Hirkani's Daughters

This morning during Z's nap, I finished reading Hirkani's Daughters: Women Who Scale Modern Mountains to Combine Breastfeeding & Working from my LLL Group's lending library. It was really, really good! In the mother-to-mother style LLL does so well, the book is mainly a compilation of women's stories about their experiences with managing breastfeeding while working (most often via pumping, but there were other creative managements as well!). I just love women's stories in general--their experiences of motherhood. I love reading and seeing all the commonalities and the differences as well. In a way, this book read like a really long issue of New Beginnings ;-)

The title of the book comes from a legend from India in which a milkmaid scales down a 1000 foot cliff in order to get back to her baby to nurse him (she is away delivering milk to the palace on top of the mountain and gets detained there). The modern women in this book also overcome many, many obstacles in their quests to continue to breastfeed their babies. This book is particularly special because it is international in scope--there are mother's stories from Pakistan, Mongolia, Tazmania, South Africa, Japan, Cambodia, etc. It was fascinating to read them all and see how many threads were *identical*, whether the mother was sharing her story from Ireland or from New York.