Fear of Food: A Diary of Mothering

By Carol Bacchi

Incorporating diary entries and reflections, this personal account of one mother's struggles during the first 12 months of her son's life to get him to eat openly confronts the social challenges mothers encounter, including insensitive doctors, the marketing of maternity in the media, postpartum depression, and social isolation. The stinging question What if I don't love my child enough? is explored in this highly personal and moving story that argues mothers must speak out about the challenges and traumas they face in order to be understood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2004
• ISBN: 9781742194196

Book preview

Stephen

Acknowledgements

The people who helped me through this difficult time are mentioned in the text but I have changed most of their names to guarantee their privacy. My brother, Don, and his wife, Rhonda, deserve to be singled out. Their willingness to disrupt their tranquility by taking my son and me into their home for six weeks will always be remembered with gratitude. I also want to acknowledge the help of my dear friends in Canberra and in Sydney who stood by us even when this must not have been easy to do.

My sincere thanks to Greg de Cure, Chris Beasley, Zoe Gill, Robert Dare, Christine Finnimore, Lisa Hill, Fred Guilhaus, Anne Yeomans and Paul Corcoran for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to the readers at Spinifex for drawing to my attention important lacunae in the narrative, and to my editor, Barbara Burton, for her attention to detail. And, of course, I need to thank my son for giving me a reason to endure and for strengthening my conviction that telling our story is a worthwhile thing to do.

Preface

This is a story about my first and only experience of mothering, and of the ways in which my infant son’s feeding disorder affected that experience. It is difficult to put dates to the problem. Medically, it probably began when he contracted viral pharangytis, a severe throat infection, at three months and ended some time in his sixth month. But my view is that the problem had earlier origins and lasted much longer. I believe that our difficulties around feeding had their beginnings in my early attempts at breastfeeding, attempts that failed due to my lack of milk. And I believe that our difficulties have only recently been resolved (at the time of writing the book, late 2001, my son was eight years old). Perhaps this is why I am now able to write about them.

My account differs from the medical account primarily because I include myself as a part of the problem. I do not mean that I blame myself. Let me make that very clear. I am opposed to all forms of mother-bashing, laying guilt trips on mothers. When I say that I include myself as part of the problem I mean that in my head the problem started earlier and lasted longer. Because of this, I had difficulties with feeding my son that go beyond any kind of medical diagnosis.

It is also unclear, as you will see, whether all doctors or nurses would agree that my son had a feeding disorder for the three months he was treated. For many of them, to say that he had a feeding disorder meant that he suffered some form of physiological difficulty, a sore throat or reflux. For many of them, the fact that he rejected food was not sufficient to constitute a feeding disorder. For these medical people, the problem was that I was a ‘tense’ mother or that I had post-natal depression or that I didn’t enjoy my child.

I believe that it is possible to say that part of the problem was in my head without psychologising the problem in the way these explanations tend to. Stephen rejected food because of the dynamic established between us which was due to a number of physiological conditions including failed breastfeeding, colic/reflux, viral pharangytis, congestion due to colds, teething, and so on. This account is an attempt to examine the nature of that dynamic.

I wrote Diaries for the first nine months of my son’s life. I also had separate Feeding/Sleeping Records which kept track of when he fed, how much he consumed (once he was on the bottle), when he slept and details about other bodily functions such as bowel movements. It came as quite a shock to me to discover that I remembered things quite differently from the story these records tell. The dates seemed wrong. And some of the incidents seemed out of order. I don’t remember them in this order.

Which account should I offer you? The account in the Diaries and Feeding/Sleeping Records should be closer to the truth, shouldn’t it? After all, they were written at the time. But, as you will find out, I was in a state of near exhaustion during much of the period they describe. I don’t think I was really ‘all there’ much of the time. It is completely possible then that events as related in the Diaries are filtered and distorted.

Moreover, how I remember this period deserves attention. It is my memories, after all, which I live with and which continue at some level to puzzle me. It is my memories that impel me to revisit the nightmare, to try to make some sense of it. But, as I’ve mentioned, my memories often don’t match the Diaries. Are my memories illusory? Or, does the fact that they are my memories make them ‘true’ in some sense or other?

I have decided to combine the accounts, to offer current reflections interspersed with excerpts from the narrative Diaries and from the Feeding/Sleeping Records. Passages from the latter sources appear in italics to suggest the haze within which they were produced; current reflections appear in normal type.

I have memories of testing times. I nearly said ‘terrible times’, but I felt that I needed to soften that. I changed ‘terrible’ to ‘testing’ because I didn’t want you to conclude that nothing good happened during these months. I didn’t want you to think that my experience of early motherhood was all bad. I mean, it is serious enough that I should suggest that the experience wasn’t totally wonderful. The conventional picture of motherhood as some natural state of joy and bonding makes it difficult, if not impossible, to admit how very gruelling mothering can be.

I believe that there are mothers out there—fathers too—who will recognise themselves in this account. I do not regard my experiences as unique. Rather they are somewhere on a continuum of the challenges accompanying mothering. My hope is that my willingness to disclose my ‘testing times’ will make it easier for other mothers to give voice to the mix of experiences which is motherhood, the euphoria as well as the frustration, the warm glow as well as the quiet desperation. Beyond this, I hope that the personal catharsis achieved in the telling of our story sheds some light on the complex dynamic between mother and child, medical professionals, and the wider society. Throughout, I highlight the conditions— institutional inflexibility, social isolation (doubtless compounded by my single parent status), medical orthodoxy—which exacerbated the difficulties my son and I faced. Things needn’t have been so bleak. These months were the closest to hell that I’ve ever come. But then I’ve led a sheltered life. My hell won’t measure high on the Richter scale of hells. But it may just register a reading.

The conditions under which I became pregnant are not relevant to the story, except to say that I never set out to raise a child on my own. It just worked out that way. I wrote the narrative Diaries and kept the Feeding Records for a complex mix of reasons which are discussed in the text. Primarily, they served the purpose of keeping me company and keeping me sane. I never intended them to become part of a public record.

I decided our story was worth telling due largely to the personal confidences of other mothers about the difficulties they faced during mothering. Through these shared intimacies I came to realise that there is a side to mothering which is seldom discussed—the daily challenges, the social isolation, the uncertainty and trepidation accompanying almost sole responsibility for one, or more than one, small vulnerable human being. My particular experiences fell into context as one version of a common tale— the story of real, gritty, down-to-earth mothering. The goal in relating these experiences is to prick the balloon of idealised mothering which makes it so difficult to admit, to oneself and to others, that mothering can be frightening, exhausting and, even at times, downright demoralising.

I approached motherhood much as I would any new experience. To me, it was a wonderful, exciting adventure—which indeed it is! I was euphoric the day I found out I was pregnant. In the months leading up to the birth, I would walk on Black Mountain or swim in a nearby Olympic pool, talking in my head to my son-to-be about the wonderful things we would do together. I knew that I was expecting a son because, on medical advice, I had undergone chorionic villus sampling—a procedure for detecting birth ‘defects’ in the first trimester.

When, after Stephen’s birth, things became difficult, I encountered a barrage of advice from institutional experts who told me what I was doing ‘wrong’. There was little interest in me except to the extent that I was or was not following the often contradictory rules they endorsed—for feeding, for sleeps, for caring. I was judged against these standards and was repeatedly found wanting. These sorts of interventions did not help Stephen and me; they made the experience worse. This story then is a plea to refocus on mothers as more than reproducers of the next generation, to see them as flesh and blood human beings doing their best to cope with a range of often daunting daily challenges. This refocusing,