Collisions with Reality

When people ask me for parenting advice — oh, don’t look at me like that, expectant parents go around asking everyone for advice — the first thing I always say is, “Even if you don’t know anything about babies, you will know your baby better than anyone else will.”

When the Time cover and article made the rounds yesterday, I was disappointed by much of the reaction I saw to it. I don’t have a problem with the picture on the cover. I don’t have a problem with extended breastfeeding or attachment parenting. What I do have a problem with is the notion that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to parenting. I’m not even naive enough to think that what worked for my son (now 2.5 years) is what will work for the next one.

The article came out just in time for Mother’s Day in the U.S. Maybe for Mother’s Day we could all stop judging each others’ parenting styles?

Yes, everyone, it’s October! One of my favorite months of the year! And so many things on my mind right now:

• There are grapevines in our yard, and all the grapes are ripening now. There are only so many grapes that three people can eat. Any suggestions for what to do with all of them? Keep in mind that they’re table grapes, so wine isn’t an option if I want anything better than Manischewitz. I’m not a huge fan of grape jam, either, but maybe the homemade stuff is worth it?

• The persimmons are also apparently ripening. I’ve never even had a persimmon, so I’m totally lost with them. Suggestions? How best to eat them? Or what to eat them with?
• To all the door-to-door religious proselytizers reading this, here’s a little tip for your future reference. When I excuse myself to go take care of my child who is audibly crying in the next room, I am not the one who is being rude.
• The Women in Astronomy blog has a good post about juggling pumping and traveling for work.
• Finally, we had a power outage last night, lasting a few hours. That didn’t stop me from reciting the bedtime books to my son when I was putting him to sleep. And when did the power come back on? When I got to, “And somebody turns off the light” line in The Going to Bed Book. I love Sandra Boynton, but I had no idea she was that powerful!

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

Yesterday I talked in great detail about why I, personally, need to nurse in public. Today I’m going to avoid specifics, and talk about nursing in public from a feminist perspective.

As I hope the previous posts made clear, nursing in public is essential if I want to leave the house with my child for more than ninety minutes at a time. It doesn’t matter why I want to leave the house — I’m not interested in sitting here and justifying each trip out of the house, or discussing whether it’s appropriate to nurse in public at a given location. I just want to participate in society. I cannot participate in society if I am spending a quarter of the time hidden away feeding my child. It’s true that there are things you have to sacrifice when you have a kid. Participation in society should not be one of them.

Although many fathers — including my husband — take an active, hands-on role in parenting nowadays, breastfeeding is the one task they cannot do. Attempts to discourage nursing in public — whether overtly or subtly — are a burden on women. Not only on women, as it affects the entire family. But disproportionately so on women. Being able to freely nurse in public does not magically remove all the inequalities that women face in society. However, it is an important battle for women who have children.

Some people claim that they are “offended” by nursing in public. I don’t want to entirely dismiss them. But in a showdown between a nursing woman and an offended bystander, who has the most to lose? The worse case for the offended bystander is that he or she has to see a baby being nursed. The worst case for the nursing woman is that she is unable to participate in society. From this, I would argue that it’s more important to protect the right of the woman to nurse in public, than to protect the offended bystander from seeing something that he or she deems unsavory.

Luckily, 44 states agree with me and protect the right of women to nurse in any public or private location.

Related:

• Breastfeeding from a feminist perspective, in general.
• A Bitch PhD post (and links therein) for more on how children are part of society.
• A long, careful post from Feministe on bike lanes in Brooklyn, and how the feelings of one should not trump the free movement of another.

When a nursing mother is kicked out of an establishment, the comments on the resulting news articles are pretty derogatory towards the nursing mother. There are also lots of comments along the lines of, “Why can’t you use the bathroom?”, or “Why didn’t you nurse before you left?”, or “Why can’t you bring a bottle of breastmilk?” Yesterday, I talked about why nursing in public is essential on a practical level. But let me illustrate it more carefully by talking about one particular day in my life, and breaking down the problems with each of those comments.

Read the rest of this entry →

Yesterday, I talked about the basics of breastfeeding. Generally, babies need to nurse all the dang time. Today I thought I’d elaborate as to why the freedom to nurse in public is essential, on a practical level:

It’s easy.

That’s it!

Whoops, I said I’d elaborate, didn’t I. Alright. Let’s do the math (I never promised there wouldn’t be any math!). If you’re lucky, during the day you might have an hour and a half between nursing sessions. How much can you get done in that hour and a half? Including travel time? Including packing up the diaper bag and/or stroller and/or car? Not much. Being able to nurse in public — and I mean public public, not just a fancy mother’s room at Nordstrom — is essential if you want to leave the house for more than ninety minutes at a time. If I’m packing up everything, it would be nice to go to the grocery store and the moms’ group on the same trip out of the house. Or maybe I’m tired of trying to prep all my lunches while the baby naps, and I’d like to get lunch out, even if it’s only a sandwich. If nursing in public isn’t allowed — or is discouraged — then these trips are impossible. I can guess, but not totally predict, when an infant is going to be hungry, and I can’t always time it so that I’m home for every single nursing session.

Then there’s the gear issue. You need the diaper bag, with diapers and wipes and a spare outfit. You need the stroller or some sort of wrap or carrier. You need a carseat if you’re going in the car. That’s all just for one baby — it’s even crazier with other kids in the mix. Nursing in public means not having to lug around bottles and a cooler of breastmilk (or formula), on top of all the other baby gear.

Nursing in public means being able to nurse at a playground while an older child plays. It means being able to meet someone for lunch, and nursing while waiting for the food to arrive (or while you’re eating, if you’re skilled and/or hungry enough). It means getting out of the damn house for more than ninety minutes at a time. It means that having an infant does not prevent me from being part of society — but now I’m getting ahead of myself. Tomorrow: a case study of a real day in my life!

Before I talk about nursing in public, I thought I should go into a bit of detail about breastfeeding. Articles about nursing in public often have a lot of crazy comments. I don’t recommend reading the comments, because they will make your blood boil. Many of them are rude and nasty. But some of them are merely uneducated, and I must admit that I didn’t know much about breastfeeding before I had a kid. I’m no expert now, but with ten months and counting under my belt, I do have some basic knowledge of how it all works.

With the caveat that all kids are different, that I am not a lactation consultant, and this is in the case of no other underlying medical issues, here are a couple of keys to successful breastfeeding:

• Nurse on demand. If I had to boil it down to one catchphrase, it would be this. Nurse on demand. When your baby is hungry, feed him or her. Maybe it’s every two hours for half an hour each time. Maybe it’s every ninety minutes for ten minutes each time. Maybe it’s totally unpredictable, because every time you turn around your baby is sick, or teething, or is going through a growth spurt. But if you nurse on demand, every time, that’s how your body knows how much milk to produce. If you start supplementing, it is very hard to stop supplementing, because your body does not know how much milk your baby needs. If you offer a bottle of pumped milk once in a while, you need to pump as soon as possible, so that your body doesn’t think there was a skipped feeding.

  It’s important to note that breastfed babies often need to nurse frequently. And once they sleep for any real stretch of time at night — say, 4-5 hours — they need to nurse very frequently during the day to get in a good 8-10 nursing sessions. (My son is a champion sleeper — a regular two-hour nap during the day since he was about 6 weeks old, and a regular five-hour stretch at night since about three months. That meant that when he was awake, he was nursing every 1.5-2 hours. It was insane, and stayed like that pretty much until he started solids at 6 months and gradually dropped a couple nursing sessions.)

• Avoid nipple confusion. If possible, no bottles and no pacifiers in the first 4-6 weeks. I must confess that we only made it 2 1/2 weeks before introducing a pacifier, because we were starting to go a bit crazy. But by then, my son was nursing well, had regained his birth weight and then some, so we thought we’d risk it. We actually quickly learned to listen to how he was sucking on the pacifier — if he was vigorously sucking and/or swallowing, it meant he was hungry, and I’d nurse him. Otherwise, he would calm down relatively quickly.

  Bottles are even trickier. There’s a window for introducing a bottle, at 6-8 weeks. Too early, and you risk nipple confusion. Too late, and they might not take it at all. We were a bit on the late side, and my son only just got the hang of it as I went back to work, when he was 3.5 months old. He wouldn’t take a bottle if I was in the same room, let alone take one from me.

There are other important keys, too — particularly a good latch — but these two are the most relevant for nursing in public. Babies need to eat frequently, and bottles should be carefully introduced.

Tomorrow: a look at the practicality of nursing in public.

It seems like every week I see an article about a nursing woman harassed or asked to leave an establishment, despite laws in 44 states protecting the right of a woman to nurse in public. I’m writing a series of posts on nursing in public, but first I thought I’d provide links to some of these articles. If you click through a few of them — and for the sake of your blood pressure, you shouldn’t check out too many — you’ll see some of the crazy and vile comments on them. The articles also often share the exact details of the actual confrontation, so this is not just a case of people being jerks behind a shield of anonymity. They’re often jerks in real life, too. (In other words, I have not concocted a strawman to argue against.)

This is not a comprehensive list; just some of the incidents I’ve read about via my normal web-browsing. (NB: I will continue updating this list as events happen.)

• Ohio, 2011.
• North Carolina, 2010 (also see story on Facebook, via Alyssa).
• Arizona, 2010.
• Kentucky, 2010. The comments really blew up on the Consumerist post about it.
• Florida, 2010.
• Michigan, 2009.
• New York, 2009.
• New York, 2009.
• Florida, 2009.
• Vermont, 2006.

Tomorrow: the basics of breastfeeding.

I have mostly ignored the discussion surrounding the blog post on sexy female scientists. I don’t think it’s unimportant, but I didn’t have the energy to really dig into the many issues raised by the post. My opinion, if you’re curious, is probably most closely aligned to Sheril Kirshenbaum’s.

However, yesterday I also saw a blog post on a nurse-in at a Johnny Rocket’s in Kentucky. (Nurse-ins, for those of you who are not in any mommyblogger loops, are generally organized as a response to a business or organization asking a nursing mother to leave or nurse elsewhere. This is often in violation of state law, as forty-four states specifically allow women to nurse in any public or private location. Yes, including businesses. One day I will have a post about how nursing in public is a feminist cause, but today is not that day.) And, well, you can read the comments yourself. Some of them are supportive, some of them are willfully mis-interpreting the law, and then some are complaining about how they don’t want to see “dirty tits” or “gross-looking” women.

These two issues are really two sides of the same coin. They happen to be extremely relevant to my life — as I am a woman scientist, and a mother who has nursed her child in public — but they are merely two examples of the sexism that is still in society. Forget about whether I’ve contributed anything to our understanding of galaxy clusters, or whether I’m trying to provide the best nutrition for my son. Am I sexy? No? Well, then, clearly I have no value.

I don’t care what Lukeprog’s intentions were in posting that list. The sheer act of compiling and posting it is hardly different from the Consumerist commenters complaining about ugly women nursing in public. It’s treating women as objects of attraction first, and scientists, mothers, and members of society last.

Nearly every day since my son was born, I’ve had a cup of coffee or tea in the morning, and a glass of wine or beer in the evenings. (I’ve also showered every day, but that’s a different post.) He’s now eight months old, I’m still nursing, and I’ve never pumped and dumped. Alcohol and caffeine do pass into the breastmilk, but only in the tiniest of amounts if one is consuming them moderately. The rule of thumb that I’ve gone by is one I’ve seen many places: “If you’re sober enough to drive, you’re sober enough to breastfeed.”

Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions out there about breastfeeding, and the biggest one I’ve encountered is that you cannot drink any alcohol while breastfeeding. This weekend I learned (via Lactivist Leanings, on twitter) of yet another product aimed at worried parents — MilkScreen — which promises to test the alcohol content of your breastmilk. I am annoyed by the mere existence of this product, and it doesn’t help that the webpage implies that no level of alcohol consumption is safe while you’re nursing.

I know it’s just a stupid product, but it’s yet another example of a stupid and useless product aimed at worried, first-time parents. And specifically, it contributes to pressure on breastfeeding women to eschew alcohol, caffeine, and medications for minor conditions. (In addition to my daily cup of coffee and glass of wine, I will not be parted from my allergy meds.) In some circles, there’s sometimes an attitude that you shouldn’t bother breastfeeding if you aren’t going to do it for two years while following a perfect diet, and I think that attitude — and the advertising by products such as Milkscreen — drives women away from breastfeeding. It’s bad enough that everyone watches you like a hawk when you’re pregnant; who wants another 1-2 years of that?

I try to personally counter these misconceptions, but I’m a busy person. There are only so many times I can publicly nurse and then have a drink. So in the meantime, I’ll just have to blog about it.