I Regret To Inform You That Our Baby Will Be Throwing Up On Your Shirt

Some things about this perfect baby boy Jude: his eyes are still blue, enormous and glassy like tiny pools, gently sunset with the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen. His favorite thing in the whole world is this psychologically unsettling mobile over his changing table — an upside-down cone of black and white spirals, something straight out of Vertigo. He is, arguably, a baby beluga in the deep blue sea. He loves baths, always falls asleep in his car seat, and makes adult facial expressions. Sometimes he’ll suddenly snap to being completely alert and wide-eyed as if his species has just been activated by an outside controller. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anything in my entire life.

Also, he throws up approximately 100 times a day.

I’ve tried to start this column — Baby Steps’ first post-birth edition — on three (3) different topics but each one eventually needed to address this core aspect of his personhood and our parenting experience. It feels unfair, to him or to us, to start with this, instead of the heartwarming stuff. But maybe this is heartwarming, too, how we carry each other’s pain, make space for all the special, inconvenient things about loving each other. How it makes the moments when he’s not in pain so precious.

So, let me just get this part out of the way. Much like Jude, my valiant baby boy, gets most of the food he consumes out of the way by expelling it from his perfect, tiny mouth.

Jude came out small, like really small, like smaller than every swaddle we had for him. Our first night back from the hospital, I panic-ordered every newborn-sized swaddle my local Target could deliver the next morning, including these grey fleece pods he ended up loving.

Some days or nights, zipping him into his pod was enough to calm him down when he got upset, and he got upset a lot. Once Gretchen’s milk came in, his upset was generally related to wanting to eat or having just eaten. He would eat and then recover from eating and then eat again. He’d crunch his body, arch his back, scream or wail or frown or grimace, and hiccup and fart and turn bright red, inconsolable. He’d spit up fresh, opaque breastmilk, and also curdled breastmilk. He’d gurgle and cough.

All of this, apparently, is normal, unexceptional. Common, even! A baby’s stomach and digestive system takes some time to function properly. We had a seemingly endless parade of doctor and lactation consultant appointments in those first weeks, and we’d bundle him up and bring extra outfits and burp cloths and bandanas and bibs. We’d ask for help and get tips and we’d go home hopeful that THIS would be the cure. We’d cut out dairy! We’d do the football hold! We’d take probiotics! It will be LIKE NIGHT AND DAY!

At first you don’t really know which of the baby’s behaviors are going to be a Thing and which are just the music playing in the lobby before you sit down for the show. But it seems like most people’s babies have a Thing. (Did your baby have a Thing? Tell me about it in the comments!) They won’t sleep, they can’t latch, they have a tongue tie, or jaundice, or colic (which always sounded to me like an 18th century plague, not a word for a baby who cries a lot) or lethargy or infections or cradle cap, diaper rash, dermatitis, clogged tear ducts.

Our Thing is this: severe reflux. GERD. There are standard recommendations of how to ease or fix the reflux, and we have done them all. Extra burping. No burping. Holding him upright for 15-45 minutes after each feeding. Going dairy-free. Bouncing him. Keeping him still. Feeding less often or more often, for more time or less time. Sleeping or resting at an angle. Pacifiers. Specific positions for breastfeeding. Probiotics. Colic care. Gripe water. This stretch, that massage, this hold, that hold.

Nothing eased his near-constant pain or reduced the volume of spit-up, which increased every day, like a gathering storm. When he was simply being a baby who cried and not a baby with severe reflux, we often found calming techniques that would work for a day or two: that fleece pod, a certain song, a pacifier, a way I could hold him and shhh him while breathing in and out.

We watched a lot of TikToks, read a lot of reddit threads, tried everything, reminded ourselves that it was okay and he was normal and even though I know all of this actually happened, and I wrote it down in my journal at the time, I don’t remember the crying parts all that well, even when the crying parts lasted the whole entire day. We didn’t take pictures of those parts, either.

At around six weeks in — just before I went back to work — we made the tough decision to put him on prescription medication, a low dose of famotidine (Pepcid), which were told would help with the pain but not the spit-up. It seemed to work a bit. He began gaining weight faster, climbing out of the 11th percentile into the 25th. He was crying less usually, in less pain usually, able finally to nap for long stretches during the day. But some days he spit up so soon after taking the medicine that we weren’t sure it got into his system at all.

He is perfect and so small and I can’t believe they let us keep him and the rate at which he consumes and then expels breastmilk is astounding. It is exceptional! I do a full load of laundry every day — a bevy of his bandanas and bibs and outfits, and also our own, our t-shirts with trails of sick down their backs, our pants, our socks, our sweatshirts, our blankets and pillowcases and sheets, his muslin blankets, his snoo sacks, our 50 burp cloths.

Your existence in space, the way you arrange your body and possessions, the things you carry from room to room, the items you keep nearby, or avoid — as humans, we seem to adapt quickly to this. The way I know I cannot leave an edible item on a surface that Penn can access for even one unsupervised second.

The way, now, we must be prepared at any moment to be suddenly bathed in breastmilk or curdled remnants thereof, that the velocity of this spit-up will be unpredictable and that no amount of careful attention can predict its journey. It is everywhere, pervasive, as common as air, or our own saliva, or drinking water.

It is of us and we are of it, and it was of Jude but it is now, blessedly, of the world.

When people come over they say that the house looks so clean, that for the parents of newborns we are keeping everything so nice, and I think that’s true — but beneath the vacuumed floor and the wiped counter are the deep, unsettled remains of spilled breastmilk, no corner of the house untouched by its specter.

He is so little and so precious, so perfect and so human, so precious and so perfect and so little and so human. He falls asleep on our chests, frog-like and tender, his lips barely parted. Sometimes he smiles and laughs and we play songs and dance around the nursery, he coos at pictures that are literally just black and white stripes on a piece of cardboard. He is of us and we are of him.

I used to throw up a lot. I have a sensitive stomach and I often fall ill with food poisoning, but I also had some disordered eating in my late teens and early twenties, and was a passionate binge drinker for most of my thirties, even though my body consistently rejected the alcohol I subjected it to. Some days or weekends or weeks my throat would feel rubbed raw, my body concave, my mouth acidic. It’s hard to look at him and not project those physical sensations onto him, to wonder how he bears it, how it can’t hurt? Like it hurts to breathe? All those hiccups, the gas, the coughing.

It’s hard to look at your child and understand his feelings aren’t your own — were I living his life I would’ve asked for a prescription on day two. But we have to be careful about those things, I understand.

We’re told he’ll grow out of it, once he can sit up more, once his muscles are stronger, once he switches to solids. In 3.5 months or 4 months or 6 months or a whole year. Yesterday was a nonstop milky waterfall and so we’re trying something else; switching from breastfeeding to bottles to ensure he doesn’t overeat. I’m pretty sure that this new approach or writing an essay about it will fix everything!

But even if it doesn’t, even if he’s exactly like this forever? He’s absolutely perfect. He’s got these blue eyes, enormous and glassy like tiny pools, and I can see forever just inside them.