I remember leaving the lactation consultant’s office with my mom right behind me. She was kind enough to drive me to my appointment since I was still within the two week window post c-section where I couldn’t drive myself. My husband decided to keep the older three kids with him so I could just focus in during this appointment and hopefully figure out what was wrong with our current feeding arrangement for our baby. It was a very enlightening, but also long and frustrating appointment full of possible tricks and techniques to help figure out what was wrong and what might make it right. While we were leaving my mom leaned over to me and said, “In my day we just smooshed our boobs in their mouths.” Words to live by.
Breastfeeding used to seem like a simpler thing. Mothers taught it to their daughters for generations and generations. It was “natural” and the obvious choice for the vast majority of mothers throughout the course of time. With the advent of formula there has become a lack of that generational knowledge and a woman may not have a mother, aunt, or sisters to teach her what was once such common knowledge. So we’ve created breastfeeding classes, written books, developed support groups, written and read blog posts, all in an effort to help us learn how to do what is at its root just “smooshing our boobs in their mouths”. I’m guessing there are many women like my mom who see it as one more example of how we hipsters like to complicate things or how we think we’re the first generation to ever do anything this way (gardening! composting! cloth diapers! we’re SO earthy!).
I’ve got a lot of respect for my mom in this regard. She chose to buck the trend and breastfed all five of her kids back when the universally accepted idea was that breastmilk was inferior to the magical formula she could have been giving us. She didn’t care. She also did it without the generational knowledge that was available to me because of her hard-earned experience. You see, my grandmother was unable to breastfeed. If the story can be believed, her doctor explained it to her this way, “Some women are milk cows and some women are beef cows. You’re a beef cow.” As cattle farmers, maybe this was a comfort to her, but it’s hard to imagine any woman would love to hear themselves described as a “beef cow”. She managed to raise five healthy farm kids on whatever solution she could figure out without access to formula or a ready supply of breast milk, but I’m sure it wasn’t easy.
