Don’t mess with the mama

“Eh… your kid is a bit of a fatso isn’t he?”

This, my dear friends, is what I heard from the public health nurse this morning at our check up. I mean, she didn’t call him a fatso, but she did caution me not to allow my SEVEN MONTH OLD to eat to much because he is clearly on the road to obesity. COME ON PEOPLE.

Now, I am a rule follower. I am scared of authority figures. If a person tells me they are a doctor/teacher/nurse/garda/boss of any kind, I automatically defer to them. It’s a weak quality that I hate about myself, but it’s how I’m built. Today was different. Today I felt the red hot flame of the mamma tigress inside come out to play and it felt GOOD. The fact that this woman had the cheek to question me and my child’s nutritional wellness created such a fury in me that all prior fear of authority was wiped out in an instant.

I mean, she told me that my kid’s ‘weight issues’ were probably down to the packets of food I feed him. I have never fed him a packet in his life (not that there’s anything wrong with them – there are some DELISH ones out there, helloooo Ellas Kitchen!) but the fact that she assumed that’s what I feed him made me FURIOUS. FUUUURRRIIIIOOOOOOOUSSS. And for the first time in my life I looked at this woman in authority and thought feck YOU and your judgy ways. And I argued with her (in reason), which I was very proud of.

You see, it’s bloody hard juggling life with a kid. And the fact that I had been up at the crack of dawn scrubbing the little fella in a bath so that he wouldn’t smell of wee in the nurses office, and defrosting his meals for the day, and putting on a wash, and emptying the dishwasher, and squeezing in some freelance work, and giving my fella a hug before work and REMEMBERING TO BRUSH MY BLOODY HAIR that I thought, who the HELL are you to be commenting on me or my child or our family.

The fact that she was making comments about a baby’s weight made me sad and angry in equal measure – when did a chubby baby stop being the sign of a healthy baby? There are skinny babies DYING all over the world! And winter is coming! For God’s sake. I could actually bleat on about this for days. DAYS. But I won’t – I think you get how I feel.

Anyway, the upside of this experience is that the little fella and I realised that we don’t take crap from anyone on our team. When it’s the two of us against the world there is nothing that we can’t face – and when it comes to the little fella, I hope he knows that no matter what happens in his life, and no matter who makes snarky comments, all he needs to think is help me Mamma, and I will appear in an embarrassing Ma outfit, ready to harness the tigress within and protect my kid with all that I have.