From the day we brought her home from the hospital, Mike and I were solely in charge of L's nutritional intake. We managed how much formula she received, how much we gave her throughout the day, how much we pumped into her at night--and trust me when I say this was a constant math and science experiment. She (obviously) needed to eat, but she also needed her stomach to stretch so that she could take bigger feedings as she grew; we needed to feed her, but we also needed to push her boundaries. If she got a 2 ounce feeding through her G-tube, and threw up a good amount an hour later (as was common), there was always the concern she wasn't getting enough food--and it DOESN'T help that L takes after her Asian roots, because she was always on the small side of the growth chart. Having the G-tube surgically removed when she was four was actually quite stressful, because it was our GUARANTEE that we could get something into her, if she just refused to eat one day. And if there is EVER a fear that parents of tube-fed kids have, it's that one day they'll revert.
{Side note to parents of picky eaters: You could always threaten to have a port surgically installed on your child's tummy, for the purpose of forced feedings. Such a thing does, in fact, exist.}
It feels like L threw up for four years straight. It was one of the most consistent things about our life, I suppose. Every year we would take her in for an upper G.I.--at which time radiologists would inject L's feeding tube with nuclear material (or whatever it is that makes your intestines glow), and we would watch as they pushed half an ounce, and then an ounce, and then 1.5 ounces directly into her stomach--until she inevitably vomited somewhere around the 2 ounce mark. She was two years old and had the capacity to hold TWO OUNCES of formula in her stomach at any given time before she began to throw up. Think about that for a minute, and how challenging it was to feed her, which we were doing constantly, just to be able to give her enough calories to survive.
I feel like maybe L was born with a million gags in her. And everyday we were working that number down. It wasn't like it got gradually better; in fact, it always seemed to be the same amount of frustrating, until it wasn't. Until she took a bite, and then another without wretching. Three bites went to an entire Nutrigrain bar pretty quickly, and from there, it all just happened.
I'll be damned, I taught that kid to eat. And she is far and away our BEST and most adventurous eater. A lot of it is her personality, but no doubt, a good part of it was just working through it and getting over it. Because we were always told she could; even after years of therapy, when she would still gag on a single pea.
You see, I have NEVER seen the gag as dangerous or abusive--because in my world it's always been life-sustaining, really. I also get that not many of you have the privilege of raising a preemie, and that even if you have, we may not see things the same way; however, a great majority of Big J & L's infancy was spent doing horribly evasive and painful things to them, in order to save their lives. It is by the grace of God that I didn't spend my days in constant fear of the what-if's, because there were thousands of things that could have gone really wrong on a daily basis--keep in mind that they came home on oxygen tanks and feeding tubes AND heart monitors. Sometimes when they slept, they just forgot to breathe (seriously). You may not equate taking medical action to save a life with the ongoing act of parenting--and we will differ there to, because I am an absolute believer that I am saving my kids a lot of struggle (not ALL, I'm not that freaking good), in the way I raise them. At some point their free will and opinions factor in, and this is true for us right now, depending on the issue--but if they could have talked when they were born, I guarantee that both twins would have told us to remove their ventilator tubes because they were horribly painful. Except that it just wasn't an option for us. I make those kinds of choices everyday on behalf of my kids, and none of them are the difference between life and death, but I certainly believe they make an important statement about the kind of people I am raising. You'll need to keep reading this blog for another 10-15 years to see if my theory holds true, but why the hell do any of us do anything on behalf of our kids, if we don't think it impacts them in the long run?
But honestly, if any of you saw Big J's video and thought that he would choke via gagging, then you are GREATLY mistaken. Gagging is actually the body's way of guaranteeing just the opposite, actually. Trust me, I pretend to be a doctor in a small, midwestern suburb.
Which is why I'm going to post another video that we took, when Big J & L were about a year old. If you don't like gagging, DON'T WATCH IT. What you will see is L getting a piece of a biter biscuit in her mouth. A SMALL piece that remained in her mouth for a few minutes (we edited on time). We actually filmed it, because it was a small miracle that she got it into her mouth, on her own--that took a solid 4 months of therapy alone. You're also going to need to trust that Mike and I KNEW what we were watching because it happened anytime we put anything in her mouth. But this is a true gag, people--over a tiny, bit of biscuit turned to mush. She is not choking on a hard, solid object, as many of you will THINK she is; contrary to what you think you know, this is what gagging looks like when a kid doesn't know how to swallow, and her body literally thinks it might kill her. There's NO control here, and she turns red, and she looks bad to the untrained eye--and it is what we did every day for four years. Every. Single. Day. And it's why she is able to eat today.
I'm not posting it to entertain you, let's be CLEAR. In fact, I'm incredibly nervous that this will offend some of you. I'm sure it will, actually. But this is a pretty darn accurate picture of what my life looked like--and I'm NOT ashamed of it. I'm incredibly proud, actually. Incredibly proud of how I have raised these babies without paralyzing fear, because this was my entire life and if a big gag was paralyzing for me, then I might as well have called it a day and spent my days as a hermit in a dark cave. It is OKAY to make hard decisions on behalf of your kids, and not be ashamed of it--and I say that to all of us who are feeding babies with g-tubes, or putting babies on a schedule, or raising kids with disabilities, or teaching kids to eat vegetables, or putting a stop to whining, or whatever it is that is SO HARD to watch your kid struggle through, for the sake of raising them to be kind and responsible and brave.
Teaching a kid with a feeding tube to eat is, to this day, the reason why I know that I don't need to rescue my kids from every struggle. It was an important lesson for L, but it was as important for me. Why I know they need to struggle sometimes, and that it won't kill them. In this 1.5 minutes of video, it looks like she is fighting to SURVIVE, and I could easily talk myself into believing that. Anyone call fill in the blanks that this was too far. It wasn't. It was EVERYDAY, and it is the reason why she can eat today. When Big J struggled to eat his spaghetti squash, it was a thousand times more controlled than this, where L looks like she is literally struggling to breathe over a bite of soggy, biter biscuit. Was it worth it, for a bite of a biscuit? ABSOLUTELY, because it's not about the single bite; it's about what comes next, and what follows that, and every step that led to her eating an entire meal, and then another. Teaching a tube-fed kid to eat is a metaphor for LIFE, friends. Once her gag was triggered (which was every time she put something in her mouth, for years), it looked like this. THIS was normal. THIS is also what it looked like when she would happen to reflux spontaneously on her formula feedings, and proceed to throw up all over our carpet, or her crib, or her car seat, or her high chair.
THIS was simply L.
But not forever, because she got it. SHE GOT IT!!! She got past years of struggle and forced feedings that she still isn't old enough to wrap her mind around, and she came through it a spunky and independent and happy little girl. We didn't scar her, we taught her to EAT--through years of feedings that her body thought would kill her. We actually knew better.
We also know that Big J is bigger than gagging through a meal of spaghetti squash, that it won't kill him, that he won't carry residual issues over it. If he does, well then, I have done something else terribly wrong in the way he perceives the world--and well, that's just the risk we take as parents, because there are no guarantees.
HOWEVER you choose to parent your kids--I am praying that you will know yourselves, and your instincts and everything that you believe BETTER than the biggest gag reflex or tantrum they will ever throw. We all raise kids differently, blog world--and we will produce different kinds of adults that fill the world and make it go round and round. We need architects and teachers and dentists and artists--as much as we need a world full of people that are ambitious, and creative and compassionate and independent. At the end of it all, we get to be incredibly proud of our kids, for very different reasons, with the hope that one day, we get to see how all this work pays off.
But for now, I'll take the small victory of L conquering the gag and learning to eat solid food.
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