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(This is a longer version of an email I sent to Dr. Phil's Web site today)
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Dear Dr. Phil,
I was appalled yesterday when you told the "Wedding Amnesia" couple to go on an eight-day cruise without their breastfed five-month-old baby. This would actually wean the baby from the breast. This goes against the guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends exclusive breastfeeding to six months. A baby who is separated from its mother and bottle fed for eight days will almost never go back to the breast. What you have suggested interferes with the central relationship and source of nourishment in that baby's life.
Dr. Phil, I know you love your family and I'm sure you enjoy a nice family dinner, cooked with love by (or with) your wife. What if I told you this: You are going to be fed through a feeding tube for eight days. It will be the same delicious, healthy food your wife makes, but through a tube. And you will not get to see your family during that time, either. But don't worry, you won't be lonely because a nurse will come in and attach your feeding tube. It will be fine!
I know that you are devoted to your family and you would miss them terribly and generally detest this arrangement, especially because it's not for your health, but someone else's convenience. You are just too much trouble!
At least you would be able to comfort yourself with memories of your family during this lonely time. But you should know that five-month-old babies do not have object permanence, or the ability to remember that things exist when they are not physically present. To that infant, its mother ceases to exist when she leaves the room. An eight-day separation such as you recommended is an eternity to that baby.
Babies suffer lasting emotional harm by being separated for too long from their primary caregivers. Why would you recommend such a misguided course of action? Forced separation of mother and infant is not even considered ethical in primate studies because of the extreme distress suffered by both. Please acquaint yourself with the scientific literature on the subject of infant-parent attachment. If you are in need of assistance, I'm sure you can find it at:
La Leche League International
Attachment Parenting International
Dr. William Sears
I can tell you it would have destroyed me emotionally to to leave my daughter for even a full day when she was five months old. Caring for and nursing one's baby create in mothers a powerful need to ensure that baby's welfare. Mothers need to have a good spousal relationship, but not to the exclusion of their children. My husband and I are very happy together and we have an active love life, and it doesn't require us to leave our now 13-month-old daughter at all.
My husband and I can leave our daughter with trusted friends or family if we decide to go out for a few hours, but we actually enjoy being with her and prefer not to leave her with anyone. Because we love her and each other and are willing to work out the kinks that arise, it works for all of us. She is a happy, secure and delightful little girl. And we are her happy parents.
Dr. Phil, I know your heart is in the right place. Please, when it comes to infant-parent bonding, let's get your head there, too.
Sincerely,
Since I have been getting coughed on and puked on and staying up and getting up while Paula has been sick this week, I'd like to direct you to some interesting reading material.
This is an NYT editorial on how I and mothers like me are screwing everything up big time.
This is some enjoyable commentary on the author of same and her new book.
Enjoy. Oh, and Happy Belated Valentine's Day!
P.S. Does anyone know where I can find a gold dress? More on that later.
I have a little something to confess. I have been going a little nuts lately worrying about Paula's cognitive development. She seems fine and quite bright, but if the lights are on and somebody's home it sometimes seems she's not answering the door.
Paula is doing all kinds of normal 1-year-old things, except the normal 1-year-old language stuff. She doesn't point, doesn't say any baby words other than Ah-boo (which still means "Mom, come get me, nurse me, do something to make me feel better NOW."), waves inconsistently, doesn't look around when we say "look at the bird/baby/tractor trailer," doesn't look where we point, etc. Usually when I talk to her the look on her face is as receptive as a snowy TV screen. Telling her something and hoping to see the "ah-ha!" moment are utterly pointless.
She says "mama mama mama," and I am thrilled. I say, "Yes, sweetheart! Mama is right here! Yay! Mama!" She stares over my shoulder as though I said nothing.
If I ask her if she wants to nurse, I get absolutely nothing in return. I have found that the only way to get a clear yes or no to that question is to squeeze each breast to see which is full - that's especially great for out in public, don't you think? If she sees me do that and does want to nurse, she gets excited and dives for the boob she wants. If they are equally appealing to her she goes to the middle. If I tell her, "We're going to visit Julio and Laila," she seems to be totally deaf. But when I ring their doorbell, she becomes ecstatic.
But I do know that she often understands me. Strangely enough, though she offers nothing in the area of initiating or responding to communication, when I say, "Stand up so I can pull your pants up," she does. When I say, "Don't bite me," she doesn't. At just four months old, she peed in a bowl when I explained why I was holding her butt in the cool spring air over a Tupperware.
I've moaned, stressed, feared, even cried about What It All Might Mean. I pored over autism web sites after Paula started repeatedly shrugging one shoulder and hitting her head with her hand. Ghosts of my pregnancy haunted me: You're going to lose her, they said. She is wonderful, bright and vibrant now, but Something Could Go Wrong. Maybe it already had.
I wrote my friend Frank, who did the personality profile on Paula last summer and in doing saved my sanity. But Frank - get ready for "when bad things happen to good people" - was burglarized over Christmas. Well, his office was burglarized anyway. He's been rebuilding years of research that was stored on his pre-historic computers. So I wasn't able to consult with him until today.
And guess what he told me. Surprise! She's just fine, doing her thing, being a total mystery to me but otherwise completely healthy. He told me her emotional sensitivity is completely focused inward on herself, and that she is "not interested in language almost at all." She requires stretches of uninterrupted quiet solitude so she can think. That is her preferred learning style, to analyse things in her head and reflect privately on her emotional response to them.
Positive reinforcement is basically an annoyance to her because it interrupts her thought process. She cares how she feels, not how others feel about her. Instead of cheering her on for a behavior I wish to encourage, I might as well type up a letter and give it to her to read. At least then she would get some delicious paper to eat.
My learning style, to contrast, has everything to do with talking things over with others and getting external feedback. I learn best with conversation, joking around, and feeling liked. So I want to learn to be a parent that way: by engaging Paula in an ongoing conversation. But it's just not on her agenda.
Many of my attempts to engage her meet with a blank expression because they don't fit into what she's doing in life. And that is a little bit of a downer.
On the up side, though, Frank said she gets to a point in her reflection where she wants to share what she's put together with someone else, and generally speaking that's me. It's when I'm washing dishes and she comes over to pull herself up my pants leg to stand looking up at me. It's after she's been engrossed in manipulating three wooden blocks for 10 minutes and she turns, looks at me, opens her mouth and eyes wide and sings out, "Aah-ah-ah-ah!" bouncing in rhythm.
When it's just her and me here at home and there's no one to talk to, I live for those moments. But today's conversation with Frank made me realize that when it's just her and me at home, while she is doing her thinking, I'm just not getting what I need. I need interaction, and Paula's not really here for that. So baby, we gotta get going.
I took a vacation last week, from Thursday to Saturday at my sister's house in Mundelein. Oh how I love it there.
My sister's house is nice, but that's not why I love it. Her neighborhood is nice - quiet, with a path around the "pond" next to the soccer field - but that's not what makes it special. I love it because my sister and her family are there.
When Paula and I visit my sister I go from being the ring leader in this circus we call child-rearing to just one of many clowns. And not the scary kind or the kind you just roll your eyes at. My sister and my niece are just so happy to see Paula that for much of the time I am with them I can just relax and do my thing, whatever that is. They're happy to see me, too, though I do play second fiddle to my daughter, which makes me a metaphorical clown with a fiddle. Of course I still wear the boobs in the relationship, so Paula comes back to me for nursing, cuddling, sharing of food. I nap with her, monitor her while she sleeps, make sure any peed-in clothing gets laundered.
But my sister and niece spend a lot of time playing with Paula, taking her to the potty, changing her clothes when needed and just generally mothering her. Meanwhile I take showers ALONE, watch "Law and Order" on cable, waste time on the computer and read my sister's trashy novels (I really am going to return them, sis).
And I can join in the play whenever I want; it's good to feel welcome but not quite so necessary. My sister spoils me, too. This last time she took me shopping to make sure there would be food I like in the house while I was there, letting me load up on bok choy, glass noodles, flour for making corn tortillas, Tofutti, and Progresso lentil soup. It's not the kind of thing they eat, like, or wish to smell, but bless their hearts, they put up with it.
Unlike my sister, I've always been a homebody. When we were kids she was always off at a friend's house or soccer practice. Especially stressful times at home meant she was outta there. I didn't know what her secret was. I consistently found myself at home, trying to help. I realize now there was little I could have done to improve things, but there I was, doing my darndest. Now that I have my own home, I do enjoy staying in it, though for both Paula's and my sakes I make sure we get out. It is the height of comfort. Almost.
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