Language Nutrition

Today I got back from Washington, DC.  It was a great networking trip and I’m glad I did it.  The hardest part for me was leaving Wyatt.  Does that sound like favoritism?  Yikes.  Let me clarify. I miss all of my kids when I am travelling for my job, but Wyatt is still so young and it seems like the girls are settling into the idea that I sometimes have to go on trips.  Wyatt does not yet understand when his Mommy (read: food source) has to be too far away from him. So being away from him scared me. What will he eat?  He will inevitably use up the meager milk supply in the freezer before I get back so I was hoping he would 1) take a bottle consistently and 2) take a bottle of formula (gasp) a couple of times so that he got the calories he needs.  I mean, he is still only in the 25^th percentile for weight, so we need to make sure the child consumes what he needs.  And if he didn’t do both of those things (and sleep at least 6 hours per night) my mom (my regular childcare) would probably lose her mind while I was gone.

I lugged the dreaded breast pump with me so that the trip would only be a minor glitch in my plan to continue to breastfeed.  I really hate pumping.  I do not mind feeding the baby directly, but I do mind pumping.  However, I also know that if a mom plans to breastfeed for as long as I do and she still needs to work,   a breast pump needs to be part of her life, so I am willing to do it. But I despise it.  It takes too long and I get impatient. And I always feel like it is not doing its job completely. And I never get the milk that I want to get out of the whole process. And I feel like I should be mooing right along with the cows on the dairy farm each time I hook up to that contraption and listen to the horrible sound it makes. There…I vented.  That’s done.

The good news is—Wyatt did great! According to my mom’s meticulous records, he drank more breast milk than formula and still got in all of his required ounces while I was gone.  As for me, I am proud to say, this time the pump did its job and this is what I brought home with me:

Ok, so here is where the moms who did not breastfeed their babies are feeling like I’m getting preachy and braggy.  I don’t mean to brag about how much milk I produce.  Truthfully, I have always felt like a “just in time” producer of breast milk. I could never be one of those moms who has so much stored up in their garage freezer that they could stop feeding altogether when their babies are two months old and the kid would never eat a drop of anything but breast milk until they were weaned onto whole milk at one.  In other words, don’t expect me to put up a shingle and start selling my breast milk on Craig’s list because I just do not produce that much milk.  I also personally hate the Mommy Wars and I usually have a policy to only talk about breastfeeding with other moms who do it because it is not something everyone CAN nor WANTS to do.  I would never intentionally make anyone feel bad about how they feed their child.  

BUUUUUTTT…truth be told, I am actually really super duper proud because I far exceeded my low expectations for myself.  There were some acrobatics required to bring the milk home and I never thought it would make it all the way home in my little cooler.  Here is what did, and what I predicted might, go awry:

1)      The first refrigerator that they brought to my hotel room did not work properly. When I got back from my morning meeting yesterday the digital temperature on the outside was reading 66 degrees.  Not good.  I immediately transferred the milk from the fridge to the ice bucket and called down for a new one.

2)      I was not able to pump every three hours as is considered ideal.  But who really IS when you have a job that requires lots of long meetings? 

3)      My instinct was to pour it all out when I thought about having to lug it through security in my carry-on bag.  It made sense for a lot of reasons (temperature control, air pressure, etc.) to take it in the carry-on, but I did not want to hold up the line while I explained why I was not with my baby, but still desperately needed this harmless milk to an inevitably unsympathetic, recently-furloughed, TSA worker.  It just did not seem like it would go well.  So I searched online and found that I could safely pack it in a small cooler with an ice pack and put it in my checked bag instead. 

4)      I doubted my plan to pack it in the checked bag every second from the time I left my bag with TSA until I unzipped the suitcase next to the baggage carousel upon return to Atlanta and saw that all was well.  I pretty much expected spilled, exploded milk or milk that was way too warm or milk that was at least 75% soaked into my business casual attire by the time I got home. 

5)      Or, worse…I also imagined that it would be purposely confiscated! Hoping to appeal to sympathies, I had written a little note to the TSA person who would inevitably inspect my bag that read:

 “This is breast milk for my 4.5 month old baby, Wyatt, who is not travelling with me.  He will appreciate getting it as cold as possible when I get home.  Please close this cooler immediately after inspection.”

In spite of this, I thought they may decide to pitch it for safety reasons and write me a sternly worded note that would say something like:

 “Dear Wyatt’s Mom:  I should not have to tell you that there are consequences for carrying cube-shaped, electronic contraptions that look like small bombs in your suitcase on a post-911 flight to and from our Nation’s capital. The fact that you packed this alleged ‘breast pump’ along with several bottles (over three ounces apiece, mind you) of suspicious fluid in your luggage proves that you are simply un-American.  Therefore, as punishment, we added some of your alleged ‘breast milk’ to our coffee and then pitched the rest in the trash.  Please wean your baby if you plan to neglect him while you willy-nilly travel by air. Who do you think you are, anyway? That is all.—Signed, TSA Employee of the Month”. Ouch.

So, you can see why I was excited to have all 30 ounces of premium nutrition for Wyatt when I opened my suitcase.  When I got to my house this morning, I pretended to be an ancient apothecary, carefully poured all of the milk from the tiny bottles into to several freezer bags and put them in my garage freezer!! I felt instantly like a mom with a huge milk supply for the first time.  Then I realized that it was not going to last past my next overnight trip to DC…next Friday…when I will repeat the above list of acrobatics. Audible sigh.

So far, this post seems like it is just about being a mom, not about the specifics of being a Mom of the Ear.  That’s what all moms do, right?  They go through acrobatics for their kids.  And millions of us choose acrobatics for the CDC-recommended nutrition of breast milk for their babies. I’m really just like any other mom.

For just a minute, however, indulge me in a metaphor.  Recently, the Georgia Pathway to Language and Literacy Coalition is exploring a very healthy partnership with the Grade Level Reading Campaign here in Georgia.  The purpose of both the campaign and GA Pathway is to make sure that all children in GA, including children who are deaf and hard of hearing, can read on grade level by age eight. This metric is so important to the trajectory of children’s lives that in Arizona they actually use their third grade reading scores to predict how many prison beds they will need when those children grow up.  In other words, translating your ability to read the words on the page to reading to learn is so key to your socio-economic status that it can have the power to determine your whole live course. 

In response to this mission to get all children to read on grade level by third grade, both groups have been talking about changing the culture in GA such that parents and caretakers will all know the importance of “Language Nutrition” for their babies from birth to prepare them for life.  In other words, feeding their BRAINS is just as crucial to their survival as feeding their bodies.

So let’s apply this metaphor for a minute.  If the CDC recommended that a certain kind of language that only the mother can produce is the best language nutrition for every baby (much like breast milk), then things would be drastically different.  In addition to hospital staff handing you the baby within minutes of birth to latch on to nurse, the same hospital staff would tell you to talk to your baby as soon as you meet him or her for the first time.  They would model the behavior for the moms each time they came to take vitals by narrating the experience to the baby.  Moms would feed language to their babies from minute one like vital nutrition and they would seek a response from the baby when they talk to them. They would have language consultants, like lactation consultants, who would help mothers establish language feeding before leaving the hospital and would not let them leave without support if the moms were not catching on to the process.  We could have language hotlines for parents to call if they get stuck or have a question about communicating with their babies.  When mom left the house, she would be sure that replacement language nutrition was provided in her absence. When she returned to the baby, she would ask the caretaker about how much the baby ate and she would also ask how much the caretaker talked to her baby while she was gone.

Imagine it. If the culture changed THAT much, then when a potential language nutrition barrier was detected within the first few hours after birth --like a failed newborn hearing screening—it would be considered to be the same level of medical emergency as a regular feeding problem.  Babies would be given support from everyone at the hospital until a plan was made for how to address the barrier. After the baby left the hospital, immediate professional support would be provided to help those families leap over any obstacles in the way of language. And most importantly, the parents would be able to deliver the important brain sustenance in new and inventive ways, in light of the hearing loss, because the professionals were transferring capacity to the families and the parents fully understood the value of carrying through at home and the consequences of not. 

You see, Moms of the Ear, if we are so lucky, have the benefit of early intervention programs where we learn the tricks of the trade on how to get language to our kids’ little brains so that their brains develop as a typical child’s brain would.  In listening and spoken language early intervention programs in particular, the focus is on delivering the family’s native language (as opposed to a new language of ASL) to the child by transferring the power of talk to the parents.  We also learn to recognize when the baby is hearing our voices and we work to train our babies to listen extra hard through their hearing devices (called auditory training). Once audition is established, the parents talk, talk, talk more than we ever thought we needed to. We talk until our tongues are tired. We wait for responses and we talk some more. In theory, those same language acrobatic skills can be used for ANY baby to achieve great educational outcomes as long as the knowledge and skills are transferred to the family to carry it out in the home from birth.

My friend Comer Yates, Executive Director of the Atlanta Speech School, very eloquently talks about it like the fabled canary in the mine shaft.  If we deliver enough life-sustaining oxygen to the canary, then everyone in the mine survives.  If we all learn to how to talk to our babies so that we deliver enough language to the child who is deaf or hard of hearing, every baby will reap the benefits of that environment and every baby will be bathed in language. 

In turn, identifying and treating language barriers like deafness (or something else, like poverty) very early on will be as important to our culture as public health programs that promote better nutrition, break down barriers to healthy food and feed mothers and children through WIC or healthy school lunches.  We would have a world where every child who is deaf or hard of hearing has the same opportunity to live and work and thrive and grow as any hearing child.  All babies would live in a world full of easily-accessible language nutrition. Oh, and the regular food-type nutrition too. 

A girl can dream.

P.S. ---I’d like to give a shout out to the TSA agent who confiscated my psycho breast milk note today, probably spit on it, and then politely followed its instructions.  See, even TSA agents know how important food is to a baby.