“The shifts over time in the notion of what children need reveal many things,” writes Linda M. Blum in At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States. “Pronouncements about ‘children’s needs’ might express a particular group’s interests for power and economic gain, as well as humanitarian concerns or historically provoked anxieties.”
I marked up page after page of At the Breast, scribbling breathless agreement in the margins. Here’s another passage, from the introduction:
“[Working-class] women’s stories, put in the context of the hard, distressing circumstances they faced, reveal the lie of the ‘natural.’ ‘Natural’ usually signals what is good, authentic, and untainted by social or human manipulation, and thus ‘natural’ motherhood seems to belong outside the public realm. Public efforts to promote breastfeeding and supervise mothers confuse this distinction, as they draw on it, presenting a motherhood that requires no significant resources, that can be accomplished privately under any circumstances.”
Blum’s book was published in 1999 but feels surprisingly on point in 2018. She writes of the social status “intensive mothering” garners for white, middle-class women, of the forces exerted by capitalism in a period when young people no longer expect to earn more than their parents did, of the hollow freedoms presented by popular culture’s version of “choice feminism,” of how family-friendliness in the workplace comes to be equated with breast pumping (and how mother’s milk is fetishized as a result).
I think of the birthing and breastfeeding classes I took during my first pregnancy—the dire warnings about how formula irreparably damages the gut microbiome (on a handout with the savage title “Just One Bottle Won’t Hurt??”), how breastfeeding can lessen the risk of everything from allergies to diabetes to SIDS, how breast milk is perfect and magical and, of course, free. Everywhere the assumption, too fundamental to bear examination, that almost any benefit to a baby, however slight or unlikely, was worth almost any demand to the mother, however great.
I think of how my son did not latch on well for the first few days of his life. Armed with advice from lactation consultants and my breastfeeding class, I brought him to the breast frequently, held him “skin to skin” on my chest, expressed colostrum onto his lips—and he slept contentedly through it all, rarely making the “minimum” eight feedings a day recommended by my lactation consultant, much less the twelve she said would be “great.” At his first pediatrician appointment he had lost a little too much weight. I redoubled my efforts to awaken him for regular feedings, undressing him and swabbing his face with a cool washcloth, weeping in desperate frustration as he slept on. One night, exhausted by a full day of labor followed by a week of fractured sleep, I neglected to set an alarm and woke in a blind panic four hours later, sure he would have slipped out of life while my guard was down. It took months to recover emotionally from the strain of those weeks—if in fact I have. And yet in the estimation of his doctor, and mine, I succeeded unequivocally. Eventually, under my watchful eye, he gained weight. And all without a drop of formula.
Just a few weeks ago, at a group prenatal appointment for this pregnancy, my midwife referred lightly, almost laughingly, to mothers who continue waking their babies to nurse even after those first days or weeks have passed, when nobody has told them to stop. “Moms take us so literally! They’re real perfectionists.” As if our anxiety were a quirk, an irrational foible. As if she had nothing to do with it.
Reading a book like At the Breast feels like being shown the matrix—and then told there is nothing outside it. The baby will soon arrive; he must be fed. Hour after hour, day after day, the decision must be made, the action taken. Understanding the aggression and hypocrisy underlying the dominant discourses of mothering does not make its demands any less urgent.
So now that your eyes are open, now that your heart is full of rage, how do you move forward? What do you choose to build, when all you want to do is burn shit down?
(Continued.)