Man vs. Baby Page 9

  Anyway . . . I’m pleased to report a small victory: they did leave without dessert, and Mr. Dickhead didn’t even finish his pint.

  That said, it did backfire a bit . . . I burnt one of my man-tits with a bit of Yorkshire pudding gravy and the sight of my white, pasty body put Lyns right off of her cheese and broccoli bake.

  . . . Still, as they pissed off out the door, shaking their empty heads, it did feel like a moment of sisterhood.

  Now, it’s fair to say that this could have been an isolated incident. And it has been pointed out to me that maybe I was being oversensitive or protective or paranoid and maybe this was all in our heads. But we have come across similar reactions quite a few times since.

  Besides, the online response to this post was bizarre and revealed that this sort of low-level disgust is being repeated in public places across the world.

  The comments and messages I received were full of anecdotes about passive and overt hostility toward breast-feeding mothers. And if you think that all the women who got in touch were paranoid or fabricating incidents, what was far more revealing were the comments from those who were themselves anti-breast-feeding. These comments showed that these weirdos really do exist and in numbers. And when you read their comments, the level of “crazy” hits a new level. Like, level 10 crazy . . . which is Lady Gaga firing Charlie Sheen out of a custard cannon crazy.

  Here’s an example of the comments I received in response to the “Breast-feeding and the Weirdos” blog post:

  Typical liberal bullshit. Why are these feminazis so desperate to show the world they’re [sic] tits. I don’t want to see it my family don’t want to see it. Cover em up.

  Mmm, bigoted, dim, weird, but not super crazy. Fair enough, what about this:

  So, I should be allowed to let my balls hang out of my zipper and air out. They are not sexual and are storage tanks too. Another fine example of women wanting to be supreme instead of equal.

  Or how about this:

  How would men walking around with their penis at the ready for a pee be judged. This is normal in the animal and uncivilized world too but you men try it and see what’s said.

  See? Nuts. It was one thing to realize that some people can’t cope with the sight of a nipple, but I had turned over a rock. And beneath it was a whole subculture of odd objectees who seemed to have a bizarre sexualized confusion about the whole thing. These were not the only comments I received that promoted the idea that breasts should be treated the same as cocks and/or balls, and should remain covered up for the sake of public decency.

  To be honest, I didn’t reply to many of these sorts of comments. I’ve found it’s best not to engage with people that unstable. (There’s always a chance that, the next thing you know, they’re standing in your back garden drooling into the shrubbery.) But, since it’s unlikely any of them can read long sentences, I’ll say this:

  It’s just weird to think of breasts as solely sexual objects. I’m a heterosexual man who really likes breasts. But I’m also aware that their primary purpose is not for me to juggle two-handed while shouting “waahey!” at every opportunity. Their primary purpose is food. And, as a reasonably well-balanced adult, I’m able to see boobs as both sexual objects and as a source of nourishment for a child. I’m able to think contextually. After all, certain appendages of the body change in context. So a penis is something you urinate out of until you start waving it around at a bus stop, or, in a more appropriate example, your ass is something you defecate from until you start talking out of it.

  I’ve dedicated a lot of time to arguing about this subject in the past year. But it seems the old saying holds true: You can’t educate pork. And, rather than waste any more breath, I figured it’s time to try to put an end to this debate. So I came up with this simple multiple-choice questionnaire that allows you to check whether you’re in the wrong about this subject:

  WEANING

  Whether you choose to bottle-feed, brave the high weirdness of breast-feeding, combination-feed, or allow your baby to suckle from a friendly goat, sooner or later all babies must move on to solid foods. Otherwise you become one of those mothers still feeding her teenager with a nipple through the school gates. (As much as I’m against judging anyone for the decisions they make about breast-feeding, once your child is old enough to get milk froth in his mustache, it may be time to consider moving on.)

  In medieval times, making the transition from milk to solid foods was regarded as quite a big deal. In a time of high infant mortality, it was thought of as an important milestone and taken really seriously. In the most serious book of all time, the Bible, it says that everyone who lives on milk is “unskilled in the word,” whereas “solid food is for the mature, for those who have the power to distinguish between good and evil.”

  It seems a bit extreme to suggest that unless you get your tot onto chicken fingers sharpish, he won’t be able to distinguish between good and evil. But if a book with talking animals, a man who lived in a whale, and a chatty bush says it’s super important, then it’s probably best to take it seriously.

  Certainly, there is a lot of serious expert advice about weaning and when to start. The advice recommends after six months. But we were sure that Charlie was ready for proper food earlier because he’d started wanting extra milk and chewing on his fist like it was a burger. We figured that when your baby is starting to cannibalize himself, he’s probably ready for a cookie. In fact, as it turns out, these aren’t signs of being ready for food at all. They are false alarms and just stuff that babies do. One of the main signs that babies actually are ready is when they become really curious about what you are eating, so that’s what we started to keep an eye out for. At around seven months, Charlie was more than curious. One night I was eating a pizza after getting home late from work, and he just looked at me mesmerized each time I lifted a slice to my mouth. And, as I finished the last piece, he stared hard at me as if to say: “I swear to God, if there isn’t another slice in that box for me, I’m going to smash the place up.” He was ready.

  We were understandably worried about moving Charlie to solid foods. Just when we’d got him used to liquids, he was going to have to tackle something chokey. It all seemed something of a leap, like removing the training wheels from a kid’s bike and making him ride it on a highway. There is, of course, a transition phase whereby the solid food is actually about as solid as nursing-home soup. But there does come that moment when you add to the spoon a bit of rice or a piece of pasta. And, although these more substantial bits of food are so cautiously small as to be barely visible to the human eye, it is a heart-stopping moment to see if your baby will swallow. They do. It’s fine. Choking is really rare.

  As well as the persistent, common fear of choking, we were also concerned about allergies. Apparently, these things can be passed down the generations, and as a kid I was allergic to a variety of foods. When I was about Charlie’s age, I had a reaction to yellow food coloring and ballooned up like a puffer fish. I had to be rolled to the hospital for treatment for anaphylactic shock. “You looked like a cute little Fatty Arbuckle,” my mom tells me. “I nearly died,” I remind her. “A cute little Fatty Fatty Arbuckle,” she persists as she pinches my forty-year-old cheeks. Unbelievable.

  Thankfully, it appears I didn’t pass on my bad allergy genes, and Charlie has had no problem tolerating the smush we serve up.

  In fact, once we’d gotten past our own fears, weaning Charlie was incredibly straightforward. I know a lot of parents have a hard time at this transitional stage, but I guess we were just really lucky, and Charlie took to food like a duck to bread.

  There were very few foods he disliked. One of the leaflets we read said that it is important to try your baby on different types of food to see what she likes and what she dislikes. It said that you should learn to read your baby’s face, as it can be difficult to tell. Not really. In my limited experience, if babies like a food, their faces light up and their mouths open like yawny hippos. If they don’t
like it, they contort their faces like they’ve just been fed mashed-up rat’s anus. There’s not a great deal of room for confusion.

  But even if you are lucky enough to have a baby who will eat any old crap, it’s important to remember that there are certain foods to avoid. Obviously, it’s going to be a while before junior can tuck into a rib-eye or whatever, but apparently there are other foods that are no good.

  BAD FOOD, GOOD FOOD

  We are told repeatedly that if we are not suitably cautious about the stuff we feed our babies, they will overdose on salt and sugar and grow into child blimps. Who, by the time they’re six, will need one of those courtesy electric mobility scooters they provide at shopping centers. Gone are the days when you can just blast some SpaghettiOs in a microwave and consider yourself a good parent. That shit’s deadly.

  So, what to feed them? After a brief bit of research on the new UK moms’ forum Netmums, I uncovered a pretty clear rule: basically, the more painfully hipster and middle-class the food is, the better.

  According to a netmums.com weaning guide, things like avocado, breadsticks, quinoa, and tofu are all great options. (If you can’t remember the full list, it’s pretty much anything from Whole Foods.)

  Handily, the same list cautions against feeding your baby certain staple foods that can be found in “every” family’s food cupboard. Things like goat’s milk, Stilton, honey, and, of course, shark or marlin.

  Well, I for one am glad I came across this list before making Charlie my signature dish of Cheesy Honeyed Shark.

  It could be argued that these lists aren’t very inclusive and that they contain items that don’t necessarily apply to normal people’s weekly shopping. Also, these lists are supposed to encourage healthy eating in babies and tackle childhood obesity. But poorer areas tend to be the ones suffering most from childhood obesity—and, I’ll be absolutely honest, on the fairly low-income housing estate where I grew up, avocado, hummus, and the finest blue cheeses weren’t that big on the teatime menu.

  Poorer families are feeding their kids on a budget, not inviting Heston Blumenthal to stop by for a tasting menu. What’s wrong with these lists being a bit more relevant: crackers instead of breadsticks, rice rather than quinoa, and the rancid rubber from an old flip-flop instead of tofu? Just recommending that everybody should try to cut down on the Stilton suggests that the experts may be a tad out of touch.

  One of the other things that we are discouraged from feeding to our young is anything that is packaged: anything that comes in a packet, a can, or a jar. Try producing a pouch of food in a group of organics-obsessed parents and wait for the glances of disapproval, as though you’re about to spoon-feed your baby sulfur.

  What parents are supposed to do is cook and puree all the baby’s food from scratch. Preferably having picked the vegetables themselves, naked and by moonlight, thanking Gaia, the Mother Earth, for her blessings and sacrifice.

  The problem with this is our old enemy: time. It takes longer than you think to chop vegetables, steam or boil them, and then blend them to a puree (and then clean up the mess afterward). And the most disheartening thing is how little food you end up with. You can amass a pile of vegetables the size of a car, but once they are steamed and pureed you wind up with three tiny jars of food and are left scratching your head wondering where the fuck it all went. You also now have a washing-up pile the size of K2.

  So jars or pouches of baby food are sometimes a godsend. Particularly when you’re away from home and you don’t happen to have your pile of fresh vegetables, fresh chicken, range, knife, steamer, and blender on hand. I know there are many weaning gurus who are militantly against anything that comes in a pouch, and it’s probably true to say that not all baby food is created equal. And maybe a lot of it doesn’t have the same nutrients as fresh food. But I’d wager it’s come a long way since the baby food we used to eat as kids, which was one part salt to two parts sugar and had enough food coloring in it to make your shit glow.

  So if Charlie eats from a pouch sometimes, I don’t think his hair’s going to fall out or he’s going to be struck down with scurvy. I think he’ll be fine.

  Besides, after about a year, supposedly, this all gets a bit easier, because at that point they should start eating the same as you. The problem is that for the past year, you haven’t really eaten. In fact, it’s a wonder we’re all still alive.

  The last meal we had before Charlie was born was a grand Sunday lunch. A towering plate of roast beef and vegetables, with all the trimmings. The last Sunday lunch we had, as I write this, was a peanut butter sandwich. I say sandwich. Actually, we had no bread, so me and Lyns just sat there side by side, spooning the peanut butter into our mouths with our bare hands like emaciated bears that had stumbled across a discarded jar.

  Charlie actually eats like a king, but the meals that we manage are invariably takeout. It’s to be hoped that Charlie doesn’t start to eat the same as us, since we subsist on horrendously unhealthy Chinese food, Indian, and fish and chips. I’ve never eaten particularly well, but, since having Charlie, we eat like we’re trying to commit suicide by MSG. My cholesterol level has gone up to 7.6 (about 290 on the American scale), which means, in layman’s terms, I am more pork rind than human. Like I said, it’s amazing we’re still alive. The plan is to make our own diets healthier before we share the same food with Charlie. But I think we’re going to have to do it gradually. At this stage, my body couldn’t take moving rapidly to a diet that included a fruit or a vegetable. I fear it would reject the goodness, I’d go into shock, and my insides would burst.

  TO BATTLE

  Of course, to look at any baby after she’s just eaten, you’d think that there is no way that any of the food has actually made it into her mouth, let alone her stomach. Charlie is no different: whatever food he eats, he ends the meal coated in it. Actually, he doesn’t look like he’s been eating at all: he looks more like his meal just exploded in front of him before he could start.

  Apparently, this is a good sign. From what I’ve seen, all kids, up to the age of three, finish every meal looking like they’ve been around the back of the house and in the garbage cans. One of the defining characteristics of thriving, happy babies is that they are covered in yogurt, have styled their hair with baked-bean juice, and have jammed their ears up with squished fruit.

  So, there are two main approaches to baby feeding:

  Baby-led weaning and spoon-led weaning

  At this stage, we are told that babies are “exploring” their food. While it would be nice if they ate some of it while they were at it, all the advice encourages this exploration. And baby-led weaning really encourages babies to explore their food with their hands.

  Which is all well and good, but the experts don’t give a great deal of advice about how to avoid the surrounding area looking like the Battle of Little Bighorn has just been reenacted using a wedding buffet.

  The bib is the most useless piece of clothing invented since those floor-dusting shoes you can get for cats. It protects the six inches below a baby’s chin but does nothing about you, your furniture, or the rest of the room—the area best thought of as a kind of “blast radius.” I’ve seen suggestions that it is best to put down some newspapers, and that’s not a bad idea for protecting the floor. But if your little one is anything like Charlie, you would need to deck out the entire room in plastic sheeting, like TV serial killer Dexter just before he’s about to brutally murder one of his victims. Charlie’s range is prodigious. After one particularly lively meal of pasta, I was peeling spaghetti off the TV and the patio doors . . . which are in different rooms. Even when we thought we’d got it all cleared up, we were sitting watching television a few days later and smelled burning, which turned out to be a piece of pasta stuck dangling from a lightbulb. (I even went to work the following day and found some in my pocket.) Pasta, though, is an easy thing to clean up by comparison with some of the other substances that form a baby’s diet. According to New Scientist, the hardest su
bstance known to man is the diamondlike “wurtzite boron nitride,” but it’s pretty clear that they never tested mashed-up Weetabix that has been allowed to dry on a window. While it’s still wet, a wet wipe will easily get rid of it; when it’s dry, you can burn your way through an angle grinder just trying to make a dent in it. If you are going to try baby-led weaning, my advice is to get a dog. Our Jack Russell, Eddie, has put on fifteen pounds in the last few months minesweeping the house for lost food. And if he keeps licking the Weetabix stuck to the window, that could be gone in a matter of years.

  Spoon-led weaning provides its own challenges. While it’s marginally less messy, it’s still advisable to dress in full overalls and goggles when feeding anything sloppy—which at this age is everything.

  Because you are spoon-feeding your baby, it is better in one respect, in that you can gauge how much your child is actually ingesting. You don’t have to just wander around the room, trying to calculate what didn’t make it into her mouth. You can measure it spoon by spoon. You can also encourage her to eat using tried and tested methods such as pretending that the spoon is a train or an airplane. (It’s ridiculous how babies will clamp their mouths shut for a spoonful of food but will open up if you can convince them that it’s actually a form of transportation.)

  Of course, it’s not that straightforward. As much as Charlie enjoys his food, he enjoys much more the fun of waiting until a full spoon is almost delivered to his mouth before swatting it away at the last minute. This creates delightful abstract art up the back of the sofa or across the walls. If you put the bowl too close to Charlie, he will tip that over as well. Deliberately. Feeding him is like being bullied in a prison cafeteria. You’re just minding your own business, and he just tips the lot over deliberately for no reason: “Clean that shit up, bitch, this is my wing.”