The great unsaids - bottle feeeding

I'm still harping on about breastfeeding and bottlefeeding I'm afraid, not least because it's been in the news again recently with the Time Magazine cover of a mother feeding her three year old.

Before I had a baby I was a little judgemental about those who did not breastfeed. I wondered why they didn't just try harder or persevere, why they put their own needs - for sleep, for comfort, for convenience, for sanity - before their babies.

Then I had a baby and breastfeeding did not work immediately. It never worked to a point of exclusivity and we've (mostly) happily mix-fed from week 1. But I was at the hospital where I had my daughter the other day and saw one of their breastfeeding posters and I remembered something a midwife had told me when my daughter and I were there in the days after her birth. The midwife was en route to a party to celebrate a new breastfeeding policy they had just implemented in which they would not just actively encourage breastfeeding, but discourage bottle feeding to the point of not helping a mother bottle feed.

Even then, befuddled by birth and parenthood, I knew this was a bad idea. Not the supporting breastfeeding, but the other side of it. Amongst the mothers I know most want to breastfeed if possible - who wouldn't after seeing all the breast is best messages - and at least half have struggled. But to only emphasise the positives of breastfeeding instead of helping parents do whatever it is they decide to do, has bad repercussions.

First, it makes mothers feel like failures by suggesting we do not want the best for our babies. And second, it stops the dissemination of information telling us how to safely feed our babies formula.

In the nearly eighteen months since I became a parent I am still yet to find comprehensive science-based information on making a bottle. Instead we had to find our own way.

For example, a health visitor told me to boil water for my daughter's bottle then let it cool for half an hour. Using half an hour cooled water would, she explained, sterilise the milk powder the water was poured onto. Now I'm no scientist but I know this is utter bollocks. Perhaps making up the milk and boiling it would sterilise it (and I suspect it wouldn't - any chemists out there know?), pouring lukewarm water onto it will not. Plus doing this in the daytime is just about okay if you do not leave the house, but are you really going to do it in the middle of the night when you have two hours of sleep at a time? I suspect there is more danger to the parent in handling boiling water while half asleep than there is to the child in having a made up bottle kept in the fridge for a few hours - but the problem is we just don't know because no one tells us.

Another example is sterilising. We steriled my daughter's bottles, of course we did. First in a saucepan. Then in a steriliser. Then the dishwasher. Then the microwave. Then with sterilising tablets. (Not one after the other of course - I mean these are all techniques we have used). Now we give them a jolly good wash using washing up liquid and water. But you know, you decant the milk powder into the bottle using a measuring spoon that lives in the box of powder. A spoon you touch with your (usually, but not always, clean) hands. Are you meant to sterilise the spoon then?

Here are four simple measures I want for new parents who choose (or don't choose) to bottle feed:

1) Clear scientific guidance on how to make a bottle, both in an ideal world, and then also in the real world where you leave the house, are exhausted, need a bottle immediately to placate a screaming child and the fuse blows on the steriliser.

2) Reassurance that above all a well fed baby is a happy baby. Happier than one screaming for milk that isn't there, happier than one digesting blood from cracked nipples, and happier than one with  a mother so tired she can barely hold the baby to her breast without falling asleep.

3) An end to the misinformation about milk production. It will not dry up if you miss one feed. Probably not if you miss several feeds. Not if you feed from the same breast twice in a row. Not if your baby sleeps for five hours in a row. Not if you have a glass of wine. Not if you have two glasses of wine.

4) Perhaps the most important - messages that those who bottle feed love their babies just as much as those who breastfeed.


Only when this is done will we be able to have a sensible conversation about feeding our babies.


Related post: The Truth About Breastfeeding

Any other time...

I've been talking to friends about recent births and those first few weeks - how awful it all is, and the utter exhaustion. And the recovery time, not just from birth and hormone surges, but often from major surgery. And I've bene thinking about the surgery in particular - I had it myself very shortly after giving birth to remove the placenta which refused to budge. And you know what, in absolutely any other situation in your life in which you have surgery, be it a wisdom tooth taken out or an ingrowing toenail removed, a bone resetting or a lump removed, you would be told to rest as much as possible, to sleep and to rest and not to worry, that anaesthetics make you woozy for several days, and please rest some more. So why is it, after the major abdominal surgery some women have, after the drug fuelled ops that follow hours of labour, we're just left to look after a baby and never get more than three hours sleep. How can we recover, how can we look after another, when we need looking after ourselves. There must be something we can do to help women in this situation?

We all want that

My friend Alison Miles wrote this lovely blog post about the genetic reasons for her children's hearing loss. And has made me think all over again about something that has been bothering me since having my daughter, which is the smug way people say, when pregnant, "As long as it's healthy I don't mind what sex it is."

Why does it bother me? Because we all want healthy children, that's why. I am sure people say it as a superstitious tic, worried that if they express a preference for something as trivial as gender then the gods will punish them in other ways, but to me it comes across as particularly irritating, suggesting that perhaps they think they are the only ones who want a healthy child, that when you ask something that illicits that response you are suggesting other concerns trump health.

Our daughter has some health issues, hopefully now resolved, the detail of which is nobody's business but ours, and the family and friends with whom we choose to talk about it, and when someone trots out the "as long as it's healthy" line I want to say to them "yes yes, that's taken without question, we all want that, do you think we didn't, do you think wanting it makes it happen, do you think you will love a child with health issues any less?"

But one can't say this to an expectant parent of course. Because they mean it nicely. They are trying to prove their suitability as parents, to others and to themselves. And though this phrase is my particular bugbear, I am not beyond superstition myself. Never in my life, before being pregnant and then being a parent, had I saluted a magpie. Now I can't bloody stop.

Essential kit for new parents

Once you have a child you become a go-to person for expectant parents keen to know what equipment they need to buy to prepare for their arrival. And of course I could wax lyrical about moses baskets and new matresses and sleeping bags versus blankets and types of baby monitor and slings and sterilisers. But really there are just two pieces of equipment I particularly recommend.

The first:

(A tumble dryer)

And the second:

(A banana guard)

Really with dry clothes and no squished banana all over your bag, you'll be laughing.

Are you a 'born' parent?

One of the interesting things about having a child is how other people view you in relation to your role as a parent and how this corresponds, or not, to how you view yourself.

I have, for as long as I can remember, wanted children, and I have also thought of myself as a maternal person, the kind who makes faces at babies on buses, gives good hugs, always has a hanky down my bra if needed to catch tears and is happy spending a few hours doing crafts or building models or pretending to drink imaginary tea. In fact this image of myself is so ingrained that it didn't occur to me that other people might not view me in the same way, until a woman I knew some years ago and met again recently, said that she hadn't thought of me as that sort of person.

Turns out that some people were taken in by me pretending to be focused on my career above all else. And whilst it shouldn't matter how anyone else sees me. I've mulled over this comment rather a lot. It irks me that I should have been misunderstood in this way, as if it reflects now on how I am as a mother, even though it was probably a throwaway comment and even though there is no reason that this person should have ever known about my yearning for children, or my fear I would not get them. And of course because even if this were true it should not reflect on how I am now I am a mother.

At the other end of the spectrum. I was thrilled when a newer friend, one who I have known for a few years but have become closer to recently as our children are similar ages, referred to me recently on her blog as "a born mother" (at least I think that was about me). She cannot know how pleased that made me. Which is ridiculous really because whether we have always wanted children or whether our children were unplanned, whether they came quickly or took a long time, whether we are naturally maternal or have to work at it, we are no better or worse as people and as parents. After all, we all love our children. all try to do our best by them and all face challenges along the way.

Where does all the time go?

I was thinking this week as I left work that what I think I have lost, in being a parent, is that sense of time. I walked past a student sitting in a comfy chair reading a book and drinking a coffee and I thought about how I never really appreciated the idea of having time when I had it, when there are no competing demands and time is something to be filled.

I wish I'd appreciated the glut of time when I had it. Now each unit of time must be accounted for - just enough time to have a bath before I need to feed the baby. Just enough time to zip the hoover around the crumbs she's made. Just enough time to swig a drink before making lunch before facilitating a nap before heading to playgroup before fitting in emails before putting the washing on before thinking about dinner before ringing my mum before grabbing a cheeky cuddle with my husband.

My favourite line ever from a play is from Waiting for Godot.

Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly.

It's been nearly a year since our daughter was born and each moment, even the most difficult ones, have been magical, enough to almost turn athiest me into an agnostic. But where the time has gone, I cannot say. It has passed far more rapidly than it used to.

Ways to improve postnatal care #5: A debrief for all new mums

What would really have helped me in the days post birth would have been a medical professional come and talk me through what happened. I could have asked why labour went the way it did, what the implications of the medical procedures I had were and got an explanation of the medicines me and my baby were being given.

Instead I got information piecemeal - some when I was out of it on drugs, some when I was out of it on elation and some when I was out of it on tiredness. All of which means I was still piecing together what happened months later.

You might ask does it matter given both me and the baby are okay. But it matters to me. And it matters to many women.

At the moment you can request an appointment with a midwife post birth to go through your notes, providing they haven't lost them of course. But this needs you to know you can do this and to be proactive.

Instead it should be offered to all women the day after birth, or before leaving hospital, so any gaps can be filled and any questions answered. That way we'd begin our parenting experience feeling empowered by information, rather than vulnerable through a lack of knowledge.


Related posts:
Ways to improve postnatal care #1: Don't call me mum
Ways to improve postnatal care #2: Change the sheets
Ways to improve postnatal care #3: Help us buy the basics
Ways to improve postnatal care #4: Allow partners 24 hour access
Why I love the NHS

Being a parent does change you

One of the compliments non parents often say about new parents is that "having a baby hasn't changed them". They mean it nicely - they mean you can still talk about things other than babies, that you manage to go to the occasional party, that you are still the kind of person they want to be friends with - but they are wrong. Becoming a parent does change you, absolutely and entirely.

It's not just that your responsibilities and priorities change, though they do. It's that something changes your very being to the core.

The experience of having a baby changes you physiologically and emotionally. You carry the weight of responsibility for another person, and a responsibility towards society to do a good job bringing up that person. But more than that, it changes your identity. However good or bad a job you do of it, the answer to whether or not you are a parent irreversibly changes and with it the way other people look at you and judge you and analyse who your are.

Your personality may stay the same, you may (if you are lucky) look the same. You may do the same job and read the same books and laugh at the same jokes, but fundamentally and profoundly who you are has changed. You are a different person. You are a parent and with that comes all the judgements and responsibilities we associate with that word as well as a sense of complete untouchability, for though you are vulnerable now in a way you have not been before you are also untouchable, for as long as your child is okay you know you will be okay.

So when people say "you haven't changed" it's not really a compliment, but it also cannot possibly be true. You have changed, utterly and completely, and so you should.

Related post: My baby, my daemon