oxygen

So we are introducing solid foods. Lukas dribbles rice cereal down his face and smiles at me with his two teeth. The two teeth, which are very cute, but due to extensive nipple biting caused me almost to wean him at 5 months. Alas, I won’t wean. I want him to have breast milk and I love feeding him. I would miss it greatly. Rice cereal, however takes a certain amount of patience. One tiny drop goes in and 3 drops come drooling out onto his clothes, his hands, his face, into the rolls of skin that make up his chin. It’s a process. But we have to do it. I am teaching now, two classes back to back and that means I have to be away for 6 hours. He has to eat something during that time and after last weeks fiasco with the bottle, I know that I can’t trust him to eat formula. He wouldn’t take the bottle. He refused it, opting instead to go from 2:30-8:00 pm without food. I came home to a starving, screaming baby who smiled deliriously when he saw me and proceeded to guzzle from my engorged breasts and pass out. So, although I had hoped to give him only breast milk for the first 6 months of his life, we are moving towards solid foods. Part of me feels guilty about this. I was with a group of mothers last week and told them that I would be away from Lukas for 6 hours. They looked a little shocked and concerned. What would he eat? How would he survive without me for such a long stretch? One mother said that she had only left her child for 3 hours, another for a few here and there and the third had only left her son once for 45 minutes!! Already the judging each other has begun, the weighing up of priorities and the need to justify our own choices as “right” by making others “wrong”. Why are we women so hard on each other? Perhaps no one judged me at all. I probably was just judging myself. Should Lukas be my only job right now? Am I putting his development in jeopardy? I don’t know. But I do know that I need to get out there. I need to be more than a mom. My mother always reminds me of the emergency instructions given on crashing planes. “Make sure that you secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.” So here we go. May we all make it through in one piece.