The Bad Mother

I am quite unusual in that I was breastfed, exclusively, for six months. My husband was never given a drop of breast milk. Not one drop. One of us is a poorly motivated, under-achieving, anxiety-riddled physical coward with a range of stomach-related problems, weak veins, a permanent cough, hay fever and chronic heartburn. And it’s not the formula baby. And this was formula manufactured in the Seventies! Formula manufactured now is like platinum space dust in comparison.

Even within my own family – my two elder sisters were only partly breastfed and they are far more physically pulled-together, mentally stronger and better adjusted than I am. They eat well, have beautiful skin, strong teeth, firm handshakes, quick wits and fine friends. Do I want my children to be like Giles and my sisters? Or do I want them to be like me?

I do not, now, believe it’s a conspiracy. I don’t think La Leche League are evil tyrants. I would never, ever tell anyone how to feed their children. I can only tell you what I did and how it worked out for me. I partly breastfed both my children for about six weeks and then switched them to formula. Kitty is now three and a half and she is strong, rarely ill, reasonably bright and mostly obliging. She was a complete fucking nightmare to potty-train, but can that really be down to breastfeeding?

There’s something else, too. I wasn’t just breastfed until I was six months old; I was still breastfeeding until I was about three or four. I vaguely remember it. I don’t know why my mother chose to carry on breastfeeding for so long, but I suspect it had something to do with it being difficult to stop after a certain point. She wasn’t really bothered about continuing to do it, and I didn’t know any different, so it carried on.

This worked out fine for my mother. She was forty-one when she had me, and not especially interested in going out on the town, or for dinner or to the movies. She stayed at home with us, with my dad, night after night. Having to breastfeed me to sleep every night wasn’t an issue.

But I did not want this life for me. I have grown up to be an independent, brisk, un-tactile, un-expressive and in many ways quite cold person. I really don’t like being touched by people I don’t know, not even a handshake. It’s not a germ thing, it’s just a … I don’t know – I just don’t like it. A benevolent hug from even a good-looking, fragrant stranger would be a major low point in my day. Most of the time when I greet people I put up a hand and wave at them firmly, do not approach for a hug or a kiss. I never, ever hug or kiss my sisters or my father in a greeting – only my children, my husband and my mother.

I love my mother unquestioningly, I am devoted to her. I would take a bullet for her, will be a nurse to her day and night when the time comes – happily! I will howl like a maimed animal when she dies; I will shriek and gibber and tear at my hair at her funeral; I will sit on her grave and waste away. But the fact that I was, once upon a time, so desperately attached to someone else, another person, makes me feel a bit queasy. The idea that someone else would be so desperately attached to me – needing me there at all times of day and night, unable to be put to bed by a father or babysitter – made me feel equally ill.

And I had no other model of breastfeeding to regard. As far as I was concerned, if you had your baby in bed with you even once, even for ten minutes, it would be there until it was eight years old, like I was. If you breastfed beyond six months you would be doing it until the kid went to school. A lot of people think that is a nice thing; I just hear doors slamming shut.

My husband did not regard the issue of breastfeeding this way. He believes that life ought to be lived as naturally as possible and he is fanatical about food. If he could grow all his food himself, he would. He eats nothing processed – not crisps, not sliced bread, not cream cheese, nothing – except occasionally for a tin of baked beans. I know that if he were a woman he would have stayed up all night, breastfed round the clock, made this huge enormous deal out of the whole thing. He would have devoted his life to breastfeeding exclusively and been crazed about it. I, the husband in this situation, would have been left to fend for myself, rushing about fetching him things, cooking, clearing up. ‘It’s the only way!’ he would tell people. ‘Those who do not breastfeed exclusively are killing their children! Formula is poison!’

But he was forced to climb down from this position, as I was not going to be that sort of mother and he was not going to be that sort of husband. He saw the benefits, to all of us, of formula feeding. Kitty rarely cried and she slept well. The formula did not make her constipated or ill.

And Giles could get right in there, doing her dream feed at 11pm for weeks, just him and her tucked up in the dimly-lit nursery together. He would breathe in her milky burps and rub his nose against her fat cheeks with no-one else to see, no-one else to interfere, just him and this baby he had longed for.

I was happy, he was happy, Kitty was asleep. I turned away from any breast-versus-formula debate in disgust. ‘It’s a choice,’ everyone whined. ‘It’s your choice.’ No, sometimes it’s not a choice. Don’t speak to me, I would think. Don’t you even dare look at me.

Now, from my lofty position of having two children both past the recommended breastfeeding stage and both getting on as well as I could hope, I can say, happily, that I don’t care what you do with your kids. Feed them breast milk, or formula, or a McFlurry! It’s nothing to do with me.

But initially, although I was bullish about switching to formula, I wanted other people to agree with me. I wanted my own choices validated. I gobbled up any piece in the newspaper about women who nearly killed themselves trying to breastfeed exclusively, and then they switched to formula and it was all fine and tra la la and they wished they’d done it sooner.

I huddled with other mothers who used formula and we said relieved things about it.

And quietly and subtly, though you could never accuse me outright of doing it, I made the case for formula to any new mother I met. If they complained to me that they seemed to be breastfeeding for hours and yet the child still cried afterwards and wouldn’t sleep, I would say, ‘Maybe s/he is hungry?’ meaningfully. ‘But s/he breastfeeds for hours!’ the new mother would say. ‘Maybe s/he is still hungry though,’ I would repeat. My final word, if she was too baffled and exhausted to get my point, was always, ‘Formula is not poison, you know. Maybe s/he is having a growth spurt. You could use formula to get him/her through it and then go back to exclusive breastfeeding.’

A friend had to exclusively breastfeed her child for four months in order to prevent passing on some severe genetic allergies. Not a drop of formula must pass its lips. It was very hard for her. The child was big, hungry and screamed after insufficient feeds. She was confined to the house and on a strict feed-pump-feed-pump plan. It was exhausting but she did it. But far from zooming off into the stratosphere with evangelism, she told me, later, that with her second child she would not hesitate to give an additional bottle of formula at night. ‘It was insanity not to,’ she said.

I punched the air. She is my most competitive and over-achieving friend and she agreed with me. I was right! Formula was not poison!

I am a reasonably rational, normal person and yet I found myself doing that awful, unforgivable thing that mothers often do, which is to subtly or not subtly bully other, newer mothers into doing things the same way that they did, so as to assuage fears about their choices. There is safety in numbers, we unconsciously think – if we all do this, it will make it okay.

If I had decided to breastfeed exclusively, and it had been inconvenient for me and difficult and painful and exhausting but I had persevered and done it, I would feel the same way about that. I would have needed to believe that the sacrifices I had made – time, pain, suffering – had been worth something. It can’t all have been pointless! It must have been essential to my child’s wellbeing! I would definitely have tried to suggest quietly to other new mothers that if they didn’t do what I had done, they were doing their child harm.

It’s dreadful, really – and I am extremely relieved that I can leave that instinct far behind me and be a normal person again. If you tell me that you want to exclusively breastfeed your child and it is very hard and tiring, the baby screams all the time – which once upon a time would have been a red rag to a bull – I will now say, ‘Mmm, yes. You are being very brave. You can only do what you think is best! Would you like some tea?’

The good news is that breastfeeding is the worst of it. What you feed your kids when they are on solids is still a thing, but you are no longer mad, wild-eyed, panicked and vulnerable. If your five-month-old gobbles down Ella’s pouches like it’s only got one more day on earth, or you do your own purees, or you do baby-led weaning or whatever, people will push you around far less for your choice.

Having said all that, I feel sad for myself and for Kitty when I think about how clumsily I approached her weaning. I was still so overwrought, confused, tired and strung out by the time Kitty reached weaning age that the thought of fussing about during Kitty’s precious naptimes with an assortment of vegetable purees, which she might or might not eat, made me feel quite ill.

So I fed her rusk mashed up with milk and mixed it with those fruity Ella’s pouches. I often attempted to give her the vegetable pouches too, but she wasn’t that crazy about them. But that is what she ate for weeks and weeks – rusk and milk, Ella’s fruity pouches. Nothing really wrong with that, but food you make yourself is lovely – it’s delicious. But I, personally, couldn’t face making it for her because I was just too crushed by it all.

Lazy! Lazy and selfish! I wish I could spend an hour with that old me, shake my shoulders, maybe give me a smart slap with one or two baby food cookbooks.

I also didn’t know how much Kitty was supposed to eat. I compared her, endlessly, with other children – often with my ravenous nephews, who would suck down plates of pasta like they were soup, crunching through apples and sandwiches and pints of milk like waste disposal units.

I would sit for an hour, coaxing Kitty to eat just one more spoonful of this or that. Please, I would think, please, please just eat this.

Then I read a book called My Child Won’t Eat!, by a Spanish nutritionist called Carlos Gonzalez, and it changed my life.

First of all, it completely re-calibrated my idea of how much, and what, Kitty was eating. The horror stories of children who refused to eat anything for days, lost weight, went yellow or bruised at the slightest touch, made me realise that Kitty’s diet was entirely fine. She ate a bit of this, a bit of that. Some things she wouldn’t countenance, but other things she would surprise me by trying. She was not constipated, or underweight, or constantly exhausted, or a funny colour.

She was thriving and I hadn’t even noticed.

‘Stop making mealtimes a stress!’ said the book. Relax! No child will starve itself. Give your child the opportunity to be hungry at mealtimes by not stuffing them – out of anxiety – full of crackers between meals. You say when meals are and what meals are, but the child says how much. What matters is that fruit and vegetables are always or nearly always offered, not that they are always eaten or finished.

After I read the book I felt like I was flying. I felt released from the crushing burden of failing to feed my child the requisite amounts of spinach and kale. I hugged this information to myself. I was released, set free. I felt as relieved as I did when I stopped trying to breastfeed. I fell to my knees, palms turned in suicidal supplication to the sky, and I gave thanks for this mercy.

With my second child, Sam, born two years and three months after Kitty, I might as well have been a different person. My expectations from my life were so different. I did not – I do not – require several hours to myself to sit on the sofa and stare at the wall in blank horror at what my life has become.

Even if I have been kept awake the night before, there is too much to do. And I don’t mind doing it, now. When I had Kitty I couldn’t believe how often I was expected to cook. Now I am just so grateful that I’ve got all the correct stuff – plenty of chopping boards and knives, really sharp speed-peelers, a hand blender. When there is a quiet moment in the house I do not sit and stare, I put on my apron and start chopping, cooking and blending.

As soon as Sam required weaning I reached for two popular and sensible baby food recipe books and I methodically went through the purees to find ones that he liked. Baby-led weaning was not an option. This boy was starving and I just needed to funnel food into his tummy – milk was not enough. First time around, these books had freaked me out with their fussy little amounts – 40g of this and 120g of that. Now I looked upon them as my saviour. I didn’t have to think! Just do what it says here.

Then I chopped, cooked and blended … chopped, cooked and blended … chopped, cooked and blended. I bought more storage pots and a special pen to write on the pots what was inside. Then I chopped and cooked and blended. Again, again, again. Repeat. Again.

And Sam responded, opening his gob for food. More, more, more! He was like a sideshow at a circus. Watch the enormous monster baby eat! Down went another spoonful, and another, and another! All sorts of different permutations of vegetable, a fish one, a chicken one, a beef one, macaroni cheese made with microscopic little flower-shaped pasta bits …

It’s nothing I did to make him such a dustbin; he’s just a big boy and hungry all the time. But I do sometimes wonder if I did Kitty a disservice by not approaching her weaning in the same way.

No matter. As Sam approached a year and didn’t want to suck down purees any more but was too incompetent to feed himself, there was about a six-week period where things were a bit rocky. What to feed him now – what, what?? And, selfishly, what could I feed him that I could potentially also feed Kitty so that we weren’t doing that ghastly thing where I was making two separate dinners? I ended up doing a thing where I would chew Sam’s food for him and feed him by hand.

He could manage rice and mashed potato, so that’s what we had with everything. And if I was giving Kitty sausage or a burger, or a chicken pie or fish fingers, she sat and ate hers and Sam’s got chewed.

It was a strange feeling, doing this. I never chewed Kitty’s food for her, because I thought that she ought to be eating it herself. No-one ever told me that pre-chewing your child’s food at this particular stage was a possibility. It didn’t seem to chime with my other rather uptight parenting methods – no co-sleeping, no breastfeeding, sitting at the table for meals at prescribed times. But then you do this rather prehistoric hippy thing of chewing your child’s food up.

But in fact it made perfect sense, and it meant that Sam ate pretty much anything you danced in front of his nose. He wanted me to eat it, too, jamming things in my mouth and going ‘Mmaaaahhh’.

I read somewhere, once – I now forget where – an explanation of the reason that babies are more open to new tastes and textures than infants and toddlers.

Babies cannot stray far from home, so they are okay to eat pretty much whatever they come across. Past a year old, two things happen. First, they stop growing quite so fast and so don’t need to eat as much and, second, they are likely to start crawling and walking. They might come across a bush with strange berries on it, or something else dangerous to eat, and so it makes sense to give infants and toddlers a suspicion of things they haven’t seen or eaten before. That’s why those who believe that a wide-ranging diet is essential (not just medically but socially) are fanatical about introducing as many different foods before the hostile toddler years take hold.

Pretty much all small children are picky, fussy eaters – either consistently, stubbornly, or in bursts, but if they have a larger group of foodstuffs from which to choose some familiar things to eat, then you won’t get trapped in that slightly hellish pasta-pesto trap.

Don’t get me wrong – if your kid eats nothing but pasta-pesto for years on end, I doubt anything bad will happen, but it’s flipping boring for all concerned.

Having said that, children will eventually just eat whatever they come across most often. Both my children eat toast with quite bitter marmalade because that’s what we eat, and if you look the other way for a few seconds, Kitty will drain your coffee. Because coffee is what is lying about the house, that’s what she drinks.

Giles used to make Kitty a beef stew when she was old enough to chew. He would cook batches of it on the weekend and freeze it in little pots. He stopped cooking it for her when she was about eighteen months old – I can’t remember why – and she hadn’t had it for a good year or so when I presented it to her again at dinner time. She sat down and ate it without saying, ‘What’s this?’ or poking it about, as she would with most new things. She knew what it was, remembering it somehow with a deep and animalistic part of her brain, and knew it was okay to eat.

Another thing that pretty much all children will do is become crazed sugar addicts. My view on this is that sugar is just a fact and it is part of a varied diet. My husband’s view is that refined sugar – cakes, biscuits, sweeties, chocolate – is completely pointless, and your diet, health, teeth, digestion – everything! – would be better without it.

I find it hard to construct an argument against this. He is right! It’s simply that I love sugar and my husband doesn’t. I just love, love, love a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive. I love a cheeky slice of cake. I love a fridge-cold Kit-Kat. And my challenge is to eat sugar in moderation, which is very hard.

The world is full of sugar – cheap and intoxicating. I have had to learn how to consume it in sensible quantities, by being exposed to it and adjusting my intake. I feel the same way about Kitty. She probably has, daily, a couple of chocolate biscuits of one sort or another – one or two with her lunch and one after her dinner. Occasionally she has an ice-cream for pudding. When she calls for a biscuit she is usually just hungry, so I always offer toast, cheese, apple, raisins, a banana – anything! – as an alternative, which she usually takes.

So on the days when she eats fourteen Kit-Kats in a row, or a piece of cake the size of her head, or an entire bag of Haribo or three Chupa Chups, it doesn’t matter.

When I was pregnant with Sam and living in a sort of twilight hell of nausea and exhaustion, my childcare of Kitty consisted of her watching television and me passing her chocolate biscuits. For six months that’s what we did. Seriously. No-one believes me when I say Kitty watched TV for six months solid, but she did.

For lunch she had pesto pasta and for dinner she had chicken nuggets and chips. We were mired in an appalling diet. As soon as Sam was born and I had my wits about me again, I worked at turning things around. I could get off the sofa, and I could make different things for Kitty’s tea without having to lie down on the kitchen floor every thirty-eight seconds. I had the strength to say no to repeated requests for chocolate. (We also cut down on the telly, though Kitty had ended up watching so much that she’s subsequently become self-regulating. She will often say, ‘I’ve had enough telly now,’ switch it off and go and do something else. I don’t mean to sound smug about this – this result wasn’t achieved without letting her watch a probably damaging amount of TV, but that’s aversion therapy for you … cruel to be kind.)

My point is that you can always bring it back from the brink; it’s easier than it seems. You can get trapped in a white-carb-and-telly tailspin, no matter how bloody posh and cultured you think you are, but if you want to, you can claw your way out, one day at a time.

The trick to turning a bad diet around is to cut down on the junk slowly and replace it with something else. Rather than saying, ‘No, you can’t have a biscuit,’ say, ‘I haven’t got any biscuits, but I’ve got raisins/rice crackers.’ It helps if you get rid of all the junk in your house. It makes it easier not to cave in.

And if you don’t want to, if you’re not bothered that your kids watch telly all the time and eat nothing but chips, then fuck it. They’re your kids. They’ll probably end up Prime Minister.

But there’s one thing that it is very hard to turn around, and that is the problem of eating at other people’s houses.

In my experience, children under five years and often older really, really don’t like doing this, unless it is a house they know very well and have eaten there before. I’ve decided, based on no scientific evidence at all, that children have acute senses of smell and taste and while someone else’s house might smell to us anodyne and harmless, to a small child the smell of someone else’s house is overpowering and bizarre. They might as well be on another planet. (It’s why kids bloody love McDonald's. It’s always the same.)

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