weaning

i breast fed my kid for the first 14 months of her life. we also supplemented with soy formula. this is because the pumping machines did not work for me. often when i would tell this to other breastfeeding mamas they would say algo asi: oh yeah i had to pump alot at first…then they would tell me about pumping for 15 minutes to get 8 oz of milk…this never happened to me. i had three pumping machines (a handheld, a single breast, and a double breast) never happened. i cried. i felt inadequate.

my midwife had said giving my baby formula was giving her poison. ok she didnt say this, she screeched it. when i asked her what was in the formula that made it poison, she said: just read the ingredient list. me: yes, but what exactly are the poisonous ingredients. she shrugs me off. she rarely had good specific knowledge about her midwifery craft. she usually got annoyed when i asked her for details. she regarded it as a strange quirk that i expected her to know facts, figures, cogent analysis. this was not a good sign.

anyways, i got over the fact that i couldnt pump, breastfed as much as i could, and my daughter drank soy formula. i figured that she was probably going to get poisoned a million different ways by the urban air, various cleaning products, chemical and dyes in clothing, etc. so purity was out of the window. and i was not going to dedicate my life to creating the pure child.

furthermore, she broke her leg when she was 2 months old, and was in a cast and body sling for a month, thus ending my baby moon. all i could do was breastfeed her and give her pain killers and cry and pray.
the poisons let her sleep at night.

when we were in mexico a friend asked how did i feel about letting someone else breast feed my kid. and i stumbled in my response. breastfeeding is a private/public intimate act. i breastfeed in public. she and i had breastfed side by side, my lil one squirmy and playful, hers, quiet and sleepy, and yet it felt strange to think of her breastfeeding my child. i had read about disease being passed through the breast milk. i felt undecided about the matter. and undecided about the idea of breastfeeding some one else’s kid. was it a violation of space? a violation of food?

i think, i would want someone to ask permission (if they could) first. but in an emergency do what you have to do.

cuz actually not alot (other than breastmilk) passes through breastmilk. and tandem breastfeeding (in trust) could make some mamas lives easier. after she asked me that, and i did some research, read some stories, i felt like i could let go of ‘possessing’ my babe a bit more.

i loved breastfeeding in mexico. sitting a cafe, drinking coffee, watching youtube, and nursing. other than people giving me little smiles and nods as they passed by, no one seemed to give me more attention when i was feeding her. other than the internationals. ah, the gringos. who thought it was so ‘unusual’ what i was doing. god, i could have slapped them. and their non-baby-having, i am a traveler-look-at-my-dirty-clothes, stop-and stare-at-the-breeder, asswipe-like attitudes.

i started to wean her…well, she started to wean herself…well, it was a back and forth process, when she started walking. her love of moving walking running crawling exploring the world, meant she would rather have a cup in her hand than a breast. and the breast was still good for going to sleep, but other than that she would try to pull the breast off my body so that she could go exploring with it….ummm…it doesnt work like that.

but all in all it took a couple of months to wean. i didnt really have a schedule or a plan. i just put the idea: wean, into my head and figured it would happen. her papa took over more of the feeding and i got to spend more time writing and typing. (she would never, not even as an infant, let me type and breastfeed at the same time…all those images of writer or office working mamas typing as they breastfeed, did not happen for me…fuck!)

and then one day i looked up and realized i hadnt fed her in 2 or 3 days. and she hadnt asked for breast milk. and we were weaned.

or so i thought.

because the next couple of weeks, i felt weepy for no apparent reason. over little things. and tired. and depressed. and silly. and then as i was writing a letter to a friend, mid-sentence, i realized, this was the emotional/hormonal side of weaning.

she has been weaned for less than two months, and i dont think she remembers it at all. i am kinda amazed how quickly she just got over it.

but the entire process from conception to weaning has been amazing. when i have gotten pregnant the first thing to start umm…blossoming…are the tetas…and they dont stop.

i remember looking in the mirror one night, and thinking: these arent my breasts…and then…oh fuck!…im pregnant!

now i watch my toddler galloping over her world and think…oh fuck!…how the fuck did i become a parent?

why are we mammals?

quoted from pbs:

Our own modern scientific classification of animals is based on evolutionary relationships, common ancestry – although in fact scientists started categorizing animals this way about a century before they realized that was what they were doing.

We, for example, are mammals. That was established in the year 1758, a hundred years before Darwin, by a Swedish biologist named Linnaeus. Mammals constitute a natural category. If you ask biology students, they will tell you we’re mammals. Why? Because we nurse our young.

Here is something the student probably can not tell you. Do we nurse our young because we are mammals, or are we mammals because we nurse our young? Let me rephrase the question: Why is milk so important in the great scheme of things that we should take our very name on that basis? Couldn’t we come up with the same group using a different criterion, and so why don’t we?

For example, Aristotle more than two thousand years ago called land animals “Quadrupedia” (four-legged), and divided them into those that lay eggs and those that give birth to live offspring. Creating a category of four-legged creatures that give birth to live offspring gives you basically the same constellation of animals as the category of mammals (with a few exceptions, like the duck-billed platypus).

Mammals actually have many features that distinguish them from reptiles, amphibians, fish, and birds – hair, for one thing. Some scientists in the 18th century actually did call this group “Pilosa,” or hairy things. But Linnaeus called us mammals, based on an anatomical feature that’s only functional in half of our species, and then only rarely.

So why did he do that?

It turns out to have been a political gesture. In the 1750s, there was major controversy surrounding the practice of wet-nursing. Many middle- and upper-class women in Europe were sending their babies off to stay with poor women in the country to be fed, rather than nursing the infants themselves. Linnaeus was active in the movement opposing this practice. In fact he wrote a book on the virtues of breastfeeding your own children, how it was natural for mothers to do this, and how therefore wet-nursing was something unnatural and bad. Up to that time he had been calling mammals simply Quadrupedia, like Aristotle. Now he calls mammals Mammalia, and uses his “objective” scientific classification to make this point. He is saying the natural role of women is to nurse their own children – that is what is right, and that is what your family should do (Schiebinger, 1993).

The point of all this is to show that what a biology student takes for granted as a fact of nature, that we are in our very essence a lactating species, is actually a fact of history – a political stand from the 18th century embedded into biology. It is true, of course, mammals are a natural unit and the group can be defined by nursing, but having a shared natural property doesn’t make a group an objective category, simply “out there” to be discovered. It is not obviously the case that breastfeeding is the key feature that makes us mammals, any more than having a single bone in the lower jaw (which all Mammalia have, and only Mammalia have) is the key feature that would make us “One-bone-in-jaw-malia.” There’s more here than nature.

So: we make sense of our place in the universe by classifying; our classifications are not necessarily derived from nature; and even when they are derived from nature, they encode cultural information.

breast feeding rate highest in decades

Breastfeeding Rate Highest In Decades; Black Women Have Most Significant Increase, Report Finds

The number of new mothers who breastfeed their infants during the first months of life has increased to 77%, up from 60% in 1993-1994, with the sharpest increase among black women, according to a CDC report, the Associated Press reports (Stobbe, Associated Press, 5/1). The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend that women breastfeed their infants exclusively until six months of age and breastfeed as a supplement to baby food until age one. Research indicates that formula-fed children have higher risks of ear and respiratory infections, obesity, diabetes and cancer, according to the New York Times.

The report, which is part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, is based on data collected in 2005 and 2006 for 434 infants. Researchers found that 65% of black women breastfed, up from 36% in 1993-1994 (Harris, New York Times, 5/1). Historically, black women have had lower breastfeeding rates than other groups, according to Former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher. Mexican-Americans had the highest overall breastfeeding rate at 80%, which increased from 67% in 1993-1994. Among whites, 79% breastfed in the latest survey, up from 62% (Associated Press, 5/1). Researchers also found that 57% of low-income women breastfed and that 43% of women under age 20 breastfed.

Satcher said, “It was very impressive that when it comes to beginning to breastfeed, [black women] have had the greatest progress” (Associated Press, 5/1). According to the Times, the increases can be attributed in part to campaigns by medical and governmental groups to educate women about the benefits of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding experts said that the findings are positive but stressed that breastfeeding rates at age six months have remained stagnant. The current report did not examine rates at age six months (New York Times, 5/1).

family pictures

fresh milk

i just finished reading fiona giles’s fresh milk.  she is from australia and so the book focuses alot around stories from australia but also from other parts of the angloworld including the us.  i read it last night while i was breastfeeding aza.  i started thinking about nursing, breast milk, pumping and the entire maternal experience from different angles.  for instance i have always had a visceral reaction against the idea of nursing past the age of two.  really a child who is walking and talking and coming up to me to nurse turned me off.  i dont mind it too much when other women around me nurse their toddlers, but i can hear the judgemental voice in my softly whispering:  isnt she too old?  but after reading this book i had a greater appreciation for why mothers would choose to continue nursing.  and i know that the who says that women should nurse until the child is at least two years old.  so i guess i too can relax that little voice in my head a bit more and wonder if aza really is not ready to wean at around 12 months, will i decide or her?  aza is so good at knowing what she needs.

i also thought about drinking my milk.  i have tasted it before.  surprisingly sweet.  like vanilla soy milk.  vanilla soy milk is one of my favorite drinks ever and even before i had tasted my own milk i thought that breastmilk should taste like soy milk, but i assumed that in reality it would taste bland or bitter more like herb tea.  i only tasted a drop or two, but i gained an instant appreciation why we love sugar, vanilla, dairy, cheese, ice cream, fatty foods.  i read about putting mamamilk in tea or coffee or using it to make icecream/icemilk and pie.  maybe i will pump a bit and try.  especially since the milk is a tonic for people with weak immune systems and conjunctivitis.

and i know that urine is healthy for the skin and internal body systems.  and now breastmilk can help heal us as adults and children.