This site will have posts going up on Tuesday July 6th and Thursday July 8th. I’m biased and I think they are pretty neat so please stop back by! This whole week is going to be great for supporting parents Nursing in Public!

The posts are going up on an automatic schedule because I am currently headed off for a week of camping with my extended family in the US. If you are a new commenter you’ll detour into moderation until I get back. I’m aiming to have any comments that come in from people new to the site approved by Friday evening.

Welcome to the Carnival of Nursing in Public

Please join us all week, July 5-9, as we celebrate and support breastfeeding mothers. And visit NursingFreedom.org any time to connect with other breastfeeding supporters, learn more about
your legal right to nurse in public, and read (and contribute!) articles about breastfeeding and N.I.P.

Do you support breastfeeding in public? Grab this badge for your blog or website to show your support and encourage others to educate themselves about the benefits of breastfeeding and the rights of breastfeeding mothers and children.

This post is just one of many being featured as part of the Carnival of Nursing in Public. Please visit our other writers each day of the Carnival. Click on the links below to see each day’s posts – new articles will be posted on the following days:

July 5 – Making Breastfeeding the Norm: Creating a Culture of Breastfeeding in a Hyper-Sexualized World

July 6 – Supporting Breastfeeding Mothers: the New, the Experienced, and the Mothers of More Than One Nursing Child

July 7 – Creating a Supportive Network: Your Stories and Celebrations of N.I.P.

July 8 – Breastfeeding: International and Religious Perspectives

July 9 – Your Legal Right to Nurse in Public, and How to Respond to Anyone Who Questions It

© Presenza @ fotalia.com

Breastfeeding Mom = Cow

It’s pretty difficult for me to find the compliment when a breastfeeding mom is compared to an animal that is mostly invoked to tell people they are stupid, fat, slow, smelly, ugly or lazy. Sure, everyone loves some milk, a little cheese, that great ice cream or their frappuccino-cappuccino-lattes but the cow itself?    Eh – not so much unless it’s steak-shaped, a choice for a seat covering or being deployed as part of a put-down*.

I’ve seen moms call themselves Holsteins, Gurnseys, Milk cows, Dairy cows and milk(ing) machines. The comparison is sometimes meant to be positive. This would be my sister-in-law who was sharing how proud she was of the volumes she was able to pump for the preemie babies at the local hospital before coming straight home to nurse her son. It would also be my sister who was proud of her ability to stay ahead of her son’s (and then daughter’s) needs while she was at work.

Sometimes when moms make the comparison it’s not so positive. Maybe she’s feeling bad about herself, maybe pumping has begun to feel like a chore, maybe someone has been unsupportive of her efforts to work and pump and she gives voice to her troubled thoughts with the comparison. Sometimes it’s being said by a mom about herself with all the baggage I threw out above with a helping of “I’m not sexy anymore.” perched on top.

I could never get comfortable with being compared to a cow by anyone, not even myself. I was a high volume pumper with both girls due to rampant oversupply in the early days. I could fill an 8 oz Gerber bottle to the rim on the left side and then add a couple more ounces to the second bottle before the milk finally stopped flowing. That was just the left side. That pumping volume was great when taken alone but it wasn’t happening in isolation. I was leaking (I don’t like to be damp), my breasts were engorged (uncomfortable) and I experienced painful cramps at let-down. For me, the cow imagery was very negative and I didn’t appreciate the jokes made (at my expense) that compared me to Bossy the Milk Cow.

A friend said that she dislikes the comparison because it seems to normalize cow’s milk while exoticizing breastmilk. She’s leery of the dehumanization of breastfeeding moms that is part and parcel of comparing them to a domesticated farm animal. She said that for her it was surreal enough being hooked up to her pump without that comparison kicking it up a notch.

In addition, she thinks of cows being milked as a passive activity for the cow. The farmer lead the cows in, hooks the udders up to the milking machines and the cows simply stands there until the farmer removes the cow from the milking area. That stands in stark contrast to how she views a mother pumping breastmilk for her child. She said “Moms pumping is an active, thought out choice. They are taking control and it’s usually an uphill battle.”

Another friend shared with me that when she hears of moms making signs for pumping rooms at work with cows on them she cringes at the imagery. I have to admit, I was extremely happy when Mothering had their contest to come up with an International Breastfeeding Symbol that gave all moms an image for use that was a positive depiction of a mother and baby breastfeeding.

Talking to these friends made me realize that another issue I have is with the idea of our breasts being compared to a cow’s udder since that is never, ever, done as a compliment. Comparing a woman’s breasts to udders is a short-hand referendum on her sex appeal. Though that idea, after careful thought, is a post for another day ! So, onward to the wrap-up!

I didn’t realize how many layers there were (for me) regarding to this issue when I started percolating the idea for this post. It started with my negative gut reaction to an off-the-cuff “Wow! Is she a cow or what?” comment made regarding a working and pumping mom. I thought it’d generate a simple “I find the comparison kind of icky. Here’s my reason why.” post and it became a whole lot more.

What do you think? Is the comparison of breastfeeding moms to cows problematic for you too? Have you ever made the comparison? If so, have my feelings given you something to think about?

* Add the adjectives in the first paragraph to the word cow and you’ll recognize the put-downs immediately.

Since all of those statements are problematic for a multitude of reasons I’m going to request that we do our best to keep the comments on this post a safe space and not make comments that are policing other women and/or not aligned with a safe, fat-accepting, feminist/womanist, pro-mom, pro-baby vibe (even when talking about ourselves). Thanks!

Testing 1…2…3…

Testing 1…2…3…

Is this thing on??

*massive amounts of feedback as I wander too close to something electronic*

HarrietJ over at Fugitivus is someone I read regularly. She’s got a lot of really insightful things to say that can be reapplied directly into my life. In her post  Oh Right, I have a Blog She talks about adoption advocacy and says -

And when you’re employed in the adoption field, unless you’re employed by advocates for adoptee rights, your new boundaries include a lot of soft-talking, a lot of nonjudgment, a lot of hair-smoothing and back-patting and therapist-smile. Which is perfectly legitimate in most contexts; if you’ve set up shop in a place where people go to get help, the least productive thing ever would be to scare off the people who need help, even if they legitimately need to be scared. And the people who need help the most are usually also the biggest assholes, either because needing help for so long has put them in a rotten mood, or because they were arrogant and ignorant and that’s what got them in over their heads in the first place. The people who have their shit together? The people who could hear a difficult thing, unsugarcoated? They don’t need you.

And that my friends, in WAY fewer words than I will ever be able to string together is why I get frustrated when I see articles, blog posts, and comments that either explicitly state or soft-pedal around the statement “You should feel guilty for not breastfeeding”.

BONKing a mom on the head with my opinion (while it may feel reeeally good when I say it and may have the additional benefit of being true) is often the best way to lose my audience and create problems for myself and others who encounter that person later on. As Harriet said (because DANG – this is so good it needs repeating), “if you’ve set up shop in a place where people go to get help, the least productive thing ever would be to scare off the people who need help, even if they legitimately need to be scared. <snip> The people who have their shit together? The people who could hear a difficult thing, unsugarcoated? They don’t need you.”

They have a fundraiser happening right now and here is how we can “donate” to a good cause.

Donate to Best for Babes…for free? How does that work?!

All you have to do is “like” our Facebook page!

It really is that easy! Five fabulous companies have partnered with Best for Babes, each pledging $500. That means for every new “like” Best for Babes receives on Facebook from May 9th – 22nd, a dollar will be donated – up to $2,500!

There is more information through the link.

Since I already “Like” them I am doing my part now to pass the message on. Please feel free to copy this post and pass it on to all your friends. Together we can help Best for Babes make a HUGE success of this fundraising effort.

A couple of days ago I watched the tail-end of a Twitter dust-up between a young man and some lactivists that I follow regarding breastfeeding in public (hereafter known as NIP). The tweets got so tense I responded viscerally just from watching the exchange (you know those tight-in-the-chest, tingly arm, itchy finger, head-in-a-vice-ready-to-explode, Oh-no-you-didn’t-just-say!! feelings).  The logical fallacies – OH! the logical fallacies just about took my breath away! The ignorant disdain of NIP, conflation of the function of breast and penis, as well as child abuse and feeding your child were really hard to watch.

I had two or three tweets typed out (I kept backspacing) that I was able to prevent myself from adding to the situation and stirring the pot.

What held me back? Part of it was my desire not to have nuker-style posts associated with my Twitter account. Part of it was my assumption that nothing I had to say, even if I could have found a reasonable tone, would have made a difference to this particular guy. Mostly though it was my monitoring of what I was thinking as I was reading the antagonists tweets and the assumptions exposed in the snarky rejoinders rocketing around in my head. This guy wasn’t really saying anything new. It was the same old tropes about NIP regurgitated by a young-than-me male. My responses to him were all about his age and gender (and some blatant privilege) rather than the verbal crap spilling from his lips.

So I sat on my fingers until they hurt and directed the few tweets I did make to the lactivists rather than engaging directly in the dust-up.

What do you do when you see breastfeeding issues being thrashed out on twitter or in message board communities? Do you sit on your fingers? Cheer on the gladiators? Join in the fracas?

I have kids. Two young people tugging at my elbow when I’m trying to write pithy, witty stuff. Pithy and witty often turn into ppothy and whyutty with these jokesters in the area. They have little patience for the Important Things Mom Must Write Right Now!

I’m a fairly open person. I’ll talk to you about a lot of things; things that might possibility make you step away from the computer screen to search for the bleach and a fork to remove you eyes hygienically.  There are people out there who can tell you what I named the ‘rrhoid I got while pregnant with my first child, It was -

Hmmm… how about we wait for it to come up organically in conversation around here shall we? Yes? Cool!

There are some things I’ll be keeping to myself though. Pictures of me or the kids with our faces to the world are gonna be as scarce as hen’s teeth. I make no apologies about that.

You get my first name but the kids are going pseudonymous. If you happen to know my kids names please keep that information under your hat here at the blog. Thank-ye-kindly! The kids had a good time picking their names even with the restriction to a fairly unisex moniker. I think they liked the control they got in shaping their image.

The younger generation has also extracted the promise that anything about them that isn’t directly related to breastfeeding must get their jelly-stained seal of approval before publishing. I capitulated to that one with an astonishing lack of push-back. My oldest young person is hitting that age where things are getting embarrassing even when they aren’t all that embarrassment-worthy and I’d like a shot at still being on speaking terms when college is on our horizon. Kiddo-the-younger is a champion grudge holder so pissing said younger person off serves no good purpose and causes me discomfort. I prefer comfort! We hammered out an agreement and they sat more-or-less patiently with me as I put together these little biographies about them.

Stats approved by PseudonymousKids™

Derby, Wait Camo (you know, for camouflage)…..No wait! Echo! Echo? Yes, we’ve settled now -

ECHO – This decisive decision-maker is starting her second decade by living in Mexico. She’s an avid reader of books two grades below where she should be reading but we don’t complain (much) because she’ll read grade-level – reluctantly – when forced to. She’s a moderately responsible pet owner (if you don’t count losing her guinea pig in the front yard last week-end against her – which I do even though we recovered her) with a menagerie that includes Juliet “Lost One” the Guinea Pig, Comet the orange canary, Dorado the Supposed-to-be-African-Dwarf-Frog-who-turned-out-to-be-an-African-Clawed-Frog. She’s a sporty one, that Echo! She has 5 years of TaeKwonDo under her belt and 7 years of dance. We’ve got a shelf full of trophies so don’t mess with her cuz she’s not allowed to take the TKD out of the dojang unless you attack her first. Breastfeeding tidbit – Echo was weaned when she was 2.5 years old.

HARPER – Harper likes her school work – most day. She does a lot of work on her own. She can be be a foot-dragger with the homework mom assigns though. She is a wanna-be of the first degree. I mean this in the best of ways. She wants to learn to play the piano, to draw and be an artist, to read like the old ones in the house, etc. She loves to help  with the cooking and cleaning but there appears to be some type of force-field around her bedroom because THAT is always a mess. She’s a tough one. Both mentally and physically which will serve her well as an adult! She’s another moderately responsible pet owner with a tandem menagerie that includes Nibbles the Guinea Pig, Lily the yellow canary and Mango the Same-kinda-frog-as-Dorado. She shares responsibility with Echo for the family fish and Louie the loving but dopey GoldenDoodle who thinks the Guinea Pigs look like really cool squeaky toys. She’s a beginner in the worlds of TKD and dance but she’ll get her years in just like Echo.

So, those are the kiddos. I’m sure you’ll hear a lot more about them as we go on including the fact that Harper was allowed to self-wean. She chose to do this just after her fifth birthday. Cool huh?

Here I washed my hands of trying to engage in direct dialog with Nestlé. Don’t get me wrong – I believe that those dialogs can be instructive and eye-opening to people unfamiliar with the issues surrounding Nestlé’s behavior and of the level of disingenuousness evidenced by our Swiss friends. The conversations serve a very important purpose in that they serve to illuminate the dark corners of an unethical corporate citizen’s character and clearly outline why we should choose not to do business with it. I have decided to – finally – completely boycott Nestlé because if what I learned in the discussions at PhD in Parenting.

So why walk away when so many are fighting that good fight? Partly because it is covered so well by others. Partly because I think it would be soul-crushing for me to tilt that particular windmill full time. I’d rather focus my energies where I can see tangible evidence of progress.

Where might that be? Here are some possibilities I’ve identified for myself as areas for further investigation (this is really not as fleshed out as I’d like it to be but it’s 2:00 am and I wanted to get this up before I go to bed rather than having it sit in my draft posts bin indefinitely like so many others) -

1. The Baby-friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) launched by the World Health Organization and UNICEF. I currently live in Mexico where hospital  maternity care and breastfeeding information has enormous room for improvement. It may be that I can go to work trying to get my local hospitals to see the value in this designation.
2. Promoting Ban the Bags and Healthy Baby Bounty Bag (created by Cottonwood Kids).
3. Work on the local, state and national level to encourage law-makers to draft and pass legislation that expands maternity and breastfeeding protections.
4. Work on the local, state and national level to codify into law the WHO International Code Of Marketing Of Breast Milk Substitutes. I believe this is going to be the way that Nestlé will finally be forced to behave with basic human decency.
5. Add my voice to those calling on local governments to enforce laws already on the books regarding advertising of Breast Milk Substitutes.
6. Renew my involvement with La Leche League (I need to renew my membership which I’ve let lapse for the last several years),
7. Investigate other organizations such as Best for Babes, The World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) and
   National Alliance for Breast-Feeding Advocacy (NABA) (the link isn’t loading for me right now but maybe in the morning it’ll behave properly)

Do you have a recommendation of an organization I should have a look at? Please share it with me in the comments.

This blog came into existence to allow me an outlet for some of the conversations I felt a great need to have that were not and are not appropriate in the context of a breastfeeding support group helping breastfeeding moms. *sounds of record player needle scratching along the top of an old 45* Conversation smonversation! I wanted to say what I wanted to say and conversation was not even on my mind when I plunked down my money for the domain name. I bought the domain name in the throws of a grand and glorious need to scream “Are you KIDDING me?!” about something or the other. I was incensed! I was finally going to let loose all the roiling boiling thoughts that I had kept on a short leash because they were not appropriate to screech out while I was trying to support someone.

I was going to become one of THOSE lactivist! You know who I’m talking about. The lactivists that almost universally face the common sentiment that they are too vocal, too in-your-face, too strident, too militant, too much, too _____. I decided a blog would allow me a pressure valve when the hard parts of breastfeeding advocacy got to be too much for my cerebrum to handle. ONWARD!

Then I rethought things a bit.

Throwing public temper tantrums loses it’s appeal after a period of time. Imagine that! I waited long enough for an expiration date on the red haze before my eyes and then began to organize the blog space I had given myself. I didn’t want to go off half-cocked from the beginning so I started reading other breastfeeding blogs and learning about the back-end parts of having a blog. Apparently Google is now my friend and I want to pay attention to how Google views and parses my pages. After years of moving about in areas of the internet protected by robots.txt files that consisted of

User-agent: * disallow

I was now going a courtin’ some of those very same robots and spiders and indexers. It’s been interesting trying to sort how to manage tags and header info to actually garner their attention. *gently laughing* I’m sure I will be coming back to these early pages and redoing a lot of the “not seen but heard by the search engines” parts of the pages.

Since the original burst of red-hot primal need to scream I’ve reworked what I want to do here. Don’t get me wrong. The idea of creating a space for myself where I could scream my guts out still holds a lot of appeal. So much appeal it’s scary some days. Who knows – one day someone may come here and go “Whoa! She’s really letting rip!” My hope though, is that I will not show my hiney that way in public. I have friends who are setting awesome examples of how to advocate and conversate *yes, I just totally made up that word* in the public sphere and I’m taking notes as best I can.

SO – now as I head forward I’m hoping to have some of those harder conversations (really – conversations), and maaaaaaybe some little debates within the arena of breastfeeding and breastfeeding support. Gentle, desultory debate would be my goal. If I start getting knots in my stomach and visceral reactions to conversation here then the blog isn’t doing it’s job for me.

I’m also looking to this blog to help me get back to the basics and work on my breastfeeding info. chops. I homeschool my kids so time during my day is limited. In addition, I tend to take on more of the “technological” issues at the community where I moderate leaving more of the hands-on helping of the members to other moderators. I know a lot about breastfeeding but it also feels like I’ve forgotten a lot too. I like the idea of having the chance to look at resources and research related topics I want to look at, rather than focusing on whatever the current wave of concern happens to be within the community I interact in.

So, there you have it. My mostly thought out raison d’etre for the blog. *grin*

Just a little happy dance that I managed to follow directions and upgrade to Thesis 1.6 without blowing anything up, erasing anything or causing whacked out formatting! *Happy, Happy, HAPPY Dance!*

ETA 10/29 – I shouldn’t have shaken my tailfeathers quite so energetically! *laughing* I managed to mess something up on the back-end in the Admin panel that had me uploading the whole thing again. It was still pretty painless and less than 30 minutes for the switch. Now I’m messing with the new Thesis Admin panel to pull stuff out of my .css that are unnecessary duplications. This should be fun! No, really – It should be fun!