#I expected to feel like shit in January since historically that's my most depression-filled time of year that I just have to survive

[neverendingford]

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[gaiatheorist]

Just a spoonful of sugar...

Fakebook- “I’m giving up chocolate for January!”

The Guardian- “You might as well give your baby gin!” (OK, I’ve taken a bit of a liberty with that, but there are LOADS of “Sugar, HUH, what is it good for?” articles.)

Twitter has thrown up the occasional BBC news story, and ‘promoted tweet’ about cakes and such as opposed to signing up for a gym-pass, but I have such a tiny and carefully pruned Twitter, I’m hardly deluged with it.

I don’t like chocolate. Pick your jaw up off the floor, there are humans, and, more specifically human-females, who don’t like chocolate. I’m drawing a distinction between males and females because of the advertising-skew, there’s only really ‘Yorkie’ that’s not pushed at the fantasy-female, who wafts about in a lacy negligee, reading romance novels, and eating chocolate. There IS chocolate in the house, but, by the time I eventually ‘need’ to eat it (Brain injury, combined with historical disordered-eating means I quite frequently forget to eat, chocolate is quick, and calorie-dense.) it will have that weird white ‘bloom’ all over it, and I’ll probably eat something else. I don’t like chocolate, and, despite there having been a MASSIVE box of sweets on my work-desk for years, it was rarely me eating them, they were people-bait, and an emergency stash, for all the times people missed lunch. 

“Children are consuming 9 billion percent of their suggested sugar-intake at breakfast!” Yes, they possibly are, how else are parents expected to wake the little shits up enough to put their shoes on? That BBC/Guardian thought-stream plunged me into un-fond memories, of shop’s-own cornflakes, with white sugar sprinkled on them, and now I’m not sure whether I want to brush my teeth, or shave them. Porridge, always a bit of a bargaining-chip with my grandparents, in that the Scots side told us the Irish/Welsh side were WRONG to put sugar on porridge, instead of salt, and vice-versa. My Irish Grandma used to put sugar on EVERYTHING, half an orange, with sugar on it, strawberries, WITH SUGAR ON. I still technically have all of my teeth, but ALL of my molars are filled. My son doesn’t have a single filling.

Sugar-on-cereal was very much a ‘thing’ when I was a child, but I don’t expect all of the ‘Wheat-bricks’, or ‘Corn-lumps’ or ‘Puffed-rice’ were already loaded, like today’s child-marketed cereals. My child isn’t a child any more, but, even when he was, I didn’t buy much in the way of child-food for him. Oh, apart from when I went back to work when he was four months old, and he wouldn’t take my frozen-and-reheated breast-milk from a bottle, so he ended up on that rancid-smelling ‘banana-flavoured’ follow-on milk from a spouty-beaker if he made the hungry-noise during my four-hour shifts. 

I’m in danger of going off on one about the in-laws here, it’s inevitable. The period that I should have spent ‘bonding’ with my son, although massively hampered by postnatal depression, was completely ruined by their overbearing-caring, by their continual insistence on telling me I was doing-the-Mum all wrong. I have a ‘small frame’, whereas most of them are morbidly obese. I strongly suspect that my ‘frame’ is, in fact, no ‘smaller’ than any of theirs, it’s just that the outside of said ‘frame’ is less padded. (Now bringing myself back from a tangent-thought of wondering whether fat people have the same-sized skeleton as thin ones.) ‘Small frame’, narrow hips, ‘small’ baby. OK, he was 6lb 11oz, against my birth-weight of 5lb 10oz, but I was a month premature, and my mother smoked throughout. Oh no! ‘Small’ baby! He’s fucking fine, he’s a normal-sized adult male now, because I managed to have more control over his dietary intake than the in-laws. 

There was, and I don’t know if there still is, because I haven’t reproduced since 1998, a weirdly obsessive-competitive culture of ensuring your baby ‘gained’. Weekly weigh-ins, which, now I’m not in the strung-out paranoid state of a new mother, I realise could be used to detect intolerance, and failure-to-thrive, but, back then, making sure the little dots stayed ‘on the line’ was given so much priority it was devastating. Couple that with the in-laws over-feeding ‘normal’ possibly being a generational thing, and I can see why Fakebook ‘friends’ who have had babies later in life than I did are STILL being sucked-in to the ‘hungry baby milk’, and putting rusks IN the bottles. We’re not fattening the kids up for market, and, despite it being a bit cold, I don’t think we’re heading for an apocalyptic Ice-age, where only the lardy will survive.

Potentially Pavlovian, isn’t it? If the babies are consistently over-fed, that’s going to have an influence on their appetite, on their expectation, and, if it’s rusks-in-milk, or synthesised, sweetened cow’s milk, that becomes the ‘norm’. I’ll bang my breastfeeding drum, in that THAT is what they are for. I accept that some women struggle, I struggled, I had weeks of crying in the bath, with tits so mis-shapen and engorged they looked like they were stuffed with Lego. They FELT like they were stuffed with Lego. Hot Lego, it was fucking horrible. Breast-feeding isn’t easy, I would have loved it to have been the cathartic-bonding bollocks ‘we’ are led to believe it is, but some of it is just fucking horrible. The way the milk ‘lets down’, stimulating Oxytocin, the ‘happy’ hormone is an incredibly pleasant sensation if you happen to be looking at the contented face of your suckling newborn, knowing you’re giving them all the sustenance they need. It’s fucking shit when it happens in the middle of Tesco, because someone else’s baby cries, though. 

I breast-fed for a year and a day, he had quite a lot of teeth by that last morning feed, the day after his first birthday, but that was my choice, as much as it’s the choice of others NOT to breast-feed, or the choice of that one ‘associate’ on Fakebook who’s still breast-feeding her four-year-old-daughter. The in-laws encouraged me to supplement my breast-milk with formula right from the start. I didn’t. They encouraged me to ‘try a bit of baby-rice’ from about 10 weeks. I didn’t. I did find it odd, that they didn’t want me to go back to ‘having a job’, but were still trying to reduce my son’s dependence on the contents of my bra. They’re feeders. I don’t think they even realise they’re doing it, but they always have. “Have a bit more!” “Have one of these, they’re from Marks and Spencer!” “Have some more cake.” 

They grew up in a different time, where food wasn’t so widely available, but not in the same half-starved by poverty way I did. My eating habits were formed early, by having to choke down plates of gristle in my early years, and dinner more or less going ‘ping’ as I grew older. Food is a necessity, it was never a luxury, or a reward, I can take it or leave it, and I don’t associate a huge lump of cake with ‘pleasure’, or ‘comfort’, it’s just cake, which is a thing I’ll eat if there’s nothing else left, knowing that the stomach-noises will follow. My mother didn’t ‘cook’, she re-heated. The ex’s Step-Mum cooks. She cooks far too much, and it’s mostly bland stodge with no flavour, and very little nutritional content, because her husband, and then her children, and step-children are used to that. One of the step-in-laws is one of those that orders omelette in an Indian restaurant. The sister-in-law with a daughter who would ‘only’ eat plain boiled pasta.

Sweets as a treat, sweets as a reward, sweets to stop the toddler crying. Fuck me, the number of times the ex would buy the kid an ice-cream to ‘cheer up’, rather than exploring why he was upset in the first place. There have been frank discussions with the boy recently, and he’s thrown in “Yeah, Dad just buys me stuff.”, he knows. 

Sugar, though, that’s a weird one. I put brown sugar in my coffee. The kid puts artificial sweetener in his tea. Artificial sweeteners bloat my gut, but so does white sugar, ‘the killer white’. Neither of us really crave sweet things, despite the sugar-on-white-bread crap at the grandparents house. Bread is a bitch for added sugars, and the horrible stuff really upsets my stomach. I ‘can’ eat bread, but I could also eat a lightbulb if I wanted to.

No idea at all where I’m going with this one, other than deflecting from a decidedly non-Mary-Poppins response to the bloke on the Guardian comments section feeling the need to say “My wife did better than you!” to my comment that I didn’t buy-in sugar laden baby-food for the kid, I just mashed whatever we were eating.