This weekend I babysat for my 6 mo. old godson. I took him and my 2 children to the animal park. We were having lunch and I was giving him a bottle. A woman came up to me and said, "You know, it would be much better for him to be breastfed. It makes me so sad when I see a child being given formula. It makes me think he is unloved."
I was flabergasted. What on earth would make someone confront someone else like that? If I had been his mother, what good could come of it? This isn't a 6-day or even 6-week old child where a mother could, maybe, with real motivation, reverse a decision not to breastfeed. This child is already 25 pounds (one of the reasons that he isn't breastfed, but that really doesn't matter), so clearly not a new baby. All this would accomplish was making a mother feel guilty.
But, of course, I wasn't the baby's mother, so this was doubly out of left field. I didn't know what to say - "I know" seemed like stabbing my best friend in the back, especially since I know how much trouble she went through to try to BF. "It isn't my child" was true but didn't really express what I was feeling at the moment. "Mind you own business" was closer to what I wanted to say, except that I didn't want to open my mouth because I was afraid a few other words that I didn't want my kids to hear would slip out. In the end I settled on "You don't know the whole story" and then turned away from her.
So, aside from the need to express my outrage at this somewhere, I guess the moral of the story is, don't confront someone unless you actually know the whole story.
I was flabergasted. What on earth would make someone confront someone else like that? If I had been his mother, what good could come of it? This isn't a 6-day or even 6-week old child where a mother could, maybe, with real motivation, reverse a decision not to breastfeed. This child is already 25 pounds (one of the reasons that he isn't breastfed, but that really doesn't matter), so clearly not a new baby. All this would accomplish was making a mother feel guilty.
But, of course, I wasn't the baby's mother, so this was doubly out of left field. I didn't know what to say - "I know" seemed like stabbing my best friend in the back, especially since I know how much trouble she went through to try to BF. "It isn't my child" was true but didn't really express what I was feeling at the moment. "Mind you own business" was closer to what I wanted to say, except that I didn't want to open my mouth because I was afraid a few other words that I didn't want my kids to hear would slip out. In the end I settled on "You don't know the whole story" and then turned away from her.
So, aside from the need to express my outrage at this somewhere, I guess the moral of the story is, don't confront someone unless you actually know the whole story.
: I think your response was a good one.
