Milk Guilt

I am currently breastfeeding a toddler with no firm plans to wean. I support and encourage breastfeeding for all kinds of reasons, but I won't drag out my soapbox right now. I just want to say that I find it sad that, no matter how much we do for our children, moms still feel guilty for not doing more. We seem to have a collective certainty that there is a such a thing as a perfect mom, and that we are just one step away from child abuse if we don't embody that perfection 24-7-365.

Case in point: I was at a local mall, in the kids' area (a carpeted hole in the floor that I refer to as the 'scream pit') and I noticed a mum with a three-year-old boy and a new baby. She was sitting at the side of the pit supervising the elder and nursing the younger. The baby reminded me so of the Bean at that age that I went over to chat. I asked the mom about her nursing experience, and she said that she had not had to wean her first to make room for the second. In fact, the boy was born with a cyst under his tounge and couldn't latch. She pumped milk for his bottles for nine (NINE) 9! months, and lost and regained her supply more than once before finally quitting. The part that raised my eyebrows was that she seemed somewhat embarassed to say that she had only provided the little guy with nine months of breastmilk.

Now, I've pumped, and let me just share with you that it's a pain in the ass. It can hurt. It is much less efficient in a volume-production sense than nursing a baby, so you end up doing massage and hot compresses and shaking the tree and so on to try to get more out. You have to sterilize the pump parts in addition to all the bottles and nipples. You can't hold the baby while doing it, and babies don't carry on conversations across rooms very well. This lady was pumping for 20 minutes, every hour and a half for months and doesn't know she deserves a medal?

Insanity.