Beloved daughter,
Your ability to frustrate me is amazing. It is remarkable in two directions: though you are so small, you can unbalance me so greatly. How could someone who weighs 12 pounds, someone who must be carried anywhere she wishes to go, someone who cannot speak or wield tools or consume solid food bring a grown man to the edge of his self-control?
While I am sure each baby has their own unique ways of frustrating mom or dad, in your case, nothing boils my water like your refusal to eat from a bottle. With your brother, we had no problem introducing him to a bottle; the dude liked to eat, no matter the source. This led me to believe, naively, that every baby must be that way; I didn’t know that rejecting the bottle was even a thing that babies would think to do.
You have been kind enough to shatter my illusion.
If you struggled against the bottle for a few minutes each time, if you fussed and whined and made a scene before eventually giving in and saying, “Well, I don’t like this thing but hey, I gotta eat,” I could handle it. But you don’t just fight it; you straight up reject it. You become a little Gandhi fasting in protest against the terrible injustice of the bottle. You just won’t take it.
Mom and I have adjusted the independent variables. We have tried different rooms, times, positions, temperatures. We have amassed various bottles and inserts and nipples. I have sung, shushed, rhymed, and rapped. I have tried it with Mom nearby and with her afar. I have tried it with a fox, I have tried it in a box. (Well, not literally that last one, but you get the idea.)
Despite our best efforts, no matter the gymnastics we perform to convince you to eat the one and only food you ever eat and the one and only food you need to survive, when that bottle touches your tongue, you react one of two ways:
If you’re calm, you act as if you’ve never heard of a nipple. The milk pools in your mouth and then comes trickling out like you were just bit by a rare snake that’s caused your swallowing muscles to undergo paralysis.
Or, if you’re not calm—and we always get there eventually—you act as if the bottle itself is the snake, venom dripping from its fangs. You spit it out like a curse, your eyes tightening into a hot cry as you realize that your own father has tried to assassinate you.
If the hill you had chosen to die on was something inessential, like refusing a certain toy or swaddle or swing, I wouldn’t mind. I would probably try a few times, then give up. No big deal. But the hill you’ve chosen to die is one on which you could actually die: namely, starvation.
What really upends me about the whole thing is the obvious necessity of what you’re refusing. Mom works hard to extract this precious, nearly magical elixir from her body; we store it in carefully marked containers like it’s enriched plutonium; we set the conditions to laboratory precision; and then plah, you spew it out (or, just as insulting, let it dribble down your neck and soak into your shirt).
The one plus from your bottle aversion, other than extra cuddle time with Mom, is that it has prompted some spiritual reflection in me. As your brother can attest based on the letters I’ve written him, when I reflect on these fatherly things I can’t help but think of Fatherly things, too. And when I ponder just how terribly vexed I am by your irrational refusal of the very milk of life, I can only imagine what continual state of frustration our heavenly Father must experience as He watches us spit, spew, and dribble His blessings all over ourselves.
Just as a small example, one of Paul’s famous lines comes to mind: “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6.23). For most of my life I have thought of this verse as a great admonition: I took it as a mortal warning, a memorably worded description of just how seriously we need to take sin.
And that may be what it is. Perhaps, though, it is also simply a reminder of a plain truth, something we should already know, similar to when I cradle you in my arms and whisper, “Okay, baby girl, this is good stuff, I promise. You need it to live.” I shouldn’t have to say it, yet apparently I do; and even so, I cannot force you to see the truth of it.
I think of God giving us the same message—the same painfully obvious truth, whispered a thousand different times in a thousand different conditions:
I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you eat that one deadly fruit I told you about, you won’t be well.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you use others, you will end up feeling used.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you live for yourself, you will end up hellishly alone.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you go this journey without me, it will be unbearably long and unbearably heavy.
Thanks to you, my anti-bottle rebel, I can imagine, in the tiniest way, His frustration when His children hear these messages and respond to the Bread of Life with a cavalier “no thanks.”
You know what the funny thing is, though? You don’t always say no.
On two occasions, for whatever reason,[1] you gave in and had a little meal with me. While on the one hand that adds a maddening layer to the whole situation, as if you are playing some sick, backwards version of baby Russian roulette, it also injects a bit of hope. If you’ve eaten once, I know you can do it again, contrary to the dribbling and spewing and wailing.
And on that point I can relate to the Father in another tiny way. If, like Him, I had no recourse, no backup option (i.e. Mom) when you reject the bottle, I would do anything in my power to get you fed. I would buy every bottle, watch every YouTube video, consult every specialist, attempt every position. I would get a dropper and squeeze it into your mouth one droplet at a time. I would swallow it myself and regurgitate it to you if that is what it took.
And you know what I wouldn’t do? I would never, ever, ever, ever say, “Well, I guess my daughter isn’t eating, then. So much for that. Starvation it is.” A father does not just let his child starve, even if by some madness she would choose to.
I suppose that is why the poet calls God the hound of heaven: He will not, perhaps cannot, stop chasing us. And I suppose it is why Paul, shortly after the “wages of sin” passage, tells the Romans just how dogged our Father is:
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.38-39).
Is it possible that in the final analysis, none of us will be able to withstand the persistence of the Father, that we will, despite our squirming and fussing, ultimately be no match for His patient hand, that we will finally give in and eat?
I’m not sure. But I do know He will never stop trying.
[1] I recall your brother being somewhere else each time, but hey, I can’t exactly get rid of him every time you need to eat.
Beautiful.