Babeorexia ~ the skinny on baby rolls

 

Bigorexia: muscle dysmorphia or biorexia is a disorder in which a person becomes obsessed with the idea that he or she is not muscular enough.

 

Babeorexia: chubby dysmorphia or babeorexia is a disorder in which a mother becomes obsessed with the idea that her child is not chubby enough.

In the beginning, at the hospital, I had one goal with two motivations in mind: Pump my child full of milk to flush out the toxic bilirubins tingeing with orange her fuzzed newborn skin, and show that I had enough supply to keep the pediatrician from putting her on formula.

 

So pump her full of milk, I did.

For two weeks, I woke my daughter every two hours and fed her for one. At first, she protested. Her eyelids were heavy with dreams of the calm, watery world she had inhabited, and to which I am sure she wanted to return. It starkly contrasted with this bright, demanding place where she was force fed and burped.

But by the time her peach skin reflected her cleansed liver and her birth weight had been regained with a few ounces to spare, she started to wake every two hours and wanted to be fed for one.

You'd think I would have understood that something was amiss. That no child on this terrestrial ball should need to eat with such frequency and duration.

But I could not stand the thought of my daughter going hungry--irrational thought, though it was.

So I pumped her full of milk.

The elastic in her onesies started to leave indentions around her arms. I could only fasten the center snap of her nightie; her newborn cap perched on her head like a yarmulke.

The day I took her to the pediatrician, I stripped off her pastel trimmings and proudly trotted her down the hallway to the scales, like some prize-winning pig.

Thirty minutes later, the pediatrician showed me that though her head was on the seventy-five percentile, her body – sadly – was at twenty-five.

My heartbeat thudded. I looked down at my daughter. I could almost see her ribs beneath the block of her torso. She only had eight rolls on her limbs when she should have sixteen!

If her weight were a test, I would have failed at twenty-five percent. My child was starving.

So I pumped her full of milk.

Her soft belly poofed out above her diaper, and her belly button caved in. Her face lost its contours in the folds of her double chin.

I switched out her three to six months clothes for twelve. Her feet dangled over her car seat. Her head was bigger than mine. We would be wearing the same size shoes soon.

I took her back to the pediatrician. I bit my nails to the quick while he fetched the computer. But, alas, my daughter’s percentile was shooting off the charts!

I was Fern with Wilbur at the state fair. I wanted a blue ribbon or a lollipop. At home, however, my husband watched our daughter cross the living room in four earth-quaking flips.

He whispered, “How big’s she gonna get?”

I switched out her twelve month clothes for toddler. I started hanging upside down on an inversion table to stretch out my back, curved and aching from carting the heft of a twenty pound six-month-old.

Then she started eating “solids”: pureed carrots, sweet potatoes, peas, green beans, butternut squash, peaches, prunes, and applesauce.

But I didn’t want her to be thirsty…

So I pumped her full of milk.

On our way home from the grocery last night, my daughter started to growl. She flailed her arms and her legs and rocked the car seat in its holder.

I looked over at my husband. “You think . . . ?”

“She is not hungry,” he said. “She ate an hour ago.”

Still—

I wrenched off the top portion of the passenger's seat and scrambled into the back. The headlights of a tractor trailer illuminated my acrobatics.

I dug through the bags in the hatch and found my daughter’s first container of Happy Baby Organic Puffs.

I twisted off the top and poured a few pieces in my hand.

My daughter thrashed her head; her new top teeth flashed. I popped in a cereal piece, careful to retract my hand. She bit down and chewed and then worked her tongue around the morsel, inadvertently popping it out.

She began to cry, and then chop her jaws.

I popped a new piece in. She grinned.

“Maybe this’s how we’ll drive to Wisconsin,” I said to my husband. “We’ll just feed her puffs.”

Randy laughed. “Yeah, she’d turn into a puff.”

My daughter began to cry again. Her puff had dissolved.

I dumped more pieces into my hand and popped one in.

 

*Is "Mom Guilt" the worst with the first child?

*Do you still struggle with "Mom Guilt" even if your children are grown?

*Image by Ann Gennes

*I received no compensation from Happy Baby Organic Puffs--although, it'd sure be nice. She's almost through the first container.