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

A mother knows

My friend Olivia for a time wrote a blog called A Mother Knows. I loved her rationale for choosing that name:


"My beautiful son, who is six months old (corrected) as I start this blog, became critically ill in the womb with a terrifying condition called hydrops fetalis and underwent fetal surgery. He was born two months premature and spent his first five months in hospital, finally coming home in June 2011. Although he is now doing really well, he still has some health issues. Why ‘A Mother Knows’? Because the one thing I have learned so far is that a mother knows her child best. Better than the health visitor, better than the midwives, better than the breastfeeding counsellors, better than the people selling useless baby products designed to make you feel bad, better than her own mother, better than any other mother."
 
I've been reminded of it these past few weeks, with an ill baby myself, and a host of medical professionals who I have no doubt have my child's best interests at heart but just don't know as well as me what my baby needs. What's more, different branches of people working in health have little regard for each other. Pharmacists don't like helplines. Helplines don't like nurses. The Specialists slag off the GPs. The GPs bristle at the thought of a referral and everyone is scathing of those working in the Out Of Hours service. And all the while I must tell every single one what it is we want and what it is we need.

I am reminded of the AA Milne poem, The King's Breakfast:

The King asked
The Queen, and
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid:
"Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?"
The Queen asked the Dairymaid,
The Dairymaid
Said, "Certainly,
I'll go and tell the cow
Now Before she goes to bed.
 
Only it's more dog's dinner than king's breakfast. And all the while it is me, the mother, who must go and tell the cow what test we need and what medicine we require. Because Olivia was right, a mother knows best of all.

The Tottenham Snail

I live quite near this mural, on the side of a house on the Seven Sisters Road in Tottenham, north London. I don't know how long it has been there but it must be nearing thirty years. When I was younger, it was always a sign that we were on the home straight, just a few miles from home, and though perhaps being near it now shows just how little the distance is that I have flown from my nest, I find it reassuring every time I see it. I love that, give or take the odd graffiti tag, usually painted over quickly, this snail has lasted for so long. I love the incongruity of it, on a road that just leads people to places, and is never a destination in its own right. But most of all I love that it is a snail. The kind of creature that we say yuk to, that along with slugs and puppy dog tails makes up small boys, the scourge of gardeners, and yes, covered in slime. Yet there it is, proud, bright and still there, heralding to my daughter when we drive past it that we are nearly home.

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?

Your absolute and utter best

I've just read Beth Gutcheon's Still Missing, having heard a few months ago Rachel Johnson discuss it on Radio 4's A Good Read presented by Harriett Gilbert which I came across by chance when I turned the radio on while driving.

It's a terrifying book focusing on a mother's torment when a child goes missing without a trace (in fact it was turned into the film Without a trace). The mother, Susan Selky, enters a kind of living death in which she must live in order to have the faith that her son is alive, but while he is missing she has effectively died inside. I read it very quickly, desperate to find out whether he is alive, to find out whether the mother might enter the world of the living again. It's ever so gripping, and of course made me think once again of the McCanns and the Needhams and the parents of other missing children.

But it's not just reading the book that made me think. Harriett taught me journalism at City University when I was a postgraduate and I've not seen her for a couple of years. I love it when I happen upon her on the radio, partly because she is a great presenter and was a great teacher, and partly because she has a lovely radio voice - learned, sexy, thoughtful, firm. It's a pleasure listening to her. And when I do hear her voice I often remember her saying to me a few years ago, kindly I think, about one or other article or book I had written, that she wondered when it was I was actually going to try my best at something. See, producing a book was not enough. I should, I think she was saying, produce the best possible book I can produce, write the best possible articles, think the hardest possible thoughts.

And you know what, though I doubt it's the answer Harriett was necessarily looking for, I've finally found something I really do try my utter best at. Yeah it's the kind of answer that might make you want to gag, but it's true anyway. I do try my best at being a parent, because I desperately want my daughter to be happy and kind and the type of person people want to know and for her to make the world a little better and to be inspiring and interesting and interested. It's not a special attribute - I believe (nearly) all parents share this. It's why Still Missing is so powerful, why we can read it and really feel for Susan Selky, and understand that she is both dead inside but must also stay alive. For there are loads of things that we should try our best at, and I intend to do so the next article, the next blogpost, the next book, really I do. But there is only one thing that really really matters, and it turns out I try my best at that without even having to think about it.

I got my copy of Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon second hand on Amazon but have since found out it is currently published by the lovely Persephone books whose website says: "Persephone prints mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and who would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial." www.persephonebooks.co.uk

Lovely crumbly yumminess

It's amazing how it's not just experiences, but senses, that define your childhood. The smells and sounds and tastes. I walked into the loo at the University where I work the other day and was hit by a powerful smell of bleach that took me straight back to the ladies loo in the Polytechnic my dad used to teach at, where we occasionally joined him for the day to play in his office while he saw students or did work. There must have been a higher education bulk buy in the early eighties for a particular kind of loo cleaner. Then there's the powder puff. I can't have seen one for twenty years but when I opened one in a shop the other day, unsure of what was in the box, the sweet smell of powder and the satiny feel of the puff made me feel all safe and young and, atishooo.

One of the senses that has stayed with me is the taste of a particular kind of cake they used to sell in the bakery on Orford Road in Walthamstow, which was on our walk home from primary school. It's still a bakery, though one selling sandwiches and coffee, rather than iced fingers, bath buns and split tins. For years I have thought about these cakes. I had tried describing them to people - crumbly, sweet, brushed with icing sugar, like a Viennese biscuit in cake form with solidified jam running through it - but no one could help.

Then I was flicking through a recipe book in Oxfam books the other day and found a picture that looked strikingly familiar. Turns out Viennese was a red herring because they're not Austrian at all. Rather they are called Swiss Tarts. And I made some, and they tasted just right.

(There are loads of recipes for these online - just search for Swiss Tart. They are butter heavy and sugar laden and consequently delicious.)

Buggy microwaves and tramps' cocks

Sometimes if I have an idea for something I want to write about, I jot down a note and come back to it days, weeks or months later. I was looking at my list today, seeing if anything that seemed desperately interesting at the time of writing the note, retained interest now. One caught my eye. It simply says ‘Buggy microwave.’

I have absolutely no idea what this means. I’ve wracked my brains and all I can think of is the possibility that at some point I thought buggies (strollers, to foreign readers) should come equipped with a microwave. Or maybe I was musing sterilising our buggy in the microwave as it does smell, as one friend so eloquently put it, of a tramp’s cock, having had formula milk (fresh and regurgitated) splashed over it on several occasions.

Today I start my six months as Writer-in-Residence at the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green (London, N22). In fact I am there now, shoes off, sitting on the sofa, laptop on lap. I’m going spend Tuesday mornings here writing, chatting, eating biscuits and scaring the real customers. Come and say hello. And buy books. By the end of the residency, in six months time, I hope to have remembered what I meant by 'Buggy microwave'. And to have cleaned our buggy.

Related post: The nicest bookshop