Bottled Up. Suzanne Barston
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seem entirely irrelevant to anyone other than you and your gestating fetus, and breastfeeding tops that list. One of my clients asked me in the midst of an eight-person meeting if I had started “toughening up my nipples” in preparation for Leo’s arrival. At the time, I was just uncomfortable with her talking about my nipple activities in front of professional colleagues, but she also made the assumption that I was planning on nursing. As if it was unthinkable that I would be doing anything but.
There was also subtle pressure—the random older woman in a restaurant who asked me if I would be breastfeeding; the infant care classes where formula feeding wasn’t even mentioned; the nurse on my maternity ward tour who warned us that we’d be woken up every two hours to nurse, and asked for a show of hands: how many in the group were going to be breastfeeding? (Needless to say, all hands shot up.)
These experiences weren’t particularly unique, or even that bad in the scheme of things. Jennifer, who teaches at a prestigious Los Angeles private school, was told by a student’s dad that he “wouldn’t respect her as a woman” if she didn’t breastfeed. (He delivered this gem during a parent-teacher conference, no less. Bet that didn’t help his kid’s grade.) Nurse practitioner Shannon endured months of chastising from her peers when she confessed she was planning on formula feeding. “I did not expect to get the flak I did from other medical professionals—none of which are my personal physicians—about my decision not to breastfeed,” she lamented. “I was told multiple times, ‘Oh, why don’t you just pump for a month?’ ‘Why won’t you breastfeed, it’s the BEST thing you can do for your baby,’ ‘It’s such a great bonding experience,’ ‘You will regret not doing this.’ ”
I spoke with a young mother who finally decided to “swallow [her] pride” and enroll in WIC (the Women, Infants, and Children program, a government assistance plan the mission of which is to insure proper nutrition for low-income mothers and their children) when she was six months pregnant. “During intake I got asked if I was going to breastfeed. I said no, that as a sexual abuse survivor I was uncomfortable with it. … [M]y breasts had been used in my attack, and to do so was to feel like I was molesting my child, to feel like I had no control over my body as it was being used in service for others. The [licensed practical nurse] told me that if I really loved my baby, I would breastfeed.” She recounts that several of her WIC counselors told her that “they ‘knew’ lots of women who had been raped who breastfed,” and suggested that since she had obviously had sex to conceive a child since being attacked, she was sufficiently healed to nurse that child.
Most of the women I’ve interviewed cite their own previous judgment of formula feeders as an ironic reminder of how powerful the “good mothers breastfeed” meme really is. “I studied the breastfeeding failures of friends and family. … I assumed they were lazy. I assumed they didn’t try hard enough. I believed everything I read in breastfeeding literature as though it were the gospel truth,” says Kelli, whose son was ultimately unable to latch, causing jaundice and insufficient weight gain. A mom of twins had felt sure that “ ‘good’ mothers breastfed their children,” and admits she “bask[ed] in the praise I received when someone asked if I was planning on breastfeeding and I answered ‘of course.’ ”
“It’s almost like with something like circumcision, or ‘crying it out,’ there’s an understanding that multiple views are okay, but with breastfeeding we have reached a point where alternative viewpoints are considered uneducated or wrong,” says Stephanie Knaak, a Canadian sociologist who has written several well-regarded papers on the infant feeding discourse. “There’s a whole stream of thought that breastfeeding is natural and it’s for bonding and it’s this kind of wonderful mother-child relationship thing, and so it’s good in that way. And there’s the medical sciences aspect—we know that breastfeeding is very strong from a nutritional standpoint, and it protects your baby, it makes them healthy, and it makes mothers healthy. And then you’ve also got a public shifting of views about motherhood—that a good mother is the mother who does everything for her child. … [M]othering is supposed to be labor intensive, self sacrificing. Breastfeeding fits in very nicely with that idea. All of these different forces culminate into the same thing, and it makes it a particularly intense pressure. There aren’t really any forces that speak against it.”33
On the many lactivist blogs and Twitter feeds I followed while researching this book, the words of Eleanor Roosevelt would be thrown around like paper airplanes in a fourth-grade classroom—inappropriately and haphazardly, and often hitting unintended targets. Although Eleanor’s original verbiage involved inferiority, not guilt, the (mis)quote most often used when the subject of guilt and infant feeding arises is that “nobody can make you feel guilty without your consent.” In context, this quote often coincided with the argument that women feel guilty only because they know they have something to feel guilty about. In other words, it’s a good thing they feel guilty about how they are feeding their kids because they have royally mucked it up.
What the people who use this argument don’t seem to understand is that the most powerful motivator for breastfeeding is not peer pressure, fear, obedience, or any other “quiet coercion.” It’s desire. The desire to be everything your coveted child needs; the desire to have that indelible bond with the human you created; the desire to provide sustenance from your very being. And when for whatever reason this desire goes unfulfilled, the resulting emotion is often guilt—not because we feel like we did something wrong but because we feel there must be something fundamentally, awfully wrong with us, to be unable to perform this most basic of human functions.
In one oddly worded article, Dr. Jack Newman, author of The Ultimate Breastfeeding Book of Answers, writes that the concept of mother guilt is just another ploy of breastfeeding detractors; that we should not stop promoting breastfeeding just because it makes women feel guilty. “Who does feel guilty about breastfeeding?” he asks. “Not the women who make an informed choice to bottle feed. It is the woman who wanted to breastfeed, who tried, but was unable to breastfeed who feels guilt.”34
Awkward phrasing and intention aside, those last two sentences are the truest things I’ve ever read about breastfeeding. I didn’t find this article until I was six months postpartum, but I wish I had come across it during those rosy, innocent prenatal wanderings through the World Wide Web. Maybe it would’ve given me some warning about what was to come.
• • •
I had been writing for a popular health and wellness website prior to my son’s birth, and the founder of the site had lent me a few books on the psychology of newborns. One had described how, if an infant is placed on the mother’s belly immediately after birth, he will instinctively claw his way up to her breasts and latch right on. It seemed so primal, this preprogrammed knowledge, an instinct to both forage for food and seek comfort. I couldn’t wait to see it in action.
To my obvious pleasure and relief, my first moments with my son Leo went exactly as the book described. His tiny movements up the outside of my stomach were like reverse echoes of what he had been doing on the inside for the past months. Familiar but hyperreal; I couldn’t reconcile this small being on my skin as the same creature that had been cohabitating with my internal organs. It was disconcerting. His big eyes looked up at me as he pushed his damp head into my rib cage; the nurse shoved him roughly up toward my nipple and he found his target. It was exhilarating. The books hadn’t lied. The nurse told me Leo was a nursing pro, that we were doing just great. I believed her.
Later, I was wheeled up to the maternity ward. There was a bassinet in our room with a baby in it. My long-awaited, desperately wanted, beautiful, healthy baby. He was a good baby—quiet, alert, an “old soul,” according to my father.
He was perfect. For about three hours.
And then he got hungry.
TWO
Lactation Failures
There’s a startling disjunction between how breastfeeding is presented—as a natural, instinctual act that is seldom sullied by physical or emotional impediments—and the actual lived reality of most early breastfeeding experiences. This has created a breeding