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Posted
Wednesday, March 11, 2009 4:03 PM
| By
Rachael Larimore
I just wanted to chime in in support of Hanna's great Atlantic article. Like Hanna, I happily nursed my first two children for a year. With my second, I had the great luxury of working from home, so I rarely even had to pump. I'm planning to nurse my third. (For one, it's free; for another, it's a lot easier to get back to sleep after those 2 a.m. feedings if you're nursing than if you have to schlep downstairs to the kitchen to make bottles.)
But I think it's crazy for women to guilt one another into breast-feeding, or for women to feel like they have to exclusively breast-feed. Two anecdotes from my older son's first few weeks hammered it home to me. First, while I was still in the hospital, recovering from an emergency C-section and trying to grasp the whole concept of motherhood, the "lactation specialist" visited our room. She handed me a bottle of glucose water and said, "Now, if baby gets hungry, just give him this, not formula." When my nurse saw it, she flipped and ordered me to hand it over. Turns out the lactation specialist hadn't bothered to inquire about my son. I'd had that emergency C-section because he weighed 10 pounds, and the doctors suspected I'd had undiagnosed gestational diabetes, so he was also dealing with blood-sugar issues. Glucose water was the last thing I should give him.
Still in new-mother mode, I tried to avoid formula when we went home, but I still remember the night Brandon cried, and I tried to feed him. And he cried, and I tried to feed him. And so on. Until we gave in and gave him just an ounce or two of formula. And then we all got four hours of sleep.
To me, it seems like breast-feeding is just another front in the "Mommy wars"—whether to work or stay at home, whether to live in the cities or the suburbs. I'm not sure why women feel compelled to guilt one another over such decisions when there is never one right answer that applies to every woman. But consider me Switzerland.
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