Around the time Piglet, my youngest child, was four months old and still breastfeeding exclusively, I began wishing I didn’t have to get out of bed everyday. Each morning, my body felt like lead, as if it was still 3am, only it was really 7am.
It was perplexing and I felt horrible. I loved watching my older kids, Puppy and Lamb (then aged four and two) playing together, helping one other. Lamb would run to get Puppy’s towel if she’d forgotten to bring it with her into the bathroom. Puppy would read to Lamb as I changed nappies, sometimes doing up a button that his littler fingers couldn’t manage.
Who wouldn’t want to get out of bed to see all that?
Then I had a revelation.
We had gone away for a spontaneous five-day family holiday – our first with Piglet. It was almost perfect. We enjoyed the cool jungle air as our car weaved through winding roads, sipped endless cups of tea at tea plantations everyday, made friends with a cheerful white mongrel, drank hot, steaming soups at our favourite restaurant and took numerous hilarious snapshots of each other making funny faces.
But what happened every single afternoon was this: I’d nurse Piglet until we both fell asleep while Sweet Man took the two kids out for ball games and lots of fresh mountain air.
Sleeping every afternoon and missing the fun depressed me.
One afternoon while waiting for them to come back, I came across an article entitled “Breastfeeding as Work” by Cindy A. Stearns, a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University. Stearns explored breastfeeding as work on a woman’s own breastfeeding body and the unpaid maternal body work of breastfeeding a baby.
As I waded through her article, I realised a simple fact: I was exhausted. Utterly and truly exhausted.
I had a new baby and two other children to mind. I was homeschooling them in between numerous household chores and had been breastfeeding every single day for five years, including tandem nursing for almost three years.
Why was I surprised that I was tired? Breastfeeding had become so much a part of my life that I’d forgotten how much time and labour intensive work it is!
Stearns’ study reminded me that no one but a mother can breastfeed. This is in contrast to other childcare and household tasks that other members of the family can perform. A family might use a bottle so that other family members can feed the baby expressed breast milk (thereby relieving the mother), but the job of providing the milk is still hers.
Stearns also pointed out that many mothers change their lifestyle and adapt their diet in order to produce a high-quality, ample and readily available supply of human milk. They must learn how to breastfeed (it’s not as “natural” or easy as people might think!) and how to persist with it despite personal discomfort, pain and inconvenience.
Reading her work, I could relate. I’d paid careful attention to my diet and radically changed my lifestyle so I could breastfeed exclusively. When Puppy was born, I was completing my postgraduate degree. It had been extremely difficult to pump more than 2 ounces. I eventually decided pumping wasn’t worth my time and effort, so I ended up taking Puppy to lectures with my mother in tow.
I’d also tried make sure I had sufficient sleep to keep up the milk supply. But with Puppy’s homeschooling in the afternoons and increased in-the-middle-of-the-night-feedings for Piglet (going through a growth spurt), it’d been difficult to get enough rest.
Strangely, I’d never considered abandoning breastfeeding. To breastfeed or not had always been a non-issue in our family’s circumstances. I didn’t view formula as poison but breastfeeding had its health benefits (drastically reducing a mother’s risk of ovarian and breast cancer). I also had a gut feel about Sterns’ emphasis on human breast milk as truly “unique, irreplaceable nutrition for babies and young children”, on breastfeeding that “satisfies their need for emotional and physical comfort in a way that bottles can’t”.
One fact that had never struck me was that breastfeeding has a direct impact on my body, so I’d better take care of my physical health. Stearns phrase, “body work”, was an eye-opener.
Reflecting on Stearns, I was reassured. Breastfeeding was “work”, albeit unpaid. Exclusive breastfeeding was tiring work around the clock. There wasn’t a need to feel guilty about sleeping every afternoon, holiday or not. Sleeping was what I needed in order to do a proper job as a breastfeeding mum. It was right there on the list of my job requirements.
How many jobs have that?
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Jin Ai traded refugee work for diapers, dishes and homeschooling. She blogs about parenting, home education and life as mom to four kids (one baking) at Mama Hear Me Roar.
Image credit: Flickr user ODHD
