Several thoughts on this topic I wanted to share.  I agree with everyone who
has mentioned how vivid memories of birth/bf are for older women.  I've seen
this over & over again, at family reunions, memories of my grandmother & her
friends swapping stories, and most surprizing, when I've had a bf table at a
community function, the number of older women who come up and start sharing
their birth & bf histories.  My daughter, much younger at these times, was
always shocked at how 'perfect strangers' as opposed to pregnant or nursing
moms, would come up to talk to me.  I use this phenomena when talking about
advantages of bf to pregnant gals.  I ask them how many times an older woman
has shared her birth/bf history with them, and then point out how common this
is to the experience of all women, and they need to recognize how important
these experiences will be to them.

I've had many people over the years ask why I have focused my energies on
breastfeeding rather than birthing.  For me, it's because I have seen over
the years how having a successful breastfeeding experience can overcome a
less than perfect birth experience.  At the LLLI Conference in '87 a
psychologist presented a paper he'd done on how LLLI concepts have been
affirmed in research  (I think his name was Rick Bell?), and one of the
things that was in his paper was a confirmation of research that showed that
breastfeeding did help mothers heal from difficult birth experiences.  I have
that paper in my files somewhere . . . It's also always been exciting to me
to be able to help new mothers grow in their mothering.  It's already come
full circle for me, in that I've had the honor of helping the children of
some of the mothers I had contact with so many years ago as new parents in
the here & now.

I'm sure we've all had the experience of helping breastfeeding mothers start
to heal from their birth experiences.

At a LLL conference in AZ a number of years ago, we had one MD who shared
that he encouraged his patients to work for the birth experience they wanted
with all their energy while they were pregnant, but once the baby had been
born, if he thought the parents were allowing their mourning of the perfect
birth experience to affect their relationship with their baby, he would take
a blank sheet of white paper and put a tiny dot in the middle, and tell the
parents that the dot represented their baby's birth, and the rest of the
white space represented the rest of their baby's life, and they should start
focusing their energies on filling up that space with loving, positive
experiences!  I've borrowed that illustration a number of times over the
years.

Glad to be back after some days off due to flu - in cold, wet So. Calif!
Kathe Catone, IBCLC, LLLL      ([log in to unmask])