Free Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Waldman Page A

speaker, a woman a few years older than I, smiled pleasantly.
    Now, the correct response to that comment might have been a stern rejoinder to mind her own business. It might even have included a series of expletives. Instead, what I did was burst into tears and launch into a long explanation about how the milk in the bottle was my own, pumped at four in the morning while everyone else in the house was asleep. I had in fact been pumping breast milk for Abraham every two hours, I told this stranger, because my son was born with a palate abnormality that made it impossible for him to suck properly from the breast.
    Abe’s feeding problem wasn’t diagnosed until he was two weeks old. He weighed a healthy seven and a half pounds when he was born, a nice, plump baby. Immediately, however, he began losing weight, and by the time, ten days later, the pediatrician finally made time to see him, he was dangerously thin. No one, not thenurses in the hospital, nor the pediatrician who visited him there daily during the four days of my recuperation from my C-section, nor the hospital lactation consultant, nor even I, his mother, had noticed that the baby was getting no milk when he nursed. None of them had noticed his abnormal palate. He had probably not managed to extract more than a few ounces of milk a day since he was born, a tenth of what he should have been consuming. He was, in short, starving to death.
    I had been worrying about the baby’s weight from the day after he was born. For the first few days, after he nursed, my breasts would leak colostrum, the substance responsible for clearing the baby’s bilirubin and meconium and passing on a jolt of immunoglobulins. Loath to waste the precious liquid, I’d asked for a breast pump. My plan had been to pump my breasts empty immediately after he nursed, and then mix the colostrum with a bottle of sugar water, which I would then encourage him to drink. The hospital lactation consultant had walked in on me. “Why are you doing that?” she’d said, pointing to the bottles hooked up to the pump. “You’ve got plenty of milk.” I’d pumped for only a minute, but produced at least an ounce of colostrum. Instead of wondering why my breasts were still so full after the baby had supposedly nursed, she confiscated the pump.
    For the next week or so, my brain still fogged by painkillers and sleep deprivation, I fretted. Whenever anyone came to see him, I would ask, “Do you think he looks too skinny?” When I changed his diaper, I would measure the circumference of his thigh with my thumb and middle finger. Again and again I asked Michael if he thought the baby was gaining weight as he should. When I couldn’t get an appointment with the pediatrician, I asked the local public health nurse to come by and weigh him. Unfortunately, and for reasons I never understood, she was far more interested inscreening me for domestic violence than in evaluating the baby. “He’s fine,” she said absently, ticking off an item from her checklist. “Has your husband physically assaulted you in the past thirty days?”
    I was worried, but not sufficiently to take action. I accepted everyone’s reassurances that Abraham was doing fine, that my concern was nothing more than a reflection of my own neuroses. What Jewish mother
doesn’t
think her baby should eat more? I even went forward with Abe’s bris, performed by a
moyel
who happened to be a pediatrician and who also missed the fact that the baby was slowly dying of dehydration. The red wine the
moyel
dripped into Abe’s mouth might in fact have been the most liquid the baby consumed in a single sitting in the entire previous eight days of his life.
    I was, however, sufficiently concerned not to be altogether surprised at our pediatrician’s response when she finally put him on a scale. She disappeared from the room and returned with a bottle of formula. “Give this to him,” she said. “
Now
.” Abe drank four ounces of formula in five