So, here's another 1956 model reporting in.  I was breastfed for a total of
nine months, don't know how long it was exclusive.  I was fortunate to be
born in Norway while the country was still recovering from the war and
didn't have the kind of economy that would support artificial feeding.  My
mother was only there temporarily, accompanying my father on his Fulbright
stay, but she recounted her stay in the hospital where I was brought out
from a nursery to be fed at regular, scheduled intervals and no one ever
mentioned the possibility of doing anything but breastfeeding.  She enjoyed
the experience enough to insist on breastfeeding my sibs, twins born in 1959
in Cambridge, MA, though she did cave in to her pediatrician on exclusivity,
a nice man called Ross who shared office space with a young upstart doc
named Brazelton.  Dr Ross was convinced it was not possible for one woman to
produce enough milk for two babies so they alternated feeds from the breast
or having a propped bottle.  I have no clue what was in those bottles.  I do
remember the Raggedy Ann and Andy wallpaper in Dr Ross' exam room, and I
definitely remember the metal trash can in there that was not for trash, but
for a nearly inconceivable quantity of lollypops, which we could help
ourselves to if we were compliant during our appointments.
My husband was born around the same time I was in a different Norwegian
city, and his mother followed the instructions she was given for feeding to
the letter, and even though she saved up her milk for at least four hours
between every feed, she always ran clean out by the time her babies were two
weeks old.  So I was lucky to have been born somewhere where they had a
little more of a clue, though not much of one.
I never gave my body weight a second thought until I was well over 40, and I
can't blame my mother's breastfeeding practices for the fact that my
metabolism matured at the same time I parked myself in front of a computer
and got addicted to e-mail.  I do thank her for what she gave me: both the
good food when I was a baby, and a clear notion that breastfeeding was a
normal part of life that I could expect to enjoy.  I could also thank her
for seeing to it that I grew up in a community in Seattle where
breastfeeding was very much the norm, throughout the sixties and the
seventies which were also my formative years.  I think one of the mothers I
regularly babysat for was a LLLL.  Funny thing is, in a community where
everyone you know has breastfed, you don't have the same need for an
organization as a safe haven.  You can find basic help and support
everywhere.  In all the discussion about LLL here recently we would do well
to remember that if it weren't for the passionate souls in LLL,
breastfeeding in the US could have been completely extinguished and possibly
never recovered.  It is in situations where breastfeeding is under serious
threat that we need not only people who know something about breastfeeding,
we need groups who challenge our notions about the way we live, how we are
developing as a society, and how we treat our young.

When I took a course in maternal and child nutrition at UW in Seattle in
1979, I learned that the group with the highest breastfeeding rate in the US
the year my sibs were born, was 'wives of Harvard graduate students'.  I
wonder how many other groups they surveyed??  Had to laugh - my mother
probably caused a measurable increase in that statistic by feeding her two
babies in Cambridge.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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