All Hail the Mighty Boob

It's no mystery to those who know me: I am an opinionated B. I do believe, however, that sometimes, my opinions are actually worth hearing. Sometimes, they are based on hard scientific fact. Okay, sure, sometimes they are nothing more than crackpot conjecture. I take comfort in knowing that I'm hardly alone in the "crackpot conjecture" group.
I consider my breath not wasted when my opinion, voiced, succeeds in provoking a shift in thought for even just one listener. Even better, some listeners question my way of thinking, giving me fresh food for mental mastication - something to chew on while I vacuum, for example.
I'd like to flatter myself and assume that I effect daily social paradigm shift by dropping pithy commentary that (upon absorption into the listener's mind) causes them to think, "Wow. I never thought about it like that!" More likely, I just annoy people. Daily.
However, the topic of this post is breastfeeding. I know a whole hell of a lot about breastfeeding. I have spent...calculating...almost exactly five years of my life breastfeeding three children. I know that this is a hot topic. Be forewarned: What I am about to write might cause you to get your brassiere all in a twist. Remember, it is all just my annoying opinion.
So, yeah. On the way to yoga the other night, I happened to hear a portion of Jian Ghomeshi's "Q" on NPR. The topic was Facebook and their habit of removing photos of women breastfeeding, citing them as "Sexually Explicit" or "Obscene". The link to this article and audio interview appears on this blog. Somewhere close to this post, I assume....
Emma Kwasnica (you go, girl!!) is a Canadian woman who has been fighting Facebook for more than five years. I definitely don't have the tenacity or passion to do what she has done, but I was inspired and incensed by her story. She said a few things that were poignant and apt.
The subject is breastfeeding: Who does it? For how long? Exclusively, or with "bottle supplements"? For the women who don't, why? Oh, that little three-letter word is the one that dogs me: Why? 
Emma said that the censorship that women are experiencing on Facebook is one more way that society is ostracizing nursing Moms. She argues that it is of paramount importance that we normalize the act of breastfeeding. I could not agree more.
Breastfeeding is not a furtive, sexualized act to be hidden away in the nearest public restroom, the back seat of my car, or a dark corner away from others who might be offended. Offended by what? That my child is eating? That the food comes out of my body? My nipple? Trust me - many have seen my nipples and come out unscathed...even pleased. Lasers do not fly out of them. They aren't like Medusa's eyes; nipples will not turn you to stone should you chance to look at one directly. 
Dig this: You can even put them in your mouth.
So, why the fear? Why the discomfort? Why the damn bottle? 
Here is a theory: Women who choose not to breastfeed might do so because postpartum, they already feel icky and fat and not like themselves and they don't want any extra attention, especially not attention devoted to parts of their body that they have been conditioned to believe have lost their womanly sex appeal. 
Another theory: We cannot seem to divorce the sexual breast from the maternal breast and therefore, should women be seen breastfeeding and enjoying it, they imagine that it casts them in the same light as perverts and pedophiles.
Another theory: Women believe that if they bottle-feed, life will be "easier" with a baby - because they can leave the house for more than three hours, because their husband can administer a bottle of Enfamil as easily as they can. They have their independence! Their freedom! Equality with the bottle-feeding husband! 
And let us not forget the power of advertising. There are many, many more dollars going into convincing women that formula is the way to go than there are in the La Leche League's coffers.


Oh, jesus. Where do I begin?
One: Nutrition. It is impossible - impossible! - for mankind to produce a more perfect food for children who cannot yet eat solid foods than that which comes out of the boob. Oh, women who have chosen to bottle-feed have told me that it makes no difference and that formula is just as good and often, I want to slap them. Purely from a nutritional standpoint: No. Wrong. No laboratory can create the man-made equivalent to human milk. If they had, they would be very, very wealthy and we would all have heard of them. 
I have read fascinating and compelling research regarding breastfeeding; shit no one ever talks about, probably because they aren't aware. For example, nursing utilizes far many more facial and skull muscles than drinking from a bottle. The smashing of the tongue against the palate and the back-and-forth jaw motion required by nursing forms not only the jaw but the appearance of the face. Children who have nursed at least six months have a jaw that is less "hairpin" and more "horseshoe". This means fewer dental problems later in life. Children who have nursed at least six months have cheekbones, wider eyes, and wider jaws. Or, they're better looking. 
Two: Bonding. Now, I am about to talk some mad shit because not one of my three children ever had formula. Not one time. The older two were, at some point, offered a bottle with breast milk and found it lacking. I can't blame them. If you were given the option of a warm, pliable chunk of flesh that smelled like everything you had ever known AND delivered sweet, tasty milk, or, a body covered in polyester and a hard, silicone nipple, which would you choose? I rest my case.
There is nothing, NOTHING, like nursing my babies. There is precious little to glorify about infancy; it is a shitty, hard time of scant sleep and raging, evil hormones. Pregnancy is almost as bad. I have always said that the only thing that I will miss about pregnancy is the feeling of the baby moving inside me. True. The only thing that I will miss about having a little baby is the nursing. It is the very best part of having a tiny person for a roommate. 
This is why it is so very difficult for me to understand the bottle-feeders. I understand that some women are single mothers. I understand that some women have to go back to work to provide an income for the most basic necessities. I do. I get that.
I don't know from experience, but I imagine that there is enormous pressure in the working world - be she CEO or part-time employee working for minimum wage - for a new mother to get back to work as soon as possible and to have the new child interfere as little as possible in the woman's working life. 
How many women choose to bottle-feed when they would rather breastfeed, because they fear for their jobs? Would it make a difference if more women spoke up and informed their employers that they intended to breastfeed and that they were looking for the best way to do so in concert with their professional obligations? I don't know. Logic tells me that if more women demand this right, employers will have to learn to work with them.
How many women choose to bottle-feed because they are squeamish or nervous or don't trust their own bodies to do the job right? I don't know. I can only speak from my own experience. The human body is an amazing machine. I have oft heard the "I didn't make enough milk" excuse and wanted to shout, "Bullshit!" Convince me that the human body is going to put in damn near ten months of hard labor to produce offspring...and then not produce adequate nourishment? 
Some women seem to be hung up on the idea that with the boob, they can't measure, ounce by ounce, how much their child is eating. Here's what's so cool: The boob makes what is needed. Sometimes, a baby needs more, sometimes less. The body is designed to produce more during growth spurts and lessen production when the child requires less, say, during a bout of teething when appetite is down. 
We seem to live in a bottle culture. Or, breastfeeding seems to be something that some women suffer through for three weeks, perhaps three months, as though it were a job to do. Well, it is a job. But it is also a joy. 
When I decided to become a mother, I rented out my body to these little creatures. I gave everything that was good in me to them, first. And it didn't stop when they came out; I still give the best to them, first. The boob is, for me, a natural extension of this philosophy. Being a parent is not easy, but nothing that is worth doing is ever easy to do. By comparison and considering everything that I know goes into being a parent, breastfeeding is a day in the park. At times, literally, a day in the park. Or in the car. Or on the floor at Target because the child was just not going to wait. 
I have heard women say that they decided not to breastfeed because it "was just too much work" and I just want to laugh at them with their tiny, first babies and ask if they think that everything else is going to be easier than having chafed nipples. 
Breastfeeding is part of the job of being a Mom, but it can be so good. In fact, the longer I breastfed each son, the less I wanted to stop. In the beginning, it was all about taking this amorphous, near-sighted person with horrible fine motor control and preventing him from perishing. But eventually, he begins to smile, make small, happy noises while eating, and pat my other boob while he nurses lazily on the other. It becomes time with this little person that nothing will ever replace. Bottles can't do that. 
The best naps in my life have been while I was nursing. I remember watching this child fall asleep in my arms, moving his jaw in his sleep (dreaming of warm boobies) and myself thinking, "Holy crap! If I just move soooo slowly and soooo carefully, I might be able to wedge myself quasi-comfortably into the corner of this sofa and sleep with this baby." The best naps. Ever. 
Ugh, this post is all over the place. It's tough to condense five years of experience, emotion, and the knowledge gained during those years into several paragraphs. I wish that all women would breastfeed - unabashedly, happily, and bolstered by the support of their husbands, employers, and society at large. I wish that women would talk about nursing, to each other and anyone else who will listen. I do believe that nourishing our babies with our bodies is an undeniable foundation of our humanity. 
I wrote earlier, way up at the top of this post, that I consider my breath not wasted when I succeed at putting a new idea into someone else's head. Sometimes, though, just listening to myself talk can be the most powerful process I know for learning more about myself. Writing is a fabulous way of talking without being interrupted. To all those people who bother to take the time to read what I write, thank you. And to all those people who have sat and listened to my seemingly interminable monologues and in so doing, helped me become a better version of Leah, thank you. I am forever grateful.