We also discussed this with T.

The weird thing is - my late mother, who had her fair share of very unusual and unexplainable ideas, squeezed my nose when I was an infant, on a regular basis, many times a day.

Seems totally bizarre.

She was not abusing me (she told me this story many times being basically proud of herself).

She believed that in order to get me to latch on the breast faster, she needed to squeeze my nose so that I would open my mouth to breathe, and then she would stick her nipple into my open mouth.

It is so weird that she would think that! I mean, I just cannot comprehend what was going through her mind - surely evolution must have ensured perpetuation of the species in a more robust way! Surely babies would be drawn to open their mouths and suck on the nipple just because they are hungry and the nipple smells so nice. To think that somehow babies do not arrive with a built-in mechanism that makes them want to nurse is just beyond bizarre.

But my mother thought that she invented a cool trick, and practiced it many times a day, routinely, in the beginning of each feeding (for 11 months).

So the T and I think that some of my reactions might stem from what must have been some kind of a primal fright - I could not breathe! To the extent that anxiety is a type of fear, a baby who is made to fear losing her ability to breathe (=live) many times a day would be expected to develop some anxiety later in life. It is kind of psychoanalytic a bit, as explanations go, but it makes sense to me.

The funniest thing... my mother also would tell me (she told me stories about my babyhood when trying to get me to eat when I was a child) that she was paranoid about my stopping to breathe, and would check on me in the crib often to make sure I was still breathing.

It is unfortunate that she died in 2008 and I cannot ask her this question:

"Mother, if you were so scared that I would just stop breathing on my own, why did YOU make it harder for me to breathe many times a day? It does not make any sense! If you were worried that your daughter might stop breathing, you should have at least not contributed to her difficulties with breathing."