Strange Fangs Chapter three had been up on the website for a few days and I've been stumbling madly over chapter 4. I know a lot of the story that has to take place, but piecing it together with all the things that have been written and tweaking the whole event into a single-serving chapter worth reading is more challenging than anticipated, especially when sleep deprived.
New Rule: I go to bed at midnight. I really don't care when anyone else sleeps, but I have to go to bed by midnight. My husband is like a little kid who wants to stay up all night if he can. I'm just not capable of that. Nope.
Also, some thoughts on breastfeeding: it's basically no one's business.
To clarify, I do breastfeed, but it wasn't an easy thing for us to do. The week after Julia was born, I spent excruciating hours of every day having the nurses try to show me new positions in the hopes that a change there might mean less pain for me. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. My hypothesis is that because Julia was born 3 weeks early, my body wasn't ready to work that way just yet. Her mouth was tiny, which one nurse noted as a probably cause of discomfort, but I think more than that it was just that my body hadn't toughened up. In any case, the effect was enough pain that my brain wasn't capable of doing its job.
There is a reason why we must love the babies. From a evolutionary perspective, we just must. It is only reasonable to kill anything that causes you that much pain and insanity...unless you love it.
Anyway, the fact that I breastfeed, that we have come to a point where I can breastfeed directly most of the time, is remarkable and amazing to me, but also none of your business.
And there's something worth noting. Julia and I spent a week in Texas, and in just one week of barely going into public, I was asked a few times about if I was breastfeeding or not. The fact that these people don't know me or my baby is part of the annoyance, just as I would be annoyed at Japanese people who would ask about the race of my child before her name or age. I try not to be offended when they ask but it's hard. That's a personal question. What if I couldn't breastfeed? What if it was physically impossible for me to do so? What if my issues with tenderness came when breast pumps were not affordable? Does this random stranger really want to hear my sob story? Do I really want to have to tell them?
It seems obvious that these strangers are only asking so that they can tell me how much babies need breast milk or how awful it is to use formula. It wouldn't bother me so much if they were just chatty folks aiming to share a story, but no stories are ever shared with me. They ask. I tell them I am. They bugger off, satisfied that the potential yuppie they were going to hassle over the benefits of breast milk is already a convert.
It still is none of their business, however. My baby is being fed. She is not malnourished. Our choices as to what and how to feed her have not led to any obvious problems or failures on our part. This question is BS.
And so, to them I say read this. In a recent study, the difference between breast and bottle feeding was found to be minimal, based on families in which one sibling was breast fed while another was not. The differences other studies find have more to do with other socioeconomic factors. Mothers who can't stay home or afford a breast pump generally don't have a lot of options.
We're lucky. So lucky.
Feel blessed, folks. Feel good. We all get another day on this marvelous space-rock we call home.
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