Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

*rolls eyes to back of head*

good grief. i get back from vacation and get to read romaniticizing bullshit about breastfeeding on the loblist! capitalist pigs hate breast feeding, yanno? coz it combines pleasure, sex, and food and that combination is subversive, doncha know. ferfucksake!

when i was little, i used to sit near my mother’s feet as she dished the dirt with her girlfriends, especially after she had my little sister, M. I’d listen to them tell childbirth and labor stories. Her story of knocking the doctor’s arm away so he wouldn’t give her an epidural, and probably other things i’ve repressed, scared me so much that, when her friends left, I started crying, telling her that i never ever wanted to have babies because it sounded awful.

my mother got that mom look on her face, the one where she realizes that her adult conversation had put the wrong ideas in her little girl’s head, and she told me that having a baby was the best thing in the world and you didn’t remember the pain at all.

when i was pregnant with sonshine, i prepared the nest, buying stuff i’d need: clothes, diapers, crib, changing table, diaper bag, blankets, etc. the one thing it never occurred to me to buy? bottles. it never occurred to me because no one I knew did anything but breast feed. of course, i had done a lot of baby sitting and occasionally took care of infants, and I did know something about the practice of squirting bottle milk on your wrist to test if it was too warm. but still and all, buying bottles and nipples and a sterilizer never occurred to me. it didn’t occur to me to use wet washcloths to wipe a baby butt either, so don’t go getting any ideas. in other words, I stocked up on wet wipes for whatever reason, having apparently forgotten about the wiping of butts with washable, reusable washcloths. In other words, I’m not making some claim about “naturalness”. Nothing that I did was “natural” as if there is some magic line between natural and unnatural.. blah blah blah. I did what I did without thinking too much about what I needed other than to think about what I used to take care of my sister and the children I baby sat.

but on some level, i guess breast feeding was what was ‘the order of things’ for my mother, and thus for me. my mother later told me that she had to argue with the nurses about breastfeeding me. at the time, most babies were on bottles and the famous 4 hour feeding schedule that had been recommended by the famous author of child rearing books, name escapes. the nurses in the hospital wanted none of this breast feeding business since it was too chaotic, too frequent, too messy, too uncontrollable, too unpredictable. they wanted the bottle feeding schedule so they could predict and control, making it easier to perform shift work, get regular breaks, keep an orderly schedule, and so forth.

capitalist pig fuckers? they don’t seem so close by when you look at it that way. there’s a lot mediating the drive for corporate profits and the activities of the nurses who gave my mother grief about breast feeding before the 1970s. profit was far from their concerns. what was more pressing was the desire for an orderly schedule so their workday was easier to manage. it’s called rationalization - see Max Weber and the popularized version, George Ritzer’s McDonalidization thesis. By which I’m saying: yes, there’s a relationship, but it’s a lot more complicated than people sitting around deciding that they are going to make a bundle on formula.

anyway, what is totally pissing me off is the lack of fucking knowledge about the history of all this. Like, first of all, people like my mother who lived in a rural community, raised among farmers, etc. fought to breastfeed for all kinds of reasons, but it most assuredly had little to do with some romaniticized bullshit about breastfeeding. it was what was done in her day among her people. big fucking deal.

what HEnwood called “artisanal parenting” was just emerging in the 70s. What my mother did - no name for it I guess. I guess artisanal parenting is actually the offspring of the 70s effort, which was more like artisanl mothering, since fathers weren’t involved much — except by way of being labor coach and getting slugged in the delivery room. The 70s transformation of the ob-gyn’s office and the labor and delivery room had a feminist cast. It was all about taking back control of the process from doctors and experts who claimed that they knew what was best. Artisanal parenting is the co-optation of women’s liberation, methinks. Artisanal parenting is all about putting me first and foremost, at the center, of mommy-daddy-me so that it is mommy-me-daddy. artisanal parenting is about making a fucking PROJECT out of having a kid! which, well, it isn’t the first time this has happened, i’m not saying that. Indeed, Vivianna Zelinger has a great book called, Pricing the Priceless Child. It’s about the emergence of the idea that children are priceless. They are so special, so unique, so so so something that you couldn’t possibly put a price on them — especially in the adoption market. But, of course, that wasn’t true just a couple of decades before when babies were regularly sold for $1 by women giving up their children for adoption.

so, it is nothing new, really. but honestly, the lack of historical perspective is annoying. who knew? what with all the subversive power of the nexus of pleasure, sex and food … how subversive was my momma! she ran around fighting the nurses at the hospital in the name of freedom! liberation! solidarity! fuck capitalist piggies! fuck the man! equality for all!

of course, the 70s came along, with a feminist critique of pregnancy and childbirth. once the domain of midwives, so the story went, it increasingly became the domain of the Patriarchy Capitalist Pig Fuckers and, in order for liberation to proceed apace, women needed to take back their cunts and their boobs! It all needed to be natural again. Never mind that we have plenty of archaeological evidence to indicate that women have been bottle feeding and/or wet nursing infants since at least, what?, ~5000 b.c. or something? Never mind that the option NOT to breast feed has been around for a long time, that it wasn’t necessarily only the province of the well-to-do, never mind that you can find plenty of texts illustrating that breast feeding often only lasted 3-6 months for women, supplemented by other forms of feeding plus the use of animal milk and bottles and that this was happening throughout the history of “the West” and in other cultures.

never fucking mind that, in our own US of A, there were actually campaigns to get working class women to breast feed! In the 1920s and 1930s!

I sat there at 4 a.m. listening to the sound of the pump rhythmically pumping away. It was late June. It was hot. The windows were open and I could hear the milk truck pull up to the farm across the street as it always did at this time of day. Shhhhuuushew. Shhhhuuushew.Shhhhuuushew. The milk would spray down the sides of the collection tube, warm and creamy but translucent, creamy like butter looks when it’s made fresh, without anything to make it yellow.

Moooooooo. Maaaaoooooo. Meeheeuuuu. Maahooeeeeuuu.

I listened to the cows calling out as the milk truck’s diesel engine idled and the driver hooked up the equipment to transport the milk from the farm’s holding tank to the truck’s tank.

I sympathize with ya Bessie, I thought to myself, as I sat at the kitchen table, expressing breast milk with a breast pump sent home with me for a small weekly rental fee, underwritten by a group in the area that was a pilot project for breastfeeding support. I was doing this because, Sonshine was still in the hospital. For some reason he and another baby because mysteriously ill with a virus right after they were born. They kept him at the pedie unit and, although I’d stayed with him constantly, I was getting no sleep, so they made me go home at one point, and sent me with the breast pump so I could express my milk and continue to breast feed when possible. Thing was, because he was sick, and then had jaundice, he had no interest in the boob.

So, there I was on a hot summer night, humid, with cow flies abuzz around me, listening as Bessie and her mates delivered their goods to the milk truck. In a daze from the lack of sleep, still, I fantasized what the world would be like if people like me could produce milk for babies with mothers who couldn’t or wouldn’t breast feed. Would it be possible, I thought? Would there be a milk truck to show up every day, early in the morning, stopping by each home to pick up the milk from a small tank? How would it all work? This entertained me as the milk pump rhythmically pumped away, the cows brayed, and the diesel engine spit and moaned, spit and moaned, spit and moaned.

3 months later I was crying, listening to Sonshine scream wildly as his father tried to feed him a bottle. I had only breast fed him. We were planning a trip to visit my mother, a trip where we’d also get away for the weekend, childless. I had been pumping extra milk to bring so mom could feed him my breast milk. But sonshine hadn’t experienced a bottle and he was one pissed off little guy. I had been unsuccessful in getting him to take it from me. He would screamingly refuse it. So wasband took him in a room, shut the door and made me leave, go outside, so I wouldn’t run back into the house, relenting, offering the breast so he’d stop crying. I think I had to get I had to get in the car and drive away so I wouldn’t have to listen to the wailing.

Eventually, he took to the bottle and all was well. We brought it in frozen servings to my mother’s. Mom promptly pulled one out, microwaved it and decided to have a taste. My mom, who was going through menopause at the time - so she said - she seemed awfully young to be in menopause, but then she started menstruating early, too, and they say that if you menstruate early, you go through menopause early too. anyway, apparently, this taste of milk was enough to cause my menopausal mother to start lactating - and I’d gather that being around a baby would have contributed. She has a picture of her in a gauzy dressing gown she wore around, with wet spots on her breasts from leaking milk.

I joined the breast feeding support group in my area after all that. It was a group, seeded by 70s community action money I think, that was about educating women about breast feeding. It doesn’t come naturally, as a lot of people say. I, for one, wasn’t sure what to do or how to do it. And it was especially hard because, before we knew sonshine was sick, he rejected this massive engorged breast. Didn’t want to eat. OF course, we knew why soon after, but at the time it was frustrating for a new mom who, sleepless and stressed, was bound to think *she* was the failure, especially after everyone around her tells her that it is natural and requires no special knowledge of training. you pick up kid, put it by your boob, and kid knows exactly what to do. well, not really.

the volunteers in the group visit each new mom to let them know that they provide support if needed - no matter what mom chooses to do. they purchased electronic pumps like the one i used, for moms in situations like mine. they also bought and distributed really low cost manual pumps, nursing pads, etc. If a mom needed help, she could all and a volunteer would visit her at home. It was a very successful program and became a pilot/ model for implementation of similar projects around the country.

No, it wasn’t LeLeche League Nazis, either.

Sonshine, by the way, got better three days later, as did the other baby. They never figured out what had been wrong. Some strange virus. They did some testing and found that we shared nothing: not the same ob-gyn, nurse, room, nothing. A couple more babies got something similar in the next two months, prompting a special team to come in from the CDC to do some sort of investigation of the hospital. They still never found anything.

But one of the important things about the group was that it had a well-rounded knowledge of the history of nursing infants and toddlers. They didn’t try to shame or force people into breast feeding. They didn’t romanticize it with bullshit about the mashup of pleasure, food, and sex. They did talk about the benefits in terms of cost, ease, immunity to various diseases and they did do what they could to help women breast feed. It’s just that, if a woman didn’t want to, then she didn’t. The mother of the other baby who’d become sick too? He was a huge baby, 12.7 lbs. He wanted to eat constantly and she just gave up. She couldn’t deal with a kid latched to her tits every hour. No one talked to her about capitalist pig fucking patriarchy or about how she should give it up for the team! or anything like that. She wanted to bottle feed fine. No nonsense about how she would be denying her kid the subversive experience of the nexus of food, sex, and pleasure!