Dear Mimi (et al),

I find myself really distressed, Mimi, by the experience which you had
with La Leche League, because it is so different from what I have tried
to do and have seen the Leaders around me doing in the 22 years that I
have been a La Leche League Leader!  I certainly would never have stayed
in LLL for this long if what you describe had been the norm which I had
experienced.

In the LLL Group with which I lead, we have a real variety of
socioeconomic levels represented; we have white women, African American
women, and oriental women; we have married mothers and single mothers;
we have moms who are planning to stay home and moms who are planning to
go back to work.  If a mother is ready to go back to work and won't be
able to continue to come to our morning meetings, we make sure that she
has information on the evening meetings in our area, where a majority of
the moms are working at least part time and they and the Leaders can
offer her many helpful hints on making that work for her and her baby.
The Seattle area has two Japanese Leaders, who lead their group in
Japanese.  There is an African American Leader in Seattle who is very
involved in working with the group there.  One of the four Leaders in
the group with which I lead is a single mother.  In our LLL District we
have Leaders who are bilingual in English and Spanish, Hebrew, and
Japanese, and we note that by their names on the District Meeting
Notice.

It has always been a high priority to me to keep both our Group Library
and also our stock of information sheets current and updated, and I toss
into the recycling bin anything which has been replaced by newer
material.

Admittedly, every LLL Leader is an individual, but LLL has always
stressed to its Leaders that we are a one issue organization, and we are
there to help every mother to breastfeed her baby without judging her or
trying to advocate any one *right* lifestyle or way of parenting.

You are absolutely right...you certainly do not have to be an active
member of a LLL Group to support breastfeeding mothers.  (Although we
would love to have you as a part of our group if you were up here...we
already have one M.D. [Family Practice specializing in Preventive
Medicine] and one M.D.'s wife [her husband is a breast surgeon] as
members of our LLL group.)  I am *delighted* to have you out there as
another advocate for breastfeeding and as a mentor for mothers of all
races, marital status, and socioeconomic levels (as far as I'm
concerned, there's only one "race" of people anyhow, and that's
"Human"!)

Best wishes,

Alice Ziring, P.T., LLLL (but speaking only for myself, not as an
'official' LLL response) Mercer Island, WA