Devotion to home instead of subjection to the world
We’re still trying to get to the bottom of whatever glitch it is here that makes clicks open spam, so for now how about some little thoughts with no links, sorry!
But I was thinking about a certain New York Times article… I still have the tab open because I have been trying to put my finger on what troubles me about it. (If you want to read it, search What It Really Takes to Breastfeed a Baby. If you are not a subscriber, get archive.ph, which will pull it up for you. Again, linking here isn’t working well, sorry. Can you say “she doesn’t monetize her blog” haha)
The article is about breastfeeding and the recent updated American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, following four nursing women as they, apparently, put the guidelines into practice.
Set aside for the moment the notion that something as fundamental to our nature as feeding our young would be determined by a group of medical professionals (as opposed to the valid observations and information they could offer on medical problems that interfere with this natural process); one wonders what qualifies doctors to make breezy policy recommendations such as “paid leave, more support for breastfeeding in public and child care facilities and workplace support…”
“To find out what it takes to breastfeed a baby, The New York Times followed four mothers for a day as they nursed, pumped and supplemented their milk with formula.”
The women interviewed see the value in offering their babies mother’s milk, apparently because of guidelines such as the AAP’s, although they even go so far as expressing some joy! — but fall in with the premise of the article, feeling the frustration of doing something they ought to (breastfeeding their babies) while also working. (Or at least the Times portrays them as doing so — who knows, the legacy media being what they are. These ladies may have had an entirely different point of view and it could very well not have come through the media filter.)
In every case, even the last one where the mother has a somewhat flexible situation, the stress of meeting the claims of outside commitments combined with the demands of the child are found to be too much. One gets the impression that working mothers will muddle through, but not willingly subject themselves to the pressures again by having more children, and indeed our national birth rate bears that impression out. Lurking behind it all is a sense of doom and disaster, or at least of letting themselves down, if they fail to muddle.
And I realized that our society has produced, has manufactured a serious obstacle to the proper feeding of babies and to the well being of families by a complete lapse of the collective memory. These women, the author, and the readership of the New York Times seem to have no other paradigm for womanhood than that of a working person, even as they glimpse the value of nurturing a child in the way that nature intended. The fathers, it goes without saying, are not consulted. (There seems to be one lurking in the background of one of the photos, carrying a toddler; the vague implication seems to be that the high-powered woman, a doctor, can have three children and breastfeed them according to guidelines because he helps with child care.)
Work, paid work, is the only possibility for women, for mothers. Feminism has defined the terms, and no other terms are allowed.
The one sort of breastfeeding mother it seems not to have occurred to the New York Times to consult is the one who simply does not work, but who is supported by her husband. Consequently, the experience she might have is not represented in the article.
I wonder if they know that such mothers exist.
I can feel my critics’ throats tightening with their objection: Why shouldn’t a man have these same pressures; why can’t society do something to level the field? Why are women still not perfectly happy in the workplace? Why do you say this about women only?! What about equality?
But maybe all this discontent and conflict is not the fault of society that unaccountably, after all this time and all this propaganda, resists the obvious solution of waving its magic policy wand.
Maybe, instead, we irrationally rejected prioritizing a way of life that allows the mother — and her husband — to step right out of the constriction of outside claims, of work, and most fatally, of regarding the baby as an emblem of unfair demand on her.
The man doesn’t have the same internal stress as the woman because he is made by God to work, to do, to act, to provide, and to protect — but not to nurse the baby at his breast.
The woman, if she takes on the man’s burden of provision , carries it along with her own maternal desires, and the child inevitably becomes the problem, despite what she cannot suppress, even to the New York Times: her love, her satisfaction at being the one to give him her milk, her happiness in the knowledge of being wanted and needed, her inner desire to give of herself without stint.
The problem is summed up in this one quote, at the end, when the author’s point of view has clearly had enough with sustaining any effort to portray the relationship between mother and child as necessary, especially to the child, and perhaps defining for the mother:
“Breastfeeding is a full-time, unpaid job. It’s time-consuming. It’s physically draining. It’s not free, nor can every parent do it — it’s not like turning a tap on,” she said. “I want my body back.”
Having reduced even this elemental, necessary human activity to “a job” and further, having long ago rejected the possibility of the one-income family, supported by the husband’s earnings, managed by the wife, oriented to home and children, as hopelessly outdated, so 50s, and simply not feasible or even thinkable, and having assumed that a certain standard and pace, of living is a universal given, those who decide these things reduce the issue to a false dichotomy: Work and try to figure out how to breastfeed the child or work and give up on trying to figure out how to breastfeed the child — and above all, blame the state, the vague all-powerful authorities, for not figuring it out. All bolstered by new guidelines from “the experts.”
But the simple truth is that all those particular difficulties (not, mind you, every difficulty!) disappear when the husband commits to providing for his wife and baby, and together, husband and wife commit to living more simply if that’s what circumstances dictate.
Living simply removes the (perceived) necessity of the whole struggle depicted in the article — pumping, figuring out daycare, meshing the boss’s schedule with the baby’s, not sleeping at night but still needing to be functional during the day in a job (and never getting a nap and still having to do all the other duties of a wife).
What’s called for is taking a good look at what our society insists is the life we must lead and judging it on terms other than what it holds. Even if that judgment involves what it would call “sacrifice” — at least we wouldn’t sacrifice our happiness.
Am I oversimplifying “living simply”? Maybe.
But someone has to say it. We don’t have to take a completely unprecedented attempt to change human nature across the board and try to solve its resultant complexities with even more attempts to change human nature.
We don’t have to plunge into the pit of socialism (redistributing goods for ideological aims), as recommended by the AAP. We don’t have to make babies pay the price for our self-inflicted stresses. We don’t have to be this unhappy! (Here I could provide lots of links that definitely show how unhappy we are, but again, spammy links, and also, I’m no sociologist. Just look around!)
When a mother says “I want my body back,” she’s making the baby the enemy (and I say this as someone who has nursed a two-year-old who was determined to crawl away with a firm grip on my nipple! I get it! See all my nursing the baby links on the sidebar and also my book set, The Summa Domestica, especially Volume 1).
Why would we accept these terms, that make of our loved ones a sort of enemy, or at least an obstacle? If these terms are imposed on us by our choices, then let’s make better choices. We have only our conflicted self-doubt to lose. Let’s recover the wisdom of the past, that respected the deep differences between men and women and protected babies in the heart of the home. I will help you (see: this blog, my books)!
When we do that, we will re-discover something: that devotion to home, which women hardly dare desire, lest we be thought a traitor to our sex, also brings relief from this constant state of turmoil. It brings peace.
The post Devotion to home instead of subjection to the world appeared first on Like Mother, Like Daughter.
