My Breasts My Choice

 Originally published 10-23-08

Hours after his birth, my perfect 8 pound 11 ounce son turned tomato red and wailed in anguish.  Try as I might, I couldn’t latch him onto my breast.  My partner, Kira, held him to me as I pulled and stretched and did my best to push my nipple into his mouth. 

What should have been a natural act was a disaster.  I was already a failure as a mom, unable to comfort my starving, yowling newborn.  Kira, steadfast by my side through 96 hours of labor, ending in an emergency C-section, leaned in to help.  “Maybe you should sit up more.” Overwhelmed and at my physical and mental limits, I returned her compassion and kindness with, “Did you brush your teeth?”

We laugh about it now, but little did I know that wearing and frustrating first attempt at nursing was just the beginning of what would be the most physically challenging and socially and politically charged aspects of motherhood. 

Surprisingly, some of the most conservative views expressed to me about breastfeeding were from lesbian friends, who I expected would be more liberated about breasts.  One inferred that a mother she knew was perverted for wanting to induce breastfeeding with an adopted infant.  Another said that only the biological mother of a same-sex couple should offer her breast to comfort their child. 

I began to hear these strong opinions about the personal topic of nursing soon after I got pregnant.  Friends, and people I barely knew, would ask, “You’re going to breastfeed, aren’t you?”  Yes, I was, but whose business was it? 

In my mom’s day, women got a prescription for baby formula and a shot to dry up their milk before they left the hospital.  Science was better than nature, they were told, and only lower-class women who couldn’t afford formula had to breastfeed.  To some it was even taboo — certainly in public — to have a baby suckle your breast.

Today, there is no debate, even among the formula makers, that mother’s milk is nutritionally best for a child, but similar to the time when my mother was birthing babies, people still make judgments about nursing. 

Now if a woman doesn’t breastfeed, she’s selfish, vain and lazy.  She cares more about perky breasts and the convenience of formula than the wellbeing of her child.  My Nazi Lamaze instructor, in between riffs on the (deserved) evils of C-sections, decried how hospitals and doctors are pushers for the formula companies because they give out samples.  She summed up that women who failed at breastfeeding “didn’t really try hard enough.”  

Not only do real women breastfeed, but they must do it without hiding.  One lactation coach – I chuckled too at first, imagining her in coach’s shorts and a whistle around her neck – scoffed at my Bebe Au Lait designer nursing cover and told me how she and other members of the League – La Leche that is – staged a “feed-in,” where breastfeeding moms whipped out their boobs on cue at the Grove in Beverly Hills and began feeding their infants.  “People must learn that the breast is nutritive, not sexual,” she said.  

Guess my coach would not have been amused by my straight male co-worker’s reaction when I showed him my “horns” – the suction cups on my breast pump.  “I could do better than that,” he winked.

Still, for all the progressive attitudes about nursing, I encountered a few that were not so enlightened.  When I explained to a gay friend that I planned to nurse for one year, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, he suggested that maybe I needed to “feel loved” by someone and my nursing baby served that purpose, and perhaps I was  “obsessed” with breastfeeding to do it for so long. 

While some opinions are utterly (pseudo pun intended) ignorant, I admit that even as a firm supporter of breastfeeding I’m still a prude when it comes to the practice of friends nursing each other’s babies to make them “milk brothers,” or the concept of “extreme breastfeeding,” such as exhibited by the popular YouTube video featuring a British woman whose eight-year-old daughter still breastfeeds. 

The rule that guides most nursing moms is, “They are too old to breastfeed when they can ask for it,” such as my friend’s two-year old who pleaded at a birthday party, “Please, just a little to go with my cake.”

Ideally, and literally, breastfeeding is the most nurturing thing a woman can do for a child, but for some reason its makes a lot of us uncomfortable.  Every time I close my office door at work and put out my “Please do not disturb” sign so that I can pump, I feel a little awkward.  I hide my plastic storage bottles in a non-descript black cooler in the back of the office fridge, and I notice nobody puts their lunch beside it.  Silly, but we are all a little embarrassed about it.

As if the social and psychological aspects weren’t enough to cope with, there’s the physical side.  The start-up problems of – cringe and wince – cracked and bleeding nipples.  The upside – and the downside – that after prolonged nursing the sensitivity usually goes away.  So does the leaking and feeling of painfully full and hard breasts, which give way to – cringe and wince – softer and sagging breasts.  Lastly, there’s the strict schedule of pumping in order to maintain your milk supply and prevent clogged ducts and nasty infections.  Not to mention the time it takes to set up, pump and then clean the pump parts and bottles.

The truth is I nearly gave up on nursing at least a half dozen occasions.  It took all the fortitude I could muster at times, especially after months of sleep deprivation due to multiple on-demand all-nighter nursing sessions, to do something I thought would come easily.  I now appreciate the many reasons women choose to nurse or not.  Despite the all the busy bodies asserting that “breast is best;” that’s only if it is best for the owner of the breast.