It was the angry comments following a Chez Miscarriage post that inspired my first post about breastfeeding, and the angry comments following a more recent entry are the impetus for this one. Specifically, it's the nazi epithet that gets me going.
It seems like any mention of breastfeeding in non-crunchy quarters evokes cries of "Nazis!" within about 20 seconds. And the part of me with an interest in semantics can appreciate that the word has more than one definition these days, that it has come to mean "person who is irritatingly overbearing" rather than "overseer of genocide." But most of me, having poured heart and soul (not to mention time and energy and money and creativity) into helping mothers breastfeed, flinches every time. Which means a lot of flinching.
There were some really good comments in response to the Chez Miscarriage post, but it bothers me to think of people reading misinformation in the first 65 comments and not wading through the remaining hundred to find out more. So I'm posting here instead on how much I hate to read about boob nazis. Or nipple nazis. Or La Leche nazis.
La Leche League takes a lot of heat for being radical and militant. You'd think there were billboards around the Schaumburg office trumpeting, Never give your baby a bottle! Nurse until age 6! But LLL is not radical on breastfeeding. It was radical in the 1950s, when exclusive breastfeeding for six months was widely thought to be as unworkable an idea as desegregated schools. That was fifty years ago. Times have changed.
LLL gets occasional criticism from some breastfeeding activists because its positions are fairly moderate. LLL says, "Breast milk is the superior infant food" -- not, as many lactivists prefer, "human milk is the norm for human babies and formula is inferior." On weaning, LLL says, "Ideally, the breastfeeding relationship will continue until the baby outgrows the need." Not the want, but the need; not the child, but the baby. There's no mention of age, and right off the bat they acknowledge that it's an ideal. That's a pretty sharp contrast to the popular stereotype of "do it for five years and we'll give you a gold watch." (LLL's views on a baby's need for the mother's presence may seem radical today; ironically, that was probably pretty mainstream in the 1950s.)
One Chez Miscarriage commenter was particularly angry about "those commercials LLL made with pregnant women riding mechanical bulls," the ones, supposedly, that the AAP wouldn't endorse because they were too far out there. Three things in response to that: first, even if LLL had the budget to make slick commercials for national broadcast, they wouldn't use risk-oriented language; that's just not their angle. Those commercials were made by the Ad Council in consultation with the US Department of Health and Human Services, based on research into approaches that would motivate people to see breastfeeding as important and not just as a nice perk to squeeze in between Kindermusik and baby massage classes. Second, the AAP's president raised questions about the ad campaign after formula company lobbying, over the protests of the AAP's breastfeeding division. You can get the scoop here, but the nutshell version is that it had more to do with formula company execs saying to the AAP, "Hey, remember that chunk of cash we gave you last year?" than with AAP higher-ups realizing, "Oh, yeah, the confidence level in this study was only p=.005, not p=.001."
And third: why is there so little discussion about the message of the commercials and so much focus on the evils of stating that babies should breastfeed? A whole lot of American women are obsessing about their pregnancies, feeling guilty about tiny risks. Folic acid supplementation affects less than one baby in a thousand, and yet how many women freak out about getting pregnant when they're not taking it? There was a discussion at Leery Polyp about risk-taking in pregnancy in which soft cheese came up repeatedly. But pasteurized cheese, soft or not, is simply not a vector for listeria. Sane women in this country are religiously avoiding a substance that poses no risk to their unborn babies, and getting angry about hearing that formula does present quantifiable risks to children after they're born.
Raising children involves risk, make no mistake. It was risky for me to let my 5yo climb trees on Tuesday, risky for me not to insist that he get out his helmet today to ride his bike. It's risky to put him in the bathtub, for Pete's sake. One of the painful bits of motherhood is weighing the risks. Not everyone is going to be able to breastfeed; some mothers who are able to do so will decide it's not for them. But can't we have an honest conversation about what's at stake without calling anybody a nazi?
When I am not busy flinching, I am always curious about what has happened when women feel slammed about feeding choices. I have met a couple of alarming LLL Leaders, and I'm sure they do some damage. But by and large the LLL Leaders I know are compassionate women working hard to support mothers. They are volunteers with families, and if you call them when a toddler has just emptied the mustard jar all over the dog you may get a garbled answer to your question. Probably, though, you will get reasonably current information presented with best wishes for you and your baby. For free. How many women can say that after they contact their doctors' offices with breastfeeding questions?
Sometimes I wonder if LLL and its Leaders are catching the flak for statements made by mothers who come to meetings and say outrageous things. If you go to a meeting for the first time and the Leader says calm, temperate things while a visiting mom complains that her in-laws wouldn't eat placenta stew or breastmilk yogurt, what story are you going to tell about the day you checked out LLL? And yet it is virtually certain that the Leader, LLL's actual representative at the meeting, is as startled as anyone, and is scrambling to find a good response that gets the meeting back on course without leaving the mother feeling more frustrated. (Perhaps, "My! That menu gives new meaning to 'made by mom'!")
The thing about running open support groups is that you attract people who need support -- sometimes more support than you can give them. I've been leading groups of various kinds since college, and it's often a struggle to juggle everybody's needs. I used to lead a Bible study attended by a high-functioning autistic man. Of course I wanted him to feel safe and welcome, but some nights I wanted to pick up my Bible and whack him on the head with it when he went off on yet another weird tangent. (The sword of the Spirit becomes a blunt instrument. Charity, thy name is not Jamie.) Recently I was talking with a friend who is an LLL Leader about a frustrating situation she is dealing with in the group she leads, a mom who means well but who can be terribly tactless. How many mothers have left meetings feeling affronted by this woman's comments? At what point does the Leader say, "Stay home, please," to the problem mom who has not responded to requests that she tone it down? It's awfully hard to gauge.
LLL's focus is mother-to-mother support. Sometimes that's a magical thing -- I've seen meetings where a teary-eyed mother comes in saying, "I just can't do this for one more day," and the woman next to her says, "Oh, I felt that way in January -- what's going on?" Another woman says, "Have you tried...?" and a fourth says, "Hey, this is what worked for us." As the meeting is ending a fifth woman says, "Want to come over for coffee?" and a year later the formerly teary-eyed mother is there with her nursing toddler, saying, "You know, the first weeks were miserable for us too but it got so much better." And that's how it's meant to be, I think, with more experienced mothers saying to newer mothers, "Yes, it can be awful, so let us help you through the rough spots." But much of mother-to-mother support depends on the mix of mothers doing the supporting. It's not always magical. Or maybe it's magical in a Wicked-Witch-of-the-Breast-complete-with-evil-flying-monkeys kind of way and not in a Glinda-the-Good-you-know-the-way-home-Dorothy kind of way.
I have some sympathy for the absolutists because there is a comforting (if misguided) certainty in absolutism and motherhood is the most terrifyingly uncertain thing I have ever done. I would love to find a secret formula (no pun intended) to ensure (ha!) that my kids will grow up to be holy, happy, healthy men who send flowers to their mother on her birthday. (Ivory roses, please. And on my gravestone, boys, how about "The Most Extraordinary Mother Anyone Could Hope To Have"?) But even now, with my 8yo, sometimes I want to say, "You know, I cleaned your butt without complaining for four long years, pal, so can you cut me some slack already?" When he was a baby, I wanted to be the über-Sears mom because I wanted him to feel loved and secure. What a rude shock it was to see that I could carry him in the sling until my pectoral girdle had permanent slingprints, only to watch him knock over smaller children with glee as soon as I set him down. (At a La Leche League meeting, no less.) How sharper than a serpent's tooth indeed. Hadn't he read the part about how he was supposed to be loving and gentle because of my loving gentle mothering?
And I know this is the easy part. The stakes get higher. A woman I know is struggling to deal with a drug-addicted daughter and it is wrenching just watching from the sidelines. I can't even let myself think about all the things that might go wrong in my children's lives or I would just have to flop forlornly on the floor, felled by those fearsome feelings of futility. My firstborn mostly beat the absolutism out of me with his will of iron and his struggles with aggression, but I can easily imagine that if I had had a docile, compliant child instead I would have given the credit to the Sears plan. Or the Weissbluth plan or the Ezzo plan, if I had stumbled across them first. It would be nice to have a Plan to take the edge off the biting uncertainty that is raising children.
I'm tempted to wonder why it's rare to read complaints about "sleep nazis" or "schedule nazis," given that there are a whole lot more "thou shalt nots" coming from Gary Ezzo or Tracy Hogg than there are to be found in most of the books I own on breastfeeding. But it would be a counterproductive wondering (more namecalling is not the desired outcome), so I won't even start. My point here is simple, really: motherhood is a tough gig. No matter what choices you make in your fervent hope to do the right thing by your kids, you leave some people scratching their heads and others pointing their fingers. It isn't easy for any of us. Can't we be kind to each other?
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