Top Eight Free: Your Guide to Allergy-Free Eating

“How old is your baby?” asks the doctor after I tell him I am breastfeeding.  He is holding my right breast and poking at a lump to see if I have mastitis.  “Well, um, actually…” I mutter.  “Actually, she’s not a baby any more.  She’s almost three.”  I hear the nurse behind my head gasp, and then try to cover it up with a cough.  The doctor looks astounded.  “Why are you still nursing a three-year old?” he asks incredulously.  Why indeed, I wonder.   This isn’t how I meant it to turn out.

At the age of three, my daughter is still an intense nurser.  She is allergic to both cow and soy milk, as well as many other foods, and so nursing for her is not so much about comfort as is it about calories.   She nurses approximately every hour and a half to two hours during the day, and wakes 3-4 times a night to nurse, when she is feeling well.  An allergy attack or the flu will increase her nursing time until I feel like I am back to her newborn days, glued to a chair and nursing almost non-stop.  On an average “well” day, she spends about three hours a day nursing. 

Even with her intense cave baby nursing schedule, Roo’s BMI hovers around the 5th percentile, with illness sometimes dipping down to that dreaded “off the chart” status.   She exists closer to the edge than most American children.

Roo was different than other babies from the beginning.  She nursed 14 hours a day.  She refused to be set down in any of the multitude of plastic baby-holding devices we had been given before her birth.  She had to be held, preferably upright, at all times.  She would not bend in the middle.  She could not sleep unless she had skin-to-skin contact with me.  Any time I tried to ease myself away from her she would instantly awake and take hours to get back down.   She had intense separation anxiety.  Every shower I took for two years was accompanied by her screaming for me to get out and hold her (first wordless howling, then more articulated).   These predilections led us to dub her “the cave baby.”  She was a primal primate clinging to her mother’s fur, latched on for survival.

The cave baby always refused a bottle.  Well, not always.  She took three in her fifth week of life, and then never again.  We tried every type and combination of bottle, location, position, and person giving the bottle possible.  We tried cups, syringes, and fingers dipped in milk.  Her only response was to scream and pull away.   (Her mantra: “I will not eat it in the swing, not in the house, not in the chair.  I will not eat it anywhere!”)

When Roo was four months old, I was hospitalized for a week for emergency gall bladder surgery.  Even though I was in surgery and recovery for almost 10 hours, Roo refused to allow any of the pumped milk I had saved up to enter her body.  One of the nurses who had failed to get any breast milk into her suggested trying to feed her formula, thinking she might take something completely different from a different source.  Unfortunately, we were told (erroneously, it turns out) by both our family doctor and our local hospital that there was no formula available for children who could not tolerate either milk or soy.  The cave baby lost almost 10 percent of her body weight during the week in the hospital.  She quite literally preferred to starve herself rather than take milk from any source other than the breast.

As Roo grew, and we began to introduce other foods into her diet, we tried to get her to drink rice milk or juice.  We introduced these every month or so for a couple of years.  Each time, her response was to scream until we washed out the cup, dried it, and showed her that it was empty and clean.  She really seemed to be afraid of the juice or milk, not just crying because she preferred something else. 

At 2 ½, Roo had a colonoscopy.  For weeks before the procedure, I tried to get her to drink juice from cute juice boxes or fun straws, knowing that she would need to be on a liquid diet to prep for the procedure.  She refused.   On the big day, she refused any clear liquids - even the blue Jell-O she’d picked out at the store and eagerly checked on in the fridge every 20 minutes, or the pure sugar water I mixed up for her.   (What kid won’t drink sugar water???)  At lunch time I started to panic because she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for over 6 hours, so I ended up giving her a spoonful of white sugar in a bowl, as a bribe for drinking 4 ounces of water. 

Nursing propagandists, er, I mean promoters, argue that nursing is no more difficult or time-consuming than bottle feeding because of the time one spends cleaning and sterilizing the bottles, mixing and heating the formula.  My lived experience says that this leaves out part of the story - that formula-fed infants eat less often and sleep longer than breastfed infants.  And that they stop using up and dirtying all those bottles relatively early in life - 10 months or a year and they have moved on to cow’s milk in a sippy cup. 

The other part of the story that is left out is that formula feeding makes it possible for someone other than mother to feed the baby.  The other parent, or grandmother, or nanny can get up in the middle of the night.  Mom, while still central, is not as essential to basic survival. 

Breast pumps have allowed some women to combine the convenience of bottle feeding with the health benefits of nursing.  One of my friends, an academic in a high pressure job, said “Nursing takes 40 minutes a feed.  I can pump in 15 minutes while reading a paper, and she can finish a bottle in 5.”  Not stated, but relevant, is that her husband can give the bottle to the baby and clean up afterward.  But pumping doesn’t work for everyone.  Some babies, like mine, will not take a bottle no matter what shape, what it contains, or who gives it.  And few women are willing to continue the inconvenience of pumping beyond one year of age. 

For women before the invention of formula and breast pumps, and in places where they are not available now, nursing was something that meant that women could not leave young children for long periods of time (unless of course, they had a wet nurse).   In nonindustralized places of the world, away from treated water and refrigeration, children nurse for years, not months.  The average age of weaning in developing countries is four.  In paces where food is scare or likely to be tainted, women probably offer the breast before solid food because they know that it is a safe source of nutrition.  

During my professional career, I always felt essential at my workplace.  When I was sick I worried about my projects.  When I eventually left a job, I worried about it being done well by my replacement (or more usually, replacements).  But I had no idea what it would fell like to be truly irreplaceable.  It is a terrifying experience to know that you are your child’s sole source of sustenance, and that if anything should happen to you, your child would probably die.  We are unused to thinking in those terms, accustomed to the sight of babies with bottles in their mouths on the subway, in the mall or the grocery store, and complacent in our expectation of fresh, safe water at the turn of a tap.  Yet for most of the world, and throughout most of history, nursing mothers are essential for a baby and young child’s survival.  A mother’s death or sickness could mean the death of the baby as well.

My cave baby is not a child of the 21^st century.  She accepts no substitutions.  Her body can not tolerate the processed, multi-ingredient foods we Americans eat, or even staples like cow’s milk.  To her, they are as poisonous as the tainted food and contaminated water in a developing country.  Almost everything that has more than one ingredient or comes in a box or can is not on the cave baby menu.  

At a basic survival level, the cave baby is not tolerant of a mother who leaves for long periods of time.   At three years old, the longest I am able to be away from her is 3 hours.   This is not what I signed up for.  I am a woman of the 21^st century with a professional degree and aspirations beyond home and motherhood.  I was prepared to struggle over balancing work and family.   Instead, I find myself living not so much the cave mommy life (I don’t have to kill my food before cooking it), but perhaps the life of a middle-class housewife in a developing country.  My servants are electric - dishwasher and food processor — but my life revolves around feeding my family.  I spend an average of four hours a day in the kitchen.   I have been bound so close to home for the last three years that I can remember clearly each of the times I left the house after dark.

My life is out of step with that of my pre-cave-baby friends, even those who have had children in the last few years.   They are mostly finished nursing their second children while also continuing to have professional lives.  Their children sleep through the night.  They watch videos with their spouses - all the way through.   They go out to eat or order a pizza when they come home from work worn out.  They even sometimes go out of town without their kids.   

When I feel most out-of-sync I remind myself that it is actually the American culture of child rearing that is off kilter from most of human history and the majority of the world today.  It is only because we are so wealthy and so safe that we can let young children sleep in their own rooms and drink milk that comes from cows or processed soybeans, instead of from their own species.   Even doctors seem to forget that, biologically, we are all large mammals