Adventures in Green Living: April 2012

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Motherhood: In My Gut

I'm fascinated by the gut. If I could choose one thing to go back to school and learn everything about, it would be all about the gut.

You know the saying, 'I've got a gut feeling.' Well I never really thought about it in depth until recently. They call the gut our second brain due to the information actually gathered there and sent out about our health to our body. The health of our gut influences our mood, for one. It makes me wonder about how our Standard American Diet has impacted our gut- perhaps leading to such high use of antidepressants?

Today I had a little convo with another mother about their journey in becoming gluten free. Her child exhibits the same symptoms my son did/does. I mentioned how this past weekend, after being gluten and dairy free for several weeks, I cheated. With pizza. Pizza has been one of the big things we've been missing and one of the first things I planned to eat when my family wasn't around. That same night I woke up with some of the most painful cramps I've ever had in my life. If I had my head about me, may have helped to use my Hypnobabies training to cope! It was that bad.

And it occurred to me, this must be how my son feels when eating gluten and dairy. All of those times he cried about his belly hurting. The awful diapers. The sleepless nights.

The horrendous sleep deprivation.

The constant suggestions by family to let him cry it out so as to learn to sleep through the night.

No, this isn't another post on why not to CIO.

It's a post on why to follow your own gut as a mother.

You see I knew all along something wasn't right. That it wasn't just a matter of him learning to sleep on his own or through the night. I could hear it in his cry. It was frustrating to be told repeatedly just to leave him alone. Or offers of taking him for a week so he could be 'taught'. This may also tie into why now it's so hard for me to feel comfortable in letting him go anywhere for long; even with family, it's difficult to trust they will be paying attention to what's going on under the surface of what may appear to be typical toddler behavior.

Despite having the gut knowledge that they were wrong, after a while I wanted them to be right. I was so exhausted. And I did try it. Twice. Once, he had a bug in his pajamas. The other time, he had an awful dirty diaper that you couldn't smell until it was removed. No, I did not let him cry himself to sleep either time, but still let him cry when I felt something was wrong because someone was there telling me to(let him).

After that I said no more. But it wasn't until today that I put two and two together, to understand and bring some closure to the sleep(less) experience we barely survived. I still don't know what propelled us to this point. How an otherwise healthy baby can be breastfed for 17 months, have a fairly healthy diet and still end up with these digestive issues. Was it the IV antibiotics we had during his birth? The one antibiotic dose he had before we discovered his penicillin allergy? Or just genetics? I didn't know then what I know now about probiotic use, so I'm not sure. Maybe it's a combination of several things.

As I get deeper into Motherhood with all of it's challenges(Oh baby, are there many!), I'm gradually exploring my own personal power to discern what's best for my children, regardless what society or my family deems normal. If this knowledge was there all along, what else am I capable of?

Have you had a similar experience?