Friday's column: Breast-feeding is the new labor
Our mothers think we're crazy. Though few of them had full-time careers while 
they were pregnant and raising infants, they did all have lives, they tell us 
now. They went places. Did things. Drank coffee. Had cocktails. They were 
not, in other words, breast-feeding their babies every two hours.

And somehow, they kindly point out, those babies survived. Nurtured on 
powdered formula and instant cereal, we grew into healthy, successful adults.

In response, we just smile our smug, how-little-they-knew-then smiles. 
Because we'd sooner buy a flammable cradle with its razor-sharp edges coated 
in lead paint than give our own precious babies food from a can.

Every generation finds its own way to make peace with the bone-grinding hard 
work that is new motherhood. For the women of the late '60s-early '70s 
Lamaze era, grueling labor stories were the key to establishing one's status as 
a martyr. So even if you stashed your little one in a plastic playpen while 
having a cigarette and a nice, long gossip with your neighbor, you could still 
claim the moral high ground of motherhood by invoking the 36-hour-long labor 
you endured with only deep breathing and a reluctantly enlightened husband 
to dull the pain.

In the age of the epidural and the scheduled C-section, such horror stories are 
passe.

Breast-feeding is the new labor

There's a new way to measure your maternal bona fides, one that makes 
natural childbirth seem like a walk in the park. Because, really, what's one day 
of sweating and suffering when compared to a whole year's worth of pain and 
inconvenience?

If you want to be considered a good mother in today's playpen-free culture of 
hyper-involved parenting, you must enter the world of competitive breast-
feeding.

The experience begins, oddly enough, before your child is even born. 
Obstetricians now routinely ask their patients about how they plan to feed 
their babies and offer not-exactly-subtle pushes in the "right" direction. 
Pregnant women are encouraged to sign up for "Introduction to Breast-
feeding" courses that spell out all the benefits of breast-feeding, while aiming 
to minimize any of the bad things they might have heard -- either from their 
own, obviously unreliable, mothers or from friends who've been regaling them 
with tales of pain, infection and secret office breast-pumping sessions.

My class was Wednesday night.

I'd been dreading it for weeks, bemoaning both its scheduling -- three hours, 
after work, on a weeknight -- and what I assumed would be its preachy 
Breast-is-Best content. But, though I magnanimously gave my husband the 
night off -- his presence was encouraged "for emotional support" -- I dared 
not play hooky.

I've got way too many bad mom strikes -- a taste for champagne and a desire 
for a short maternity leave foremost among them -- against me already.

So I dutifully showed up to join five other pregnant women who'd assembled in 
the waiting area of our doctors' office, which had been converted into a 
screening room for a lactation-themed slide show and video presentation. We 
all wore the same look of grim determination, tempered by good-humored 
attempts to disguise our unease.

The video, which mostly consisted of extreme close-up shots of tiny babies 
hungrily latching on to enormous, looming breasts twice the size of their 
heads, lacked only the theme from Jaws to make it truly terrifying. And the 
slide show, which featured pastel pencil sketches of multi-ethnic babies and 
their blissed out mamas, was as sweet as the video was frightening. Neither 
seemed particularly grounded in real life.

It was the advice of the instructor -- a nurse practitioner who, I had to admit, 
seemed quite normal and less evangelical than I'd expected -- that was the 
big draw. We'd all heard about breast-feeding complications and were looking 
for something to sootr anxiety about what has become the great test of 
modern motherhood: Will I be woman enough to nurse my baby for the full, 
American Academy of Pediatrics-recommended year?

'City moms' are the problem

Our teacher, Claire, who, of course, breast-fed both of her kids, assured us 
that it would be no problem. "Really," said Claire, who happens to work in our 
doctors' Northbrook office, "it's only our city moms who tend to have trouble."

Her pronunciation of the word "city" made it sound a lot like "neurotic."

She then proceeded to regale us with tales of women so determined to 
exclusively breast-feed their nutritionally challenged babies that the kids 
wound up in intensive care, a fate that might easily have been avoided with 
some supplemental formula.

"You just need to relax," she told us.

And then, mercifully, she let us out of class an hour early.

Posted by Debra Pickett on September 29, 2006 09:00 AM | Permalink 
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