Diplomats and Breastfeeding

I had an interesting dream last night that I feel inspired to post about. I was in a sort of waiting room area with quite a few people in it including my sister-in-law and also a Diplomat (distinguished older gentleman with gray hair). Z wanted to nurse and so I picked him up and then turned slightly away from the diplomat in order to start nursing him. My sister-in-law said something like, "I see you're trying to hide from everyone. I can't believe you're STILL breastfeeding him." The diplomat then said, "at the Embassy we have an old saying: we work together as smoothly and comfortably as a good latch."

LOL! My dreaming brain cracks me up :)

Milk, Money, & Madness

This week I finished reading Milk, Money, and Madness. Dia Michels is one of the co-authors and I've actually heard her speak twice--once in 2003 when I was pregnant with L and then last fall at the LLL of MO conference. Anyway, it seemed like it was well past time to finally actually read her book! It was quite good. I'm surprised at how riveting a book about the "culture and politics of breastfeeding" can be! (It did remind me a lot of The Politics of Breastfeeding that I read a while ago.)

I only have time to share quotes today, not much evaluation:

"Babies need holding, stroking, dressing, bathing, comforting, burping, and, within a short time, feeding solids. Dad can do every one of these. The desire to participate should not be confused with the need to give the baby the best of what each partner has to offer."

I liked this one because I hear from people SO often that they want Daddy to be able to participate in baby care by giving the baby a bottle. There are LOTS of things that fathers can do for their babies, other than feeding.

A good one with regard to public breastfeeding/breasts as sexual objects:

"When the attitude is taken that a woman’s breasts belong to her and no job is more important than caring for one’s young, the confusion between breastfeeding and obscenity goes away."

With regard to the argument that bottle feeding "liberates" women from the tyranny/restrictiveness of breastfeeding:

"The liberation women need is to breastfeed free of social, medical, and employer constraints. Instead, they have been presented with the notion that liberation comes with being able to abandon breastfeeding without guilt. This 'liberation,' though, is an illusion representing a distorted view of what breastfeeding is, what breastfeeding does, and what both mothers and babies need after birth."


With regard to how women are treated pp in other cultures, etc…

"An entirely different situation exists in societies where technology is emphasized. The birth process is seen from a clinical viewpoint, with obstetricians emphasizing technology. A battery of defensive practices are employed, some of which are totally irrelevant to the health of either mother or infant. Skilled technicians spend their time and the family’s money on identifying the baby’s gender and performing various stress tests. All the focus is geared toward the actual birth. After the birth, mother and baby become medically separated. The infant is relegated to the care of the pediatrician, the uterus to the obstetrician, the breast abscess to the surgeon. While the various anatomical parts are given the required care, the person who is the new mother is often left to fend for herself...All the tender loving care goes flows to the infant; the mother becomes and unpaid nursemaid."

The quote continues:

"This may appear to be a harsh evaluation, but it is realistic. In western society, the baby gets attention while the mother is given lectures. Pregnancy is considered an illness; once the 'illness' is over, interest in her wanes. Mothers in 'civilized' countries often have no or very little help with a new baby. Women tend to be home alone to fend for themselves and the children. They are typically isolated socially and expected to complete their usual chores, including keeping the house clean and doing the cooking and shopping, while being the sole person to care for the infant..."

"According to the U.S. rules and regulations governing the federal worker, the pregnancy and postdelivery period is referred to as 'the period of incapacitation.' This reflects the reality of the a situation that should be called 'the period of joy.' Historically, mothering was a group process shared by the available adults. This provided not only needed relief but also readily available advice and experience. Of the 'traditional' and 'modern' child-rearing situations, it is the modern isolated western mom who is much more likely to find herself experiencing lactation failure." (emphasis mine)

I think these quotes are important because I think there is a tendency for women to look inward and blame themselves for "failing" at breastfeeding. There is also an unfortunate tendency for other mothers to also blame the mother for "failing"--she was "too lazy" or "just made an excuse," etc. We live in a bottle feeding culture; The cards are stacked against breastfeeding from many angles--economically, socially, medically etc. When I hear women discussing why they couldn't breastfeed, I don't hear "excuses," I hear "broken systems of support" (whether it be the epidural in the hospital that caused fluid retention and the accompanying flat nipples, the employer who won't provide a pumping location, the husband who doesn't want to share "his breasts," or the mother-in-law who thinks breastfeeding is perverted). Of course, there can actually be true "excuses" and "bad reasons" and women theoretically always have the power to choose for themselves rather than be swayed by those around them, but there is a whole lot that goes into not-breastfeeding, besides the quickest answer or what is initially apparent on the surface. Breastfeeding occurs in a context and that context is often one that DOES NOT reinforce it. I often think it is more of miracle that a mother manages to breastfeed, than wonder why she doesn't!

And, a final quote:

"...infant formula sales comprise up to 50% of the total profits of Abbott Labs, an enormous pharmaceutical concern."

And the U.S. government is the largest buyer of formula, providing it for something like 37% of babies. I should have written that quote down too!

Quick catch up

It has been super busy around here lately, but I wanted to go ahead and try for a quick catch-up.

A couple of weeks ago I finished a great book. It had intrigue, suspense, dirty double-crossers, backstabbing, plots, conspiracies, and more. Was it a new mystery novel? No! It was The Politics of Breastfeeding! Seriously, this was a phenomenal book. I bought it over two years ago and it took me a long time to get to it on my to-read shelf, because I was kind of thinking, "how interesting could this be?" It was great. I really recommend it. It will make you outraged and shocked though! This was my surprise hit of the year. Someday I might get around to sharing some great quotes from this book, but probably not because there are so many more books to read...

Speaking of my to-read shelf, you may be surprised--or throughly NOT surprised--to know that I have probably 80 books on my to-read shelf. I also have about 30 on my Amazon wishlist, 10 on my Bookins want list, and about 30 more on my library wish list (as in, books I want to read, but don't want to buy).

Quite some time ago, I also finished reading Creating a Charmed Life. This was one of those inspirational/motivational books that I read a little snippet of at a time after my morning yoga. In one of the sections--"Choose Actual Over Virtual Reality"-- it s aid,"There's a saying that goes, 'Some people make things happen. Others watch things happen. The rest wonder what happened.' The watchers are rapidly outnumbering both other groups, but real life is participatory. It balances consumption with production. And when you leave it there's less regret, because you know without any doubt that you were here."

I also read the book Living in Balance. Lots of good quotes, but kind of slow reading. The content was right up my alley, but the pace and style of the book was unengaging and actually kind of boring to get through. Quote of a quote I really liked:

"I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible, to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit."

--Dawna Markova

Today, I also finished reading my brand new copy of Prepared Childbirth: The Educator's Guide. I'd heard this was a "must have" for CBEs. I did find several things I could use right away and I'm incorporating them into the next series I have (starts next week). However, I didn't find that much that was new or fresh to me. It actually just reinforced that I've put together a pretty good and complete "curriculum" for my birth classes and maybe I need to stop trying to find even more and more curriculums to draw from--my own program is good how it is!

Journal Articles

I have no time to blog this week, so this is a quickie just to report that my essay in Midwifery Today came out this month. This was just a short, semi-funny piece about "the mess" from my glorious homebirth ;-) It was fun.

My article about the birth-breastfeeding continuum was also published in the International Journal of Childbirth Education (ICEA's pub) this month. This was a serious article with references and an abstract and all that good stuff. I ended up being pretty proud of it.

L had a little poem published in HMN's The Wise Mom in their new "Holistic Kids" section this month too:

The valley is so beautiful.
The things are so bright.

The family is so great.
And everything's all right.

This week I also enjoyed reading this month's International Doula from DONA and my first issue of my new subscription to Hip Mama. I've long wanted to subscribe to Hip Mama, but never have until now. Interesting pieces that are little bit outside of my own personal somewhat insulated and privileged sphere of motherhood.

Also, my beloved Brain, Child arrived and I gobbled it up without an ounce of self-control, as usual. I swear, if I was going to be marooned on a desert island with only one thing to read I would say this magazine. Except, I read it WAY too fast, so it wouldn't last me nearly long enough and I'd "starve" of reading materials before actual starvation even had a slight chance to set it. So, I'd have to, reluctantly, choose something else. Like a big huge Complete Works of Shakespeare or something. Though, if I was going to die on the island, wouldn't it be better to go out happy with Brain, Child by my side instead of slogging through Shakespeare, who has never floated my boat, despite my best efforts? (I took a whole freakin' CLASS in Shakespeare in college and yet have never fully made it through ANY of his works...) Okay, digression over. Proceed!

Earlier this month I enjoyed some thought provoking articles about life and death in UU World magazine.

Only finished one book and haven't had time to write about it yet. This is all I can do for today!

In the Womb

I had the opportunity recently to watch the film In the Womb, by National Geographic. Overall, it was an interesting film though I thought it became repetitive and there was computer graphic footage that seemed to be repeated over and over again. It really brought home the miracle of human development. It is truly like magic how a baby develops in such complexity and perfection!

Of course, I was most interested to see the birth at the very end of the film and it was great! The mother gave birth standing, with her heads and arms leaning on the hospital bed. The voiceover made comments about how movement during labor is so important and how upright--standing, squatting, kneeling--is the best way to give birth (and thankfully this was backed up by what was actually happening on the screen instead of just the "ideal"). So, that was really cool! It is a very brief clip and not very easy to see so I wouldn't recommend the video for use as a birth video per se, it was just nice to see a normal birth portrayed smoothly (and in hospital setting). Then at the end the mother was nursing the baby and the baby was kind of mouthing the nipple and the nurse suddenly popped in and whisked the baby away from her--holding it up naked and away from her body so the poor thing was all splayed out and crying. My two year old was watching the film with me and I said, "oh no! They took the baby away from the mama!" The baby started to cry and my little guy FREAKED OUT, he clung to me crying and saying "baby. way. mama. WAAHH" and then asking to nurse. It was sad, but also cute that he cared so much and knew where the baby really should be--with its mama!

Recent Publications

I haven't had a chance to post yet about the recent publications I've had. The most recent was in Compleat Mother--a short little poem about nursing Z. I wrote it in January when he was really sick and we were spending a lot of time lying down and nursing through it. It is called "How to Meditate with a Baby." I also was really proud to have my article "Planning for Postpartum" published in the spring issue of the Journal of API. This would be a good article to use in birth education classes if I do say so myself :)

In March, I had an essay in New Beginnings (LLLI's magazine). This one was primarily about nursing while reading and is called "The Rhythm of Our Lives." Hopefully it will be available online at some point. I also had an article in the CAPPA Quarterly called "Creating Needle Felted Birth Art Sculptures."

Then, finally the spring issue of CfM News (which I edit--so, I guess maybe it doesn't count as a publication since I put it in there myself!) I had my "Small Stone Birth Activism" article as a well as a book review of Birth Book and a book review of Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy & Birth.

Catching up with recent reads

My stack of books that are waiting to be blogged about is unbelievable, so I decided I'm just going to write a quick post about the ones I don't have much to say about! I have one waiting that I read shortly after Christmas, but I jotted down like SIX pages in my notebook of things to write about it and so still it lingers in my to-blog pile.

So, sometime during the last month or so I've read the following books and don't have much to say about them (wow! what a fascinating post already!):

Full Circles, Overlapping Lives--this one is by Mary Catherine Bateson who is Margaret Mead's daughter. The subtitle of this book was "culture and generation in transition" and I expected something very different from it than what it actually was. It was really a sort of in depth case study of the multigenerational participants in a seminar the author taught at a university one year. I confess that I got bored and skimmed towards the end. I felt the title was misleading and I was not expecting a case study sort of book, but rather a sociological type book. One quote I liked early on when the author was discussing her relationship with her daughter and how being of different generations parents and children have a gap--"I have learned to work with the assumption that my daughter and I were born in different countries--not according to our passports but because our country has changed, making me an immigrant from the past."(emphasis mine) This was funny and also somehow depressing at once--I feel weird about being an immigrant from the past and yet it is true. Once you can start saying, "ten years ago XYZ..." you know you're an immigrant from the past!

The New View of Self--this was another one whose title and subtitle (How Genes and Neurotransmitters Shape Your Mind, Your Personality, and Your Mental Health) seemed misleading once I got into it. This book was supposed to be about how the brain works and also about the self, but it was basically exclusively about mental illness and how mental illnesses work and what is wrong in the brain that leads to mental illness. I was not really enraptured with it, but struggle with the whole, "I started reading it and can't stop now" mental illness of my own. ;-)

Babies, Breastfeeding, and Bonding--this is a book by Ina May Gaskin that I had never heard of before I picked it up on the used book table of an LLL workshop in 2006. I just got around to reading it and didn't end up reading it cover to cover because a lot of the breastfeeding info was repetitive to me (and/or outdated since the book was written in the 80's). I was interested to read it though and will now pass it on to a friend. It has content in it about Ina May's own children that I was not familiar with before, like that her oldest daughter had a brain tumor and died at 20. She also makes a good point in the book that I've taken to heart about nursing older babies/toddlers when they start "getting rough." She makes the point that they need to learn how to treat people with respect and you should not be a "punching bag" for your nursing toddler. I needed to hear this because I have an aggressive nurser who is NOT polite and gentle to me while he nurses. Reading her sections about that made me feel committed to "cracking down" on Z's overzealous twiddling and writhing, kicking, etc. I'm kind of a pushover for my nurslings. She had some different ideas about weaning than I personally hold and she told a story that she thought was funny, but I found creepy--the mother put soot from the stove all over her breasts and when her rough little toddler boy came to ask to nurse next she lifted her shirt, he saw the blackness and said, "what happened?!" and she said, "pigs got 'em." AAAHHHH! He never nursed again. Ina May thought this was a funny story, but I thought it was harsh and disturbing (though also kind of funny). I told M & L the story and L thought it was hilarious and says the "pigs got 'em" line now when I'm nursing Z and bugs me with it!

Me Talk Pretty One Day--this was a funny book. a little diversion from my usual and read just for fun. It was actually laugh out loud funny in some places (also really crude in others...). Talking about computers he says, "I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn't real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class." I wonder what he thinks of blogs?!

Mind Over Labor--this one I have more to blog about, but I'm going to do it in a different blog, so I'm just briefly mentioning it here. I've read this book once before and re-read it looking for ideas for guided imagery or birth visualization exercises to use in birth classes. It has some good "mental work" to prepare for birth. I like it quite a bit. It is on the older side (1987), but not particularly dated.

Good! Now I have 7 books and a few articles left in my stack of "to blog." Blogging shouldn't be a "chore," LOL! That's what I get for being all Type A all the time, I can take a hobby and turn it into a "job." Maybe I read too much if I just wrote about 5 books (and another one yesterday) and I still have 7 books to write about as well as three that I'm currently reading...

The Mother Dance

A couple of weeks ago I also finished reading The Mother Dance. The book is by Harriet Lerner a well known author, psychologist, lecturer, etc. about the psychology of women. (Probably best known for her The Dance of Anger.) I quoted this book a few weeks ago with her comments about perfectionism. She also addresses the ever present maternal guilt:

"Guilt keeps mothers narrowly focused on the question 'What's wrong with me?' and prevents us from becoming effective agents of personal and social change."

On a totally unrelated note, in another section she discusses research that was done on mothering practices in late 18th century Paris when using wet nurses was widespread. "In 1780 there were 21,000 babies born in Paris. Only 1,000 of these babies were breastfed by their mothers, and only 1,000 were wet-nursed in the city. The vast majority of these infants, 19,000 of them, were sent to wet nurses outside of Paris, sometimes as far as 125 miles away. It was ordinary practice for the children to remain there for as long as three to five years."

This was a cultural artifact--not of economic necessity--during this time women were encouraged to organize their lives around their husbands and breastfeeding was seen to interfere with a woman's modesty (as well as with her ability to provide for her husband's sexual needs).

I thought this was fascinating and also sad. It also made me chuckle a little to think about complaints about children being in day care--at least the baby isn't being farmed out 125 miles away for 5 years anymore! LOL!

Last week I also finished the book Tying Rocks to Clouds: Meetings and Conversations with Wise and Spiritual People. This book was so-so and I found myself frequently feeling depressed when I was reading it, so...

Anyway, a good quote regarding parenting (from the author's interview with Stephen Levine who has three children):

"Talk about a fierce teaching. It is easier to sit for three years in a cave than to raise a child from the time he is born to three years old." ;-) This was in response to a question about whether serious spiritual development is possible when having relationships with others (spouse, children, etc.) I firmly believe that without having children, I would be less "developed" than I am now--it is sort of like having kids is bad for the self (ego), but great for the soul!

Magic of Mothering

When I was reading Birth Book a couple of weeks ago, I read the section in it about "imprinting" (I think it has been fairly well established that there isn't really human "imprinting" after birth, but when this book was written it was still one of the ideas). Anyway, there was a section about research done with baby goats done to look at the ability of a mother to protect her offspring from environmental stress. They separated twin goats and put some in rooms alone and the others in rooms with their mothers. The only difference in the room was the presence of the mother. An artificial stress environment was created involving turning off the lights every two minutes and shocking the baby goats on the legs ( :( ). After the babies were conditioned like this, they were tested again two years later. This time all the babies (now adult goats) were in rooms alone and were again "treated" to the lights off and shock routine. The goats who had been with their mothers during the early experience showed no evidence of abnormal behavior in the stressful environment. The ones who had not been with their mothers did show "definite neurotic behavior." Somehow, the presence of the mother alone served to protect the baby goats from the traumatic influences and keep them from being "psychologically" disturbed in adulthood.

Except for feeling sorry for the baby goats, I thought this information was SO COOL. How magic are mothers that just by being there we can help our babies--even if there is still something stressful going on, our simple presence helps our babies not be stressed by it and continue to feel safe. Magic!

This was included in the book because of the idea that birth may be a stressful environment for a baby and if the continuity of motherbaby is maintained after birth (immediate skin-to-skin contact and opportunity for breastfeeding), the baby does not become stressed or "neurotic." But...if the continuity for mother and baby is broken by separation (baby whisked away for weighing or whatever), both mother and baby are stressed by this and it may have an impact on their future relationship and behavior. The book also talks about how the sound of the baby's first cry has a sort of "imprinting" effect on the mother in that her uterus immediately begins to contract and involute after hearing her baby's first cry, whereas mothers who are immediately separated from their babies and do not make contact with them have a higher likelihood of postpartum hemorrhage (I have no idea if this has been debunked or not since the book was written in 1972, but it was an interesting idea to read about).

In case anyone pays attention, I'm attempting to switch my schedule around and start blogging here on Saturdays instead of Fridays (and blog for CfM on Fridays instead of Saturdays).

The Mother's Guide to the Meaning of Life

Of course, I received many lovely books as gifts this year which will keep me reading and posting for quite some time to come. I got a short little book called The Mother's Guide to the Meaning of Life which I read Christmas evening in about 30 minutes. I wanted it because the subtitle is "What I've Learned in my Never-Ending Quest to Become a Dalai Mama." Dalai Mama--I love it! Aside from that little touch of genius, I didn't really glean a whole lot from the actual book. Kind of funny with a lot of cute little line illustrations (like of her "Palm Pilot"--the palm of her hand with lots of notes written on it. ;-) I have one of those too!) She talked briefly about questing for perfection--"if you really were a perfect mother, everyone would hate you"--and quoted The Mother Dance author Harriet Lerner regarding perfectionism as the archenemy of mothers. Coincidentally, I also got The Mother Dance for Christmas and later in the evening when I opened it up to skim through I randomly opened to that same quote about perfectionism. Funny, eh?!

I also read Riddle of the Prairie Bride. This was a predictable "history mystery" for preteen girls (I bought it on clearance from American Girl and gave it to my mom to stuff my stocking with). Widowed father of 12 year old Ida Kate sends for a mail order bride. She arrives with her one year old baby and it soon becomes clear that something is amiss. She does not meet her description from her letters, gives inconsistent answers and so forth. Ida Kate investigates, mystery is solved, and true love reigns on the prairie. Why am I bothering to blog about this you may ask? Because, I keep an eye out for "breastfeeding as normal" content in kids books and I loved that in this mystery the first clue that the prairie bride is not who she says she is is that she didn't nurse her baby! (and, a one-year-old baby at that! Wow!) "She feeds him milk from a cup rather than nursing him as mothers do..." (Ida Kate notices the baby patting on the front of the mystery woman's dress and instead of nursing him, she gets a cup of milk for him). I also liked the use of the word "nurse" instead of "breastfeed." Cozy, familiar, desirable, and NORMAL. (With the emphasis on the process and not the product as Diane Wiessinger would say.)

The children's books the Royal Diaries and the other historical fictional diaries in that series of books also often mention breastfeeding and I like that about them (I appreciate it because it is NOT necessary for the content of the book, but it adds a nice touch of realism and normalness). Also, I just remembered that in one of the AG short stories--Josefina's Reward I think---her older sister has to hurry back from what she is doing to "nurse the baby" (who is also over one year old and walks and talks in the book).

Breastfeeding as Radical...

I finished reading the fall issue of Utne a few days ago and marked the following quote to share from K.C. Compton in an article about baby boomers:

"We discovered firsthand the radical nature of simple acts: Sit in the front of the bus, ask that your husband be present during his son's birth, decide to feed your infant with your own breasts, refuse the nuclear power plant being built just up the road. We also learned how much more effective those acts can be when compounded by the hundreds and thousands, their feet on the street..."

This reminds me of a powerful editorial by Peggy O'Mara that I read once in Mothering, urging women to see their mothering as a political act.

Also, since I'm posting about breastfeeding, I wanted to mention that I got the new LLLI catalog last week. It has been *completely* redone and the layout and appearance has received a total makeover. The results are great. I love it! It is "pocket" guide style called "Breastfeeding Guide: tips & products." So, instead of being a catalog, it is actually a helpful little booklet first and a catalog second (the products come in the second half of the booklet, after the tips. 26 pages of questions answered and then 25 pages of catalog--pocket sized though, so maybe 3 x 5?). For being so small, it covers a remarkable amount of territory and gives lots of good information--from "How often will my baby nurse?" to "When will baby sleep all night?" to "Is it possible to breastfeed twins?" Like I said, it is a great little *book* not just a catalog. I love it and think it was a stroke of genius to reach out this way!

Reflux & Rice Cereal

I read the winter issue of Parenting magazine this week and was really happy to see the following snippet in their brief article about reflux/GERD:

"Leading experts no longer recommend thickening bottles with rice cereal, especially for regular spitup. One reason: A new study in Pediatrics found that this can lead to overfeeding, which only makes spitup worse."

I was SO glad to see this in mainstream print. Breastfeeding advocates have known this information for some time, but in my experience many doctors still recommend thickening feeds. I even talked with a mother who had been told to pump and exclusively bottle feed because her baby "had" to have rice cereal in every feed and there was no way to get the rice cereal into her breasts so it would have to be fed by bottle. I did suggest that as a compromise maybe they could feed the cereal to the baby by spoon before or after nursing, rather than pump and mix the cereal into the expressed milk. These kinds of situations make me want to tear my hair out in frustration and dismay :( So, I'm glad to see it in readily available public print that rice cereal additions DO NOT help.

The Wisdom of the Body

I'm on a decluttering rampage thanks to my recent reads and one of the things I'm evaluating is my large stack of "to-reads." Many of these are unsellables from book sale expeditions and so I keep them to read "someday"--not because I really want to per se, but because I have them and they look pretty interesting (I get rid of TONS that do NOT look interesting, so I'm not a totally hopeless case here!) Anyway, one that I've had for years, I finally realized is never going to make the cut and actually be read (there are so many actually great things to read, why waste my time on only "pretty interesting"?!) is The Wisdom of the Body. I skimmed through it last night reading the pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding parts and found the following quote when discussing the biology and physiology of milk production and delivery:

"The beauty of a nursing mother can never be explained by a little oxytocin around the milk glands."

How do I get so much reading done?

This is why! :-)

I wrote an essay about nursing and reading recently and wanted to share one of the pictures DH took for it.

LLL of MO Conference

Last weekend I enjoyed the LLL of MO conference in Columbia. It was really well put together and I enjoyed myself thoroughly (I also got thoroughly exhausted--it was a packed schedule--and came home with a nasty, wracking cough). I "won" some cool stuff in the silent auction and raffle too--such as a Peekaru baby carrier cover and a Moby Wrap. And, the conference tote bags are cool--nice black and red with a stylized line drawing of several mothers and babies in a half circle. Really very nice. It was great to see old friends and get to know new ones better and also to meet people face-to-face who I only know through email. Face-to-face makes SUCH an important difference and is so much more real than "virtual" connections are.

I presented my session on Celebrating Pregnancy through Art and it went well. This was the first time I've presented at a conference and it was a delight. My session did not have many participants, but more than had originally signed up for it, so that was encouraging. The picture here is of the display board I made of different types of art during pregnancy (most of which hang on my wall in real-life. This was like a portable birth art wall for me! The picture below is of figurines created during this same session at the FoMM retreat in Sept. I didn't take a photo of the figures from the LLL conference session.



My favorite sessions were those presented by Diane Wiessinger. She gave an amazing session called "Watch Your Language" that was about how we talk about breastfeeding. An example, using the word "special" to describe breastfeeding--a "special bond" a "special nursing corner" etc. and also using the word "perfect" (which communicates something that isn't reasonable or that "real" people can't do or live up to). She encouraged us not to "glorify breastfeeding" like this. Breastfeeding ISN'T special, it is NORMAL. A breastfed baby has a "normal bond" with its mother! Human milk isn't the perfect food for babies, it is the NORMAL food for babies. I just loved it. I love language and hidden "messages" in our words. I could go on about this presentation for hours. It was great. She also gave a meaningful talk about "Changing Thoughts on Latch" that was really important.

I also really enjoyed a session by Deanna about "Following Your Passion While Raising Your Family." One of the insights I re-had following this session was whether I would prefer people to say after I die, "She did everything she was supposed to do, "OR, "she was joyful." I feel like much of the way I live my life would garner me the first response--I did everything I was supposed to do (but didn't have a whole lot of fun doing it...) WAH! I need to do some serious thinking and reorganizing and re-prioritizing. I'll keep you posted as to what develops...First thing might to reconsider the "serious" thinking and do some "joyful" thinking instead, LOL! ;-)

The link was made several times during this conference (by both headliner speakers--Diane & then Dia Michels) about the need to more explicitly link birth with breastfeeding. As Dia said, there needs to be a new word, "birthandbreastfeeding." Sometimes in LLL settings I feel apologetic about my passion for birth or like I need to make sure to keep it low key, so it was nice to have it affirmed that the connection is undeniable. The two are inextricably linked and it DOES matter how and where you give birth. As Diane said, "It's the birth, silly!"

The Writer's Life

I read four books this week, but I'm leaving for a conference shortly and so only have time to write about the one I have the least to say about! ;-) I was going through books to get rid of and came across The Writer's Life. It was a really quick read and I read it that evening. It was basically a collection of quotes from the diaries of famous writers (like John Steinbeck, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Mark Twain, etc.) The compilers of the book had gone through these authors' diaries and put together a new book--it is organized in to chronological sections starting with excerpts written in youth and then thoughts about the writing process, fame, ambition, etc. and then concludes with thoughts about death, life's work, immortality. Not all authors are quoted in each section, just a handful. Anyway, it was a mildly interesting read (and a quick one). I probably should have just put it in my giveaway box. I need to get better about that!

Anyway, one quote from Rosellen Brown in particular stood out to me:

"I know that for me, writing has something in common with nursing the baby. I can't do it if I don't do it all the time. Put it aside to build up strength, the flow will dwindle and finally disappear. When the baby was at my breast ten times a day, I had a rare secret feeling that we were violating a law of nature, defying a form of entropy...One cannot hoard some things. The more I gave the baby, the more I had to give her, and had I tried to conserve myself, I would have found that I conserved nothing."

I identified with this--that is one reason I keep a blog. I also find I need the "proper" time to write though, or the flow isn't there. That isn't true of nursing! I can do that anywhere, anytime!

I'll write about my other three reads when I get home!

Honoring Our Cycles

This week I read Honoring Our Cycles by Katie Singer. I've had this book for quite a while and just now had a chance to read it. It was a very quick and simple read--I think that is one of the book's main strengths, it is written in very clear, basic English (maybe a sixth grade reading level?). It also makes it somewhat stilted or somehow "off" to read it though because it IS so simplistically written (makes you feel like you are none-too-bright or something! LOL!). Anyway, to be totally honest, one of the only reasons I wanted this book is because I'm so enraptured by the cover. I just love it. I think it is a beautiful, wondering book cover. I'm attempted to share the cover image here. We'll see if I'm actually successful when I publish this post!





Okay, back to the book. It is about using fertility awareness to avoid or promote pregnancy (avoid in my case). The book is clear and easy to follow. It contains some inaccurate breastfeeding information, which I'm very sensitive to--including such odd comments as, "sometimes, when a mother is away from her baby for an afternoon or more, her milk dries up." Huh?! This is where the overly simplistic approach does not succeed, because it is NOT correct (in this case).

I'm very interested and excited right now by fertility awareness--how coolly and magically women's bodies indicate where they are in their fertility cycle. I am regretful that I spend so many years hormonally manipulating my cycle rather than just paying attention to my own body (which clearly communicates with me). so, this book reinforced this "magic-ness." I guess I would recommend it to others, but I'm not sure. There is a certain "spark" missing because it is so basic (I think it is designed for use with low-literacy populations). That gorgeous cover makes up for a lot though! ;-)

Thoughts about breastfeeding

Last month I read the fall Compleat Mother and there was a great quote in it from the British Medical Journal:

"Giving women leaflets on the benefits of breastfeeding is of little value. Inviting women to participate in small discussion groups with one to one advice sessions achieved the best results, in some cases tripling the rate of breastfeeding success."

I've also been wanting to share a link to one of my favorite articles about breastfeeding, "Breastfeeding as a Spiritual Practice." This article was immensely meaningful to me when my first baby was born--it was published in the fall 2003 issue of Mothering magazine, which was the first issue I received after the birth of my first son. He was about 2 or so weeks old when I got it and this article was in it and it was exactly what I needed to read. Breastfeeding can be a meditative and spiritual act--it is actually a "practice" a "discipline" of sorts. The author, Leslie Davis, explains it better:

"I realized I'd never before devoted myself to something so entirely. Of course I've devoted myself to my husband, to my family, to friends, to my writing, to mothering, and even to God and other spiritual endeavors at various points in my life...I'd completely given myself to this act of nursing in a way that I never had before. Nothing was more important than nursing my son. nothing was put before it. There was no procrastination as with exercise, no excuses as with trying to stop eating sugar, no laziness as with housecleaning and other chores. Nursing had to be done, and I did it, over and over again, multiple times a day, for more than 800 days in a row. It was the closest thing to a spiritual practice that I'd ever experienced."

Viewing the act of breastfeeding through a spiritual "lens" like this was a lifeline to me as a vulnerable, sensitive, and "bruised" postpartum woman trying desperately to adjust my pace as an overachieving "successful" independent person to one spending hours in my nursing chair attached to a tiny mouth. I marvel at the uncountable number of times I spent nursing L and that I now spend nursing Z. I calculated that I've probably nursed Z about 3,000 times just lying down to go to sleep (nap or bedtime, plus time waking up too). That is just the lying down times, not the sitting in the chair or standing in the Ergo times. (Side note: this is the key to my reading success--I've had over 3,000 opportunities during the last year to pick up a book or other reading materials, LOL!)

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In other news, I finally added to my post from last month about Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.

LLLI Conference + The Revolutionaries Wore Pearls

I returned from the LLLI conference in Chicago on July 24th (and it was our ninth wedding anniversary the next day :-). It was a wonderful, wonderful trip. I learned a lot and just had a great time. I felt rejuvenated and re-inspired as a Leader, a woman, and as a mother. I really needed a boost in all three areas and it was great to get it. I left the conference with a sense that LLL is of *vital* importance and I felt a new and profound sense of purpose about my work. I also finally had a sense that maybe I AM in this for the long haul--I see myself helping mothers and babies in some way or another for many, many more years to come. It was also great for me to see how old so many people were (LOL!). I get this frantic sense that I need to do everything and I need to do it RIGHT NOW and so it was an awesome reminder for me to see how many people that I respect and admire (like the Sears') are pretty "mature." It showed me that I have time to work on my purposes and accomplish my goals--I don't need to rush. There's time enough for me!

Anyway, while I was there I purchased their new book The Revolutionaries Wore Pearls.
It was interesting and good, but did have a note of finality to it that I also felt underscoring the International Conference. It also was very perky and, “Life was GREAT!” and Seven Voices, One Dream showed a more realistic picture, I think, of what the founders went through. They definitely had a revolutionary impact though, no matter how you look at it. As a side note, that was another perk of the conference for me, I felt like a revolutionary! The book is "scrapbook style" and has lots of images of newspaper clippings, etc. That was fun.

I was also interested to see the phrase several times, "the beginning of a dream to bring gentleness to giving birth and joy to the womanly art of breastfeeding" (emphasis mine). So, my overlapping interests in birth and breastfeeding mirror that of the Founders. The two are on a continuum and birth practices can have such a profound impact on breastfeeding.

Speaking of the Founders, I was delighted to see 6 of them at the conference and was even more delighted to speak with and get autographs from two of them--Mary White & Marian Tompson. I also got my picture taken with Mary White (as well as with Ina May Gaskin and with Peggy O'Mara! I was so starstruck--this conference had all of my "celebrities" in one place! It was so, so cool!)

Having Faith

This weekend I finished reading Having Faith, another accidental find from Bookins.com. It was such a good book--both fascinating and frightening. The subtitle is An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood. The book is the account of an ecologist's pregnancy and then two years of breastfeeding. She turns her ecologist's eye toward studying her own pregnancy--she herself has become a "habitat" an "ocean for one" and she explores pregnancy through that lens (of herself as habitat). I learned all kinds of things about how the body works, about the physical processes involved in pregnancy, and WAY more than I wanted to know about the role of environmental contaminants (that was the frightening part of the book). It sounds boring on the surface, but she was very skillful at weaving together the human interest parts of the story with the very technical/scientific elements/descriptions/parts of the story. She also talks at length about birth defects and about past major scandals/tragedies involving iatrogenic birth defects (Thalidomide, etc.) Some of it was horrifying. With regard to environmental contaminants such as lead, mercury, etc. she makes the point that books geared towards pregnant women are very strict with the "no smoking, no drinking, no changing the cat litter, and no eating soft cheese" stuff and RARELY mention, except to totally blow off, things such as the nitrite levels in your drinking water. Or, the pounds and pounds of lead that was belched into the atmosphere during the "leaded gasoline" era and that we are STILL absorbing into the bodies of our unborn right now through soil and water contamination. Conventional books tend to pooh-pooh worries about environmental things as, "don't worry your pretty little head about that," while taking a hard line at the soft cheese which are, frankly, the least of our worries!

When it comes to breastfeeding, she makes a wonderful point that had never even crossed my radar--when considering ecological models of food chains and biomagnification (the process by which contaminants are increased the higher the step on the food chain), motherfed BABIES should actually be considered the pinnacle of the food chain. Usually, the charts stop with "man" as the top of the foodchain, but HELLO, it is actually the baby at mother's breast who is at the top of the food chain. This is kind of cool in a sense, but deeply horrifying in another--the baby is receiving the highest body concentration of poisons and toxins from our planet's food chain :-( Mothers actually reduce their own body's load of toxins by breastfeeding (because much of the fat in breastmilk comes from the mother's stored body fat, which is also where all the nasty stuff like DDT is stored :-( WAH! Of course, this does NOT mean that breastmilk is bad or that women should not breastfeed--what it means is that it is inexcusable that day by day we are poisoning the bodies of our women and their babies. Breastmilk is the superior infant food--it is also the baby's birthright and isn't it also the baby's birthright to have clean, pure, safe milk? We have a major cultural and biological crisis when mother's milk is tainted with pesticide residue, carpet cleaning chemicals, hormone additives, etc. etc. ::sobs::