The audacity of having to feed your children

😒😒😒

My worst fears came true at my daughter’s 9-month check up when the pediatrician uttered the words I had feared.

“Time to eat food for calories!”

Yes, I was being asked to feed my child three meals and two snacks a day––on top of offering bottles of milk––and I was deeply offended by the ask.

You probably you don’t think much about the children you see throwing food at a restaurant table, or scarfing a cereal bar at the park. But, if you’re a parent, you know that chicken nuggets are not just chicken nuggets. They’re loaded with nitrates and a lot of big emotions.

Feeding your children is a daunting task, fraught with expectations, social pressure, imposing medical requirements, CDC recommendations, and usually some emotional baggage from your own childhood.

From the very first hours of life, feeding your baby becomes the number one priority. My son was whisked away to be fed formula when his blood sugar dropped after an hour on dry land, and needed to see the doctor every week for a weight check for his first month. It’s all about milk supply, finding the right formula, pumping, deep latches, trying different bottles, and ounces, ounces, OUNCES. It’s a lot of math, worry, and fear that whatever you’re doing is absolutely, most definitely not enough.

Feeding your baby solid food is fun at first. A puree here and an avocado wedge there. How silly! A bib! How fun! So, when the pediatrician tells you it’s time to suddenly feed your baby full ass meals, it’s a complete paradigm shift. The only relationship you have with keeping your child alive is liquid, and now someone is telling you (once again) that it isn’t enough.

For a first-time mom, it’s really hard to let the milk thing go. It’s beaten into you that your baby needs a certain amount of ounces per day or they will not thrive. So much so, that’s it’s easy to forget that the point is to get them to eventually stop drinking milk and eat food instead. More importantly, it’s hard to see the perspective that a milk diet is extremely temporal. A mere fraction of a lifetime.

But, when the lifetime is less than a year, this shift isn’t just physical; it’s also emotional. Changing how you feed your baby ultimately transforms the relationship in a major way. And who the hell is ready for something like that 6-9 months in?

It doesn’t help that, logistically, by this point, you’ve finally gotten the milk or formula thing down pat. Just when you’ve reached a peak, it’s time to face an even steeper incline. Because, while cleaning bottles, remembering to buy formula, pumping and breastfeeding are truly a full time job, it’s no match for coming up with well-balanced age-appropriate (read: non-chokable) meals for the first few years. Milk, no matter how stressful it is in the first few months, is objectively much simpler than food.

I have such visceral memories of texting with my friends Hannah and Allie, both of whom had sons the same age as mine, complaining about the audacity of having to feed our children. What do you give them? Are things too chokey? I feel like I keep giving him the same thing over and over again! UGHHHH. Literally no break. They need to be constantly eating.

Three meals a day. Seven days a week. That’s sitting in and cleaning up a high chair, and likely the surrounding walls about 30 times a week! This is not including the two additional pediatrician-recommended snacks a day.

I’ve been dreading this phase of babyhood almost as much as the newborn months. My son, recently launched into Q2 of his third year, can finally eat a meal in an almost humane way. Of course there’s clean up involved, but it doesn’t require a five-step process anymore. Having a second or third (or fourth if you’re an actual saint) kid always feels like resetting the clock in a lot of ways, and for me, no more so than with cooking and cleaning.

I’m back to having to wipe, sweep, mop, vacuum, and scrub every time my daughter eats, which feels like a never ending loop between 6am-8pm, daily. My hands look unrecognizable from washing and cleaning all day. They’re dry, flaking and cracked. I’m almost too embarrassed to get a manicure. Sure, there are plenty of brands that have tried (some successful) to get me to buy special mats that go under high chairs to make it so much “easier.” But, they are ill fitting, bunch up, a tripping hazard, and end up being a middle man of one more thing to clean.

If you’re unfamiliar, the weaning process involves offering bottles and food all day for several months until the child can decide food is better than milk. This produces so much waste, and so much mess. Not to mention, my older child and baby are still not synched up schedule wise. They’re completely staggered for most of the day, so I’m really making small deconstructed adult meals, and cleaning up even more desecrated meals off the floor, all day. It is a special (albeit cute) brand of hell.

This has led me to the realization that there is no “easy meal” for the busy mom. Because, I’ll tell you something. Even when we pick up food from a restaurant, it ain’t easy. Sure, I don’t have to cook or clean my own dishes, but I do need to perform Top Chef level deconstruction on the food, clean up is just the same as if I made the meal myself, and then I always need to figure out how to dispose of the food packaging––which inevitably means a trip to the trash bins.

I recently started subscribing to a few food newsletters, mostly moms like

caroline chambers

, for recipe ideas, in order to mix up the boring, awful weekly menu I currently have going on. Everything they put together looks delicious, and is always touted as “simple,” “easy,” or “quick.” But, these recipes are never any of those things. Sure, perhaps in the grand scheme of the culinary arts, they could be classified as such. But, for the average working mom who doesn’t get the joy of cooking, it’s all fucking hard and takes an hour at minimum. When you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t really care, everything takes waaaaay too long.

Zoe, from

ZoeFoodParty’s Newsletter

, posted a gorgeous "5-Ingredient Pasta Squash Pasta,"and I was immediately salivating. I must have been feeling especially *~*iNsPiReD*~* because I decided to actually attempt it, even finding the cool boingy spiral pasta she used at Trader Joe's. It was only five ingredients and two pots, but the directions required over 500 well-written and engaging words to explain to me, the opposite of a cooking savant, how to make it.

I made it. It looked…something like the picture and tasted pretty good. It took at least an hour to make it, ten minutes to eat it, and 20+ minutes to clean it up––followed by a rich dessert of 1.5 hours of a bedtime routine for two small children.

I haven’t made it again since.

This experience is not unique to my life. I assume most other parents (mostly mothers) are in the same food splattered boat––exhausted, simultaneously hungry and turned off by food from touching it so many times a day without any time to eat or enjoy it. But, it’s not a conversation or sentiment I often hear shared. 

This is one of the dark corners of parenting for which no one prepares you. People allude to exhaustion, burnout, no breaks, etc., but I rarely hear commiseration around how taxing it is to feed and clean up after your children. Why aren’t more people talking about their asinine grocery bills, supermarket deliberations, food waste, toddler meal rejections, backbreaking dishes, and the sheer mental energy that goes into making sure everyone is fed something that won’t cause asphyxiation multiple times a day?

All we get are promises of beautiful, nourishing yet easy, quick, and simple recipes that are anything but for the average mom with no time or interest in cooking!

I know most of my angst and cracked hands (I know, I know GLOVES), are confined to this particular age and stage. Pretty soon food will stay on plates and go in mouths, and the most I’ll need to think about choking is avoiding bay leaves. Shortly after that, I’ll have helpers who can do the planning, cooking, and cleaning for themselves. And, eventually, I’ll be lucky to have anyone who wants my mediocre mac and cheese at all.