Why does my baby keep throwing up milk? A personal essay about learning from feeding struggles.
The comment was an unwitting arrow. A father was telling my partner and me about how quickly his baby was putting on weight. At 2 and a half months old, he was already outgrowing 6-to-9-month size clothes. He weighed almost as much as our 13-month-old.
Jenni and I didn’t—couldn’t—laugh. Until several months earlier, the matter of our son’s nourishment had been a source of all-consuming stress and anxiety. Our son had GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease). Prolific vomiting episodes that alarmed even veteran lactation consultants were a fixture of nearly every feeding and an ever-present threat in the time between them. He’d arch his back, wailing, his body going rigid with agony, and exorcize a quarter or more of a given meal. Every 90 to 120 minutes, we witnessed the most literal rejection of a mother’s milk. When we transitioned from breastfeeding to hypoallergenic formula (a decidedly modest improvement), I got to share equally in feeding duties, along with the profound sense of personal failure in this core parental competency. If the concept of “A-plus milk” implied the existence of “F milk,” this was what F milk felt like.
I recognized in the father’s remark some understandable jubilation in response to a positive outcome, as well as a worthy desire to acknowledge the energy and time-intensive labor of breastfeeding. But the concept of “A-plus milk” was both vexing and perplexing. It framed a baby’s burgeoning not as an instance of good fortune, but as a product of parental merit: something accomplished with talent and effort, something deserved. What did this imply for our family?
