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Liz nursed her daughter for four months, far less than she had originally
planned. But one month before her due date she had received her diagnosis -
breast cancer. Now her chemotherapy treatments were about to begin and she
had to wean her. “I felt like Hannah was being ripped from me, like my
ability to mother my child was ending,” Liz recalls. “I was afraid when I
stopped I would be just like anyone else to her.”
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My own daughter screamed whenever I offered my breast and refused
to latch on for 5 ½ grueling weeks. I was completely unprepared for this.
But after spending many days in tears, wondering if I would ever be able to
nurse her at all, we tentatively, gradually, became a nursing couple. I’ll
never forget the miracle of waking up one night to discover that Emily had
latched on by herself and was nursing in her sleep, cheeks gently puckering
and releasing. Emily ultimately went on to nurse not only well past the age
many in our culture find acceptable, but practically chanted mantras in
honor of my breasts.
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At 17, Lauren was homeless, depressed, and broke. “Nursing Taea was the one
thing that remained constant during the chaos of moving from place to place,
of having huge problems with my boyfriend,” she recalls. “It was our comfort
zone, the one thing we could rely on.” A mere two years later, Lauren now
helps other teen-aged mothers. “I try to explain how amazing it is that we
can carry another human being around and then feed it off of something our
own bodies make!” she explains |
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Why are breastfeeding stories
important? And why is it so important for women to share them? What voice do
we have to reclaim?
For centuries, women’s wisdom
and experience have been trivialized and ignored, often devalued by women
themselves. My own grandmother, for example, was willing to
share with me what she remembered of her birthing and early mothering
experiences, but she could not, for the life of her, understand why I cared.
She dismissed as trivial the details of some of life’s most profound
experiences.
It has only been in the last
couple of decades that we have begun to recognize the value of women’s
stories, stories that involve childbirth, miscarriage, and menopause, for
example. Only in the past couple of years, however, have the voices of
breastfeeding women, begun to be heard.
Finding the
Common Threads
Sharing our stories asserts our right
to be taken seriously. Breastfeeding in particular has become
so misunderstood that only by revealing what has become secreted can we
begin to convey the full spectrum of our experiences. Only by finding ways
to integrate our diverse and individual experiences and feelings can we see
the common conditions that affect us as nursing mothers and women. One of
the authors of a book on women’s stories about miscarriage writes: “I longed
for a chorus of voices telling stories from personal experience, but those
voices weren’t yet collected in a book.” [i]
In the introduction to her
book, Mother’s Talking, Frances Wells Burck writes, “We have a hard
time taking ourselves seriously in isolation. She is right. There is great
comfort and relief when we realize that we are not alone, that other women
not only can understand our experiences and feelings, but have been there,
too. And there is great delight when we don’t have to hide the facts of our
mothering, but can joyfully share them with others who won’t judge us or
call us crazy.
Breastfeeding - more
specifically, the women who breastfeed – must become accepted, visible, and
valued. Women
must begin to talk about it - honestly, unabashedly and unapologetically. We
need to talk about what it means for ourselves as women and as mothers. We
need to break the silence and shatter the myths that surround the
breastfeeding experience.
Stories are
Unique
Despite our commonalities, our individual stories are unique. And there is
no singular or correct way to nurse, no “right” way to feel about nursing.
Anthropologist Penny Van Esterik talks about the importance of avoiding what
she calls “politically correct” breastfeeding - breastfeeding that is
promoted in a way that tells women there is only one acceptable way to nurse
a baby. Sharing our breastfeeding stories helps us to avoid this. “From
women’s stories,” she writes, “we learn that breastfeeding is about love,
ecology, politics, power, women’s knowledge and the wisdom of the body. It
is about the personal messages and memories that contribute to who we are as
people and the way we relate to others.” [iii]
Storytelling is an act of
power, of taking control of our lives. And your story, too, deserves to be
heard.
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