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Fretful Mother: breastfeeding is beautiful, until you do it to someone else's baby
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I’ve read with interest over the past few days about a scene that went down at a conference involving a famous snack cracker. The tasty cracker doesn’t have much to do with it, but the women attending the conference have the blog world all atwitter.
About boobs.
Specifically, the trouble involves one particular blogger who has a child, left her child home to attend the conference, mistakenly left behind her breast pump as well, and then found herself engorged and in extreme pain because she was so full of milk. No matter what she tried to alleviate the pain, it just didn’t help. A fellow attendee had a baby at the conference, and, after they became acquainted, she offered to let the first woman breastfeed her child.
Another attendee observed the woman breastfeeding someone else’s child, and she wrote a scathing post about how disgusting it was.
The term is “cross feed.” Women have done this since the dawn of time. Wet nurses are not a new concept, but the idea seems to have vanished in our society full of ticky-tacky houses, gated communities, antiseptic soaps and gels, and lack of letting the village raise a child. Some naysayers have chimed in to say that accepting donated milk from a milk bank is one thing, but allowing the lips of your baby to touch another woman’s bosom? Not so much.
Salma Hayek was lauded as an exemplary citizen of the world when she breastfed a child in Africa, yet we shun a mother in America for doing the same thing.
As a mom, I chalk this up to yet another example of mothers bashing mothers. I’ve seen it happen far too often in the blog world. It also says a great deal about America’s obsession with women daring to breastfeed in public rather than being more offended by breasts being shown as objects of desire only, in wet t-shirts, oily ads for men, and the ilk. Breasts are both for pleasure and food for a baby.
Had someone offered to breastfeed my child when I was having such incredible troubles with my own supply, I would have taken their offer on the spot. Whether my son would cooperate is a whole other issue, since he didn’t with me. But, I would have accepted the help instead of crying about my own perceived failures.
Wet nurses had a very clear purpose before our society shunned women’s bodies and minds. If only we could see the value once again, without bashing each other senseless with “disgusting” and “perverted” and “diseased.” It isn’t stealing milk from your own child if your supply is high and plentiful.
So, what do you think? Could you breastfeed another child? Would you accept the offer from another woman?
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