How to eat, Day 147

Over the past few days since the surgery the reality of having a child that is going to be fed through a tube at home has been slowly dawning on us. 

Everybody keeps assuring us that this isn’t a big deal but it feels like a very significant impediment to normal baby stuff to always have a tube and a pump and a bag of milk hanging above the pump, connected at all times. At most we can shut it off for 15 minutes a day to give him a bath or some other activity.

Both ana and I feel like everyone at the hospital was so busy trying to make us feel better about the surgery that they glossed over some of the materiality of it. Now the reality is here with us in the form of whole new teams of doctors that he will need to follow up with after he goes home, care and cleaning procedures that need to happen every 4 hours, and equipment that we are learning to use.  

For almost five months now every time we see a baby rolling down the street in a stroller or laying out on a picnic blanket we have turned to each other and said “that’s going to be us soon”, and that’s still true… but it actually isn’t the complete picture anymore, now each one of those scenes will be modified to include extra items: a little whirring pump and a bag hanging above it and thin flexible tube tucking into Barnaby’s cute little outfits. 

Along with the additional equipment comes the loss of something else. Parenting books all talk about the importance of breast/bottle feeding as a developmental activity, often the more “wholistic” the source the more egregiously insensitive it is to the many mothers out there who can’t or don’t breastfeed for a whole rainbow of reasons. Barnaby may yet go on to breastfeed when his reflux improves, but for the time being there are huge swaths parenting advice that is not applicable to us and stressful in its implications.

Many mothers enjoy breastfeeding, some describe it as a soothing bonding ritual; but nobody has ever made that claim about pumping. Ana has lots of thoughts around this but that’s her business to share.

There are far worse fates than a feeding tube, many of which we have been forced to consider intimately during our opening act as parents, but this one is still hard.