World Breastfeeding Week

I have thoughts

It is World Breastfeeding Week. And inevitably I feel as if I should be doing something to make my thoughts known, and to promote the book I wrote about breastfeeding.

And yet, every year it comes around and I make a couple of Instagram posts, but I struggle to enter the discourse.

Perhaps because it does feel like such a discourse, even now. One that is fraught because, as a society, we still give mothers a really bloody hard time. Anything can be fashioned into a stick with which to beat us.

We are never enough, even if the best we can ever be is enough.

And this is all still the case even though the term ‘matrescence’, coined in the 1970s, has become part of our lexicon. Such that society is better at understanding what we already knew; that new motherhood is wild and ferocious and fragile. And even though we all better appreciate that what really matters when it comes to feeding our babies are the conditions under which we mother.

Formula is fucking fantastic if you can’t or don’t want to breastfeed and you have access to clean water and the financial means to obtain formula.

But, if you can’t access formula and/or clean water, you might find yourself making up diluted bottles or feeding your baby with unsafe water, and then it might be too late to switch to breastfeeding.

And, if you really wanted to breastfeed and find that - for whatever reason - you can’t, formula is a brilliant way to feed your baby, but it is not enough of a balm to soothe the burning fire of grief that might reside in your heart each time you make up a bottle.

Maybe someone in your life made you feel bad about not breastfeeding. Maybe someone in your life made you feel bad about breastfeeding. Maybe they thought you fed the baby too often, or for too long, or too publicly. Maybe that little comment they made became a wound that festered and made you doubt your whole mothering identity.

Every year we better understand the miracle of human milk, in its ever-changing composition, so responsive to the needs of our babies. But with every year, the material and practical support structures required to support new mothers remain insufficient. Every year, companies seek to replicate human milk which could be an emancipatory gesture if only these advances weren’t co-opted by capitalism, creating another tier of ‘BEST’ to market to parents to make them feel shit because they can’t afford lab-made milk.

These are the things I might say, if I was better at book promotion.

But I am now, so I will just say buy my book here. And if you already have a copy, please leave a review here. xx