Re:

Date:    Tue, 11 Jul 2000 23:19:53 EDT
From:    "Laura Hart, RN, BSN, IBCLC" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: sharing feedings with partners & siblings

Yeah, jealousy and the apparent loss of status happen to siblings, too,
and I hear all the time from mothers who limit or abandon breastfeeding
because they can't cope with their older child's demands or feelings.
People are fond of relating that analogy of a husband being a second
wife home. That speaks to the intensity of the feeling, but not the
origin. The analogy only works, in fact, because of the focus on the
"marital couple" and the problems related to using that as a model for
everything. I was reading yesterday about an "Ezzo family" who declined
co-sleeping because it wasn't supposed to be a family bed, it was
supposed to be the marriage bed. Since when is my husband no longer part
of my family? Since when is he no longer supposed to cuddle with the
baby?
I'm convinced that when partners and children have been nurtured, and
continue to be nurtured in the family that even if they no longer feel
that they are at the centre of everything, the exclusive focus (the way
a husband feels before children, or an only child before siblings are
born), that they easily accept the new member of the family. Lots of
cuddling seems to be all that is necessary. It is important to convey
that some members of our families and societies need more help and more
care than others, and that all needs can be met.
Incidentally, my husband says that in his South American aboriginal
society, where clothes were not worn, seeing breasts was not a turn-on
(well, I suppose they turn on the baby's desire to BF, but not a sexual
turn-on, I think he meant). For him (this was an interesting discussion
this a.m.!) it is tactile... Gestures become constructed as sexual or
non-sexual, I guess, by who gets to touch whom how. In their society,
the bethrothed (or married) woman brushed the long hair of her promised
man, so that is very sensual to him.
Jo-Anne

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