bottles of expressed milk. It's INSANE how irrational these things are.

[rmc28]

Oh dear. The things women do to each other, eh?

I will try never to get like this.

[ailbhe]

It can be hard though - because there is a line of reason somewhere between "feeding the baby coca cola and crisps at two weeks old" and "exclusively breastfeeding until three years" and the line is *in a different place for every single baby on the planet*. This is hard to take in unless you get in-person exposure to a lot of mothers and babies whom you know in your heart of hearts to be responsible. Well, it is for me. I'm glad I had such a varied and tight-knit group from antenatal classes. They probably saved me from extremes of dogmatism that would have cost me friends.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

I'm glad someone is there as a voice of reason. I just wasn't able to do that myself. I refuse to let anyone judge me for what I did (and what I *had* to do), but I still don't want to read all this self-satisfied judgmental claptrap about "poison". That "poison" saved my daughter's life, thankyouverymuch. *And* I'm still breastfeeding at going-on-13-months.

(So - if it isn't clear - thank you for being the voice of reason!!!!)

[ailbhe]

If I'd had to resort to formula, it's quite possible I couldn't stick it either. It's often not very pretty.

On the other other hand, it did give arm me with information which has helped people in real life to save breastfeeding relationships they thought were doomed - sometimes it's as simple as saying "It's the three month growth spurt, give it a week and you'll have 'enough' milk again."

I've seen a starving baby. Um, I wrote about it - http://ailbhe.livejournal.com/241718.html but that may be triggering - and I didn't enjoy it at all.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you followed my LJ when E was born - and I didn't necessarily write about all of it at the time, but a lot of what you wrote about in that other post is very familiar to me. E was born at 6 pounds 11 ounces, and at 4 days old had lost a whole pound!!! (Do you know how small a 5#11oz baby is, even when they were fullterm?) She swam in all her newborn clothes.

I knew - somehow - that she would come through it okay: she was developmentally fine and hit all the right milestones at proper times. But (later, after my supply really came in and was well established) when I spent an entire weekend breastfeeding obsessively, and she still *lost* several ounces, it was time to supplement. Period.

But I was very bitter about the whole BF experience - it's supposed to be so easy! and so natural! and for us it was anything but. Yeah, it got easier, and I'm a very stubborn person too. But part of me is amazed I made it this far.

Hmmm, I do still have some issues around this, do you think?? :)

[ailbhe]

Baby sizes... Linnea is not typical in my family. A 6lb baby is fine and large. 7lb is monstrous big. My nephew was small, at just under 4lb at term, and my niece was small but not worryingly so, at 5lb and 2 or 3 oz.

Linnea was 9lb 14oz, larger than my niece and nephew combined. I have since had a third niece, who was *over 6lb* which is astonishing.

Perhaps my family just likes to avoid "newborn" size clothes, and skips them at either end of the scale...

Losing more than 10% of birthweight in the first week is a bit scary though, yes indeed, especially if you're starting off without much to spare.

I'm very bitter about the whole birth experience. It's supposed to be so easy! And so natural! I mean, my mother had five of us and thought it was *fun*. My sister, apart from her first (the <4lb one) had easy labours and births and it was all fine and fast. Me, I'm not so good at it.

Someone ought to tell people that birth and breastfeeding are *hard* and can be painful and difficult and nasty, but that they're a good idea anyway. Heh.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

I'm very bitter about the whole birth experience. It's supposed to be so easy! And so natural!

Yes, exactly. Just listen to your body and it will know what to do. Right.

I think it just needs to be acknowledged that nursing and childbirth (and everything else about parenting) have a range of normal, just like everything else in life. So we don't all feel like freaks for whatever bit we didn't do "right".

[ailbhe]

To be fair, my body told me in plenty of time that things were going wrong. But it took a month to persuade the experts we were right. Poor ole body.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

It's awful that, almost a year after I stopped trying to breastfeed Alex, this still makes me upset to the point of nausea.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

You, like me, had a choice for our children: formula or starvation. *THOSE PEOPLE* don't realize, and haven't been in our shoes. Feh upon them.

[clare-s.livejournal.com]

you did the right thing though. In this case formula was best for you and your baby. the end

[ailbhe]

Oh, Rivka, I'm so sorry! I honestly thought - stupidly, but honestly - that you would be ok with it.

I'm sorry.

Gods, competitive parenting sucks even more than I think it does, doesn't it?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

It's okay. It's just been on my mind an awful lot, for some reason, as we approach her birthday.

[ailbhe]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rivka/15302663/in/set-342565/

I *love* that picture. I was particularly pleased, at the time, by how *entirely* unapologetic you were. It made me cry from, if I remember correctly, relief.

So what kind of CAKE will there be for the birthday? Hm? Important things!

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

It's not the mother's fault if breastfeeding is easy! I've had my share of fighting against the baby clinic because yes, I did think it was possible to breastfeed twins; but it's never been physically hard except that with twins (and a toddler around) it's a full-time job.

[ailbhe]

It's not the mother's fault if breastfeeding turns out to be just about impsosible either. One of my friends here, locally, had a baby who is a little older than Linnea's age. She and I have pretty much retro-diangosed silent reflux now, though there's no way of telling; at the time, she went to doctor after doctor, lactation consultant after lactation consultant, and nothing was found wrong. Except that the baby was constantly on the breast, would only sleep upright on mother's chest, and losing weight visibly and frighteningly, even to people who weren't her mother.

Her baby was starving to death, and we were all watching it, and the only thing that could be done was to feed her formula. And mothers like her get grief in communities like the one that inspired this post, because apparently women who spend all their time sitting under a cranky baby should be doing online research in a field in which they have no expertise. It makes me cry.

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

It's not the mother's fault if breastfeeding turns out to be just about impsosible either.
No, of course not. It was just that that confounded text made me feel guilty for having it easy. Guilt is my besetting, er, sin, as anyone who is reading my Lenten ramblings will know.

[ailbhe]

http://ailbhe.livejournal.com/240533.html might interest you :)

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

I must have read it at the time (it rang a bell when I read it just now), but yes, absolutely.

[cheshire23.livejournal.com]

WORD. It didn't quite get that bad with my daughter, but it came pretty close, until the damned reflux finally got diagnosed and three different IBCLCs told me that the situation was an emergency and I absolutely needed to supplement.

I remember how frustrated I was at my inability to get rid of that one bottle a day that was the difference between the happiest baby girl in the world and a fussy hurting baby that wouldn't nurse well, sleep, poop, or sometimes even smile.

And then of course there was the "CPS got called because our baby was failing to thrive, but we still supplemented with donor milk only!" post a little later. Yeah, must be nice to a) live where it's available, b) be able to afford to pay $10 an ounce for it, and c) have absolutely no other reason to be afraid of CPS (my husband and I are both pagan and openly bisexual, and he was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder about a month after my daughter was born - Rochester's liberal but I'm not sure it's THAT liberal, and I didn't want to take the risk - oh, and we also live in a "bad" neighborhood, never mind it's got a fairly low crime rate, it's in the inner city and ethnically mixed so...*eyeroll*). I still sat at my computer bawling my eyes out reading that...it made me wonder if I really hadn't tried hard enough. :(

[ailbhe]

I think http://ailbhe.livejournal.com/tag/essay might interest you, particularly http://ailbhe.livejournal.com/241718.html

[cheshire23.livejournal.com]

*nod* I saw that...and then sometimes I have to wonder if I really didn't try hard enough, just because it didn't get quite that bad. And then I remind myself that this was the same point we learned that putting someone who is actually bipolar on an SSRI = BAD IDEA and I was as a result literally trying to keep my husband from jumping off a bridge. I think my daughter needed both parents ALIVE slightly more than she needed to be 100% breastfed. *shrug*

I wrote this (http://cheshire23.livejournal.com/295173.html) a while ago, out of frustration with the same sort of competitive parenting thing. Scares me sometimes that people can even think that way. :P

[clare-s.livejournal.com]

As in not a P*ss take ? because self preservation makes me read it that way

[ailbhe]

Oh, no, it's a pisstake. HYDROGEN intolerance? really?

[clare-s.livejournal.com]

thats what you get when you skim read - you miss stuff like that shoved at the end of sentences.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

I refused to buy a certain brand of cleaning product in the shop the other day because it was advertised as containing "Active Oxygen".

[ailbhe]

That's too cute.

[flybabydizzy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, right, minus several million for me; but then almost everyone apart from a few lj friends and my kids themselves (17& 20) judge me to have been a useless mother. 20 years ago I was weird for insisting on feeding with expressed milk - he did have to have wysoy (ponggg) top up, as I just couldnt get the milk going properly until he got to his due date. Then the solid foods came in, by todays standards, far too early, including, through total ignorance, Things That Babies Shouldn't Eat (well, he was 6 months old, and decided he WAS going to eat my mackerel pate'. He enjoyed it, but imagine THAT nappy!) At the other extreme, I also had to be very secretive about nursing until 21(ds)18 (dd) months. That made me not just weird, but pretty much perverted!
So, whether someone judges me from the old fashioned bottle-from-day-one camp, or the modern exclusive breastfeed til whenever group, I did it wrong! Ya wanna know what? I don't care much; I did what I could for the best at the time. And I've made a lot more mistakes since then, some of them a lot more serious.
IMHO, formula milks are fine for those who need them. My son wouldn't have survived without them, like diabetics wont survive without insulin. It's just that most of us don't need them; we ALL just need acceptance and support for what we need or decide to do.