WARNING: The following blog contains the word “nipple.” If you are either offended or aroused by the word “nipple,” please hit the “Back” button on your browser. But before you go, here’s a little something for the road: “Nipple.”
Imagine for a moment that you’re a waiter. Perhaps you are (or were) an actual waiter/waitress and don’t need to imagine at all. You know all too well the challenges of a job in the service industry; guests so finicky that, if they were not currently occupying your 4-top, they would likely be institutionalized, status junkies that live to demean others for the sole purpose of feeling better about themselves, and children. Just to name a few.
Now let’s imagine that you’re a waiter in a foreign country; a country so foreign that the language is not a language at all. The citizens communicate in only silence and rage. There’s one item on the menu, yet the presentation is very specific. You can understand neither their demands nor their complaints. They get angrier and angrier until finally, red-faced from the indignity, they poop on you.
That is exactly what happened when I tried to bottle feed my 5-week-old daughter for the first time.
Before our daughter was born, my wife and I decided to breastfeed. In addition to the health benefits, according to most of the recent literature, not breastfeeding is the first and most profound incident of parental abuse. To hear the experts tell it, all former non-breastfed babies are currently congregating at truck stops, engaging in all manner of unspeakable human transactions.
So, we decided to breastfeed. That means, in the waiter comparison above, my wife is the cook, and the cook was tired of being “on call” 24/7. Plus, as an enlightened, new-millennium father, I wanted to share in the primal giving of life to my progeny, by which I mean I wanted our daughter to hate me.
We waited until the fifth week to avoid what experts call “nipple confusion.” The premise behind “nipple confusion” is that an infant, if bottle fed too early, will not return to the breast. Likewise, if they are bottle fed too late, they will not accept the bottle. We find it hard to believe that our daughter would succumb to nipple confusion insofar as she will viciously attack and attempt to suck any and all objects with a cold-blooded determination rarely seen outside of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week.
It turns out that Nature imbues its newest creations with all of these truly miraculous survival instincts that can be almost totally derailed by a well-meaning dad.
I gathered the bottle of pumped breast milk and a burp cloth, and found a quiet, comfortable place. I laid our precious girl in the crook of my arm, made sure I held the bottle at a 45-degree angle, gently presented the nipple to her, and she screamed like I had stabbed her in the mouth with a dirty carrot soaked in hot motor oil.
My attempts to nourish her continued to traumatize her for over an hour. Her screams reached a volume and frequency such that, many years from now, intelligent life in distant solar systems will eventually know of my betrayal of her trust.
As her displeasure intensified, my soothing lullabies became desperate: “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!? WHY WON’T YOU…!? Up above the world so high, like a…IT’S RIGHT HERE! JUST SUCK ON IT!”
Soon, we were both spent. While flop sweat was stinking through my t-shirt, she sat slumped on my lap, soaked in milk, looking like a baby boxer who had just gone 15 rounds with a cow’s udder. My wife gathered her off of my lap, placed her on a Boppy, and fed her the way that God and Nature had intended.
I’ll try again tomorrow, and, if I have to, the day after that. According to the experts, these things take practice. Now if you’ll excuse me, Daddy’s got a bottle of his own to practice on.
