Sarah

You raise another really important perspective about debriefing.  I 
think you're saying that the way we characterize a mother's 
experience can be helpful, or unhelpful, depending on how we frame or 
interpret it for her?   If so, I agree.  While _we_ may think that, 
say, the duration of breastfeeding may have been too short, or that 
the mother may have weaned too early, I think it's really important, 
as well as simple good manners, to validate her effort, and 
acknowledge the benefits to the baby of any length of 
breastfeeding.  For the mother contemplating weaning I truly believe 
that 2 days of breastfeeding is wonderful for the baby, 2 weeks is 
even better, 2 months is better still and so on, and I think the 
mother herself deserves the full recognition of making that gift to 
her baby.  It's important, and she often doesn't want her effort and 
dedication to be framed in such a negative way that we might  grieve 
with her, particularly if she herself feels pretty good about what 
happened.

When working with individual mothers who wean prematurely, I'm always 
struck by how many pressures a mother has, how many calls on her time 
and her emotions and the duty she feels to certain significant others 
in her life.  I think women make "little decisions" (as described by 
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy) in order to juggle these demands, ie they do the 
best they can in their own circumstances.  And at times, those of us 
supporting an individual mother have a responsibility to acknowledge 
her gallantry, even as we ourselves might mourn the fact that the 
society she lives in under-values the importance of the breastfeeding 
relationship, or the best health and well-being of her baby-child.

For me, it's really easy to make a distinction between how I interact 
with individual mothers, and how I approach institutionalized policy, 
even including HCPs who may have not breastfed their own babies at 
all, or for long.  There is a responsibility to give up to date 
advice and assistance, but clearly, no-one told them that.  The real 
failure, I think, is national and sub-national authorities who make 
recommendations about the value of breastfeeding, and have many good 
paper guidelines and policies already in place, but seem to fail to 
implement and enforce them.  That medical people can sabotage 
individual breastfeeding relationships by sharing their own 
undermining 2 cents' worth, even in an effort to save a mother pain 
in the future, is astonishing to me.  I would expect that Departments 
of Health, or professional associations would jump on these little 
acts of medical misconduct whenever they occurred.  I would think 
that journalists and editors of influential publications that shape 
societal attitudes would be called to account. But this doesn't 
happen. The policy doesn't filter down to those whose duty it is to 
implement it.  Ultimately there seems to be a higher value placed on 
freedom of speech and promotion of free choice than on babies' health 
and well-being.  Having worked for thirteen years in a country where 
I could count on paediatricians to whole-heartedly support 
breastfeeding, where GPs would prescribe a lactation consult for a 
mother who requested drying up pills, or where a nurse trained 
elsewhere who gave her own outdated point of view about breastfeeding 
would be called into matron's office and put right, where a media 
conference was called by the Ministry of Health to get journalists 
fully behind breastfeeding promotion, and where no-one frankly 
_dared_ to undermine breastfeeding, I still find it absolutely 
astonishing here, in this otherwise quite civlized country, that this 
wholesale sabotage of babies/young children's health goes on and on 
and on.   I must say I do like living now in a democracy, but it 
comes with a price.  Perhaps we've always done it that way, and a 
different way can't be imagined....

Pamela Morrison IBCLC
Rustington, England
--------------------------------

On 22/03/2012 17:48, Sarah wrote:
 > Pamela, Rachel, all: Yes, *very* interesting!!
 >
 > How do these observations about protection and grieving and 
support jibe with my sense (at least) that even in the "natural" 
course of breastfeeding and weaning, a mother grieves when the 
breastfeeding portion of her relationship with baby ends.
I would personally describe my reaction to weaning as nostalgia rather
than as grieving. I suppose that technically nostalgia is a mild form
of grieving, but, since the word 'grieving' has connotations of quite a
severe reaction, it isn't the one I would have wanted to use. It would
have framed my reaction in a way that was more severe and painful than
was actually the case. Just as I needed to acknowledge my feelings, I
also needed to avoid framing them as something more than they actually
were, because that wouldn't have been any more helpful than trying to
deny them altogether.

I think it's important to be aware of this, because so much of what I
was reading at the time seemed to be trying to tell me that it was all
going to be horrible and so sad for me and baby and so difficult to deal
with... I would feel far worse after reading the stuff that was meant to
help me deal with weaning than I would before! It's important to
acknowledge mothers' feelings and give them permission to feel that way,
but it's also important to listen to how they *do* feel and not be in
too much of a rush to assume they feel terrible.


Best wishes,

Sarah

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