Today I was talking to a woman who had her first baby about a month ago. She's already back in the office, trying to make breastfeeding work. "That must be tough," I said. "Yeah," she answered, "I feel like a dairy cow."
I've heard this a lot: newly lactating women feel like farm animals. It speaks to me of a culture that is really confused about lactation. Nobody ever says, "I feel like a barnyard animal because I'm gestating." We see pregnancy as normal; this is not, after all, Brave New World. We see lactation, however, as optional. Weird. Degrading.
I have to tell you guys: I had no idea I had been living in a bubble (a breastfeeding-is-perfectly-normal bubble) until last summer. That infamous Time magazine cover coincided with my summer class, in which I had my first exposure to dozens of young women sharing their unedited thoughts about breastfeeding. And what did they think? For the most part, they thought it was weird. Gross. Potentially damaging.
In December I will have been nursing one child or another, or sometimes two of them, for 16 years. (I'd put the odds of Stella weaning before her birthday at about the same as the odds of her reading independently before her birthday. It's not out of the question, but I'd be pretty surprised.) I never post about it these days, though, in part because the public reaction to the Time cover, with the 3yo nursing while standing up, was so shrill. Freakazoid! Pervert!
Stella, who is 3, is nursing standing up as I type this with my freakazoid hands; I am thinking about the sea change in my attitude. I had to pump for Alex because he was on the ventilator, and I remember feeling slightly horrified by the milk spraying out of my breasts. I said, "Hey! It works!" I thought, "Yikes! That's weird!"
It's been a long time since nursing seemed weird to me. Nursing means I have a ready supply of the highly nutritious food that my pickiest toddlers have consumed happily, with no worries about safe storage or spoilage. I have benefited immensely from this potent tool for comforting my kids during the tumultuous transition from baby to big kid. There is an ineffable rightness in the reality that I can build their brains and strengthen their immune systems at the same time that I am building bodies and soothing spirits. It's providential, not perverted.
It's a shame that cultural weirdness about nursing turns it into something women think they have to hide. Last week Stella asked for Elwood when she woke up in the small hours. This is exceedingly rare and I was happy to send him into her room while I slept alone in our big bed. In the morning she said, "I'm so happy to see you, Mama. I don't like Daddy's breasts." It still cracks me up, but it seems a little less share-able than it did before the Time craziness.
Even women who are determined to nurse will often talk about it as a duty they're eager to shed. They want their bodies back, they say. Here in my sixteenth year of lactation that idea is pretty foreign to me. I'm not in a hurry to have my lap back -- I will be a little sad when no one wants to cuddle and read Frances or Curious George or St. George and the Dragon any more. I'm not in a hurry to have my arms back -- a world where nobody wants to be scooped up and hugged will be a sadder world. And although I expect I'll have my breasts back sometime in the next year, I'm not counting down the days. I have been a nursing mother for more than three-eighths of my life. It's not, as you may have deduced, an identity I'm in a hurry to shed.
When I nurse my children I don't feel like a cow. I feel like a woman. I feel like a human. I feel like a mother.
As always, this post is only my own musings about the cultural weirdness that complicates lactation for many women. I'm passing no judgments on women who feel like farm animals while nursing. I've been there; I'm somewhere else now. This post is about the view from where I'm standing. It's fine with me if you're standing somewhere else.
Recent Comments