For me the best part of rearing three children was breastfeeding them. After the positive pregnancy test I decide to experience procreation fully--breastfeeding, staying home to raise them, reading picture books over and over, listening to 85 versus of favorite songs repeated 85 times from the back seat of the car--you get what I mean. The total immersion belief: if you are going to eat corn on the cob why not experience it from seed to composting?
Can you see this magnet? It's a repro of a Picasso. Lovely. Hold on, this is going somewhere.
Recently Selma Hayek has received flak because while visiting Africa she breastfed a starving, emaciated infant. Evidentally she was motivated by the plight of the infant and by the fact that she had left her nursing daughter at home and her breasts were engorged. Two problems solved: hungry infant and engorged (not unpainful) breasts. So what is the big deal? Why the out cry? Concerned people write and talk about the plight of Africa and want to send billions of aid money and troops to straighten out the situation and then criticize a woman for helping one infant (and his mother who was probably stressed from not being able to feed her son), one soul, in the way that she was uniquely, in the moment, able to do so.
By the way people, nursing moms in the US cross-breastfeed (have I made up a new word?) all the time. I did. My husband's aunt breastfed her nephew. A friend did. And many more.
Get real.
No comments:
Post a Comment