Artist: Judy Chicago

To Emma and Tom

For three years each

you came back home

to my patient hard-working breasts.

For more than a year, you shared.

From my weary flourishing body, I

gave you this.

And when I came out the other side

of those rivers of milk,

I was remade.

Acknowledgement of artist Judy Chicago

I've kept a laminated photograph of the image shown at the top of this page by Judy Chicago (the image above is a photo of a photo) in my intimate space for over thirty years, most recently blue-tacked onto a cupboard in my study. For me, this print speaks of the extraordinary generative power of a woman's capacity to birth and make milk, elemental metaphors for female creativity and courage whether in art, as we care for a small person, or in our professional lives. This amazing image also speaks of our evolutionary connectedness with all living things - how life on Earth came out of the great planetary flow of waters.

According to an internet source, the image is of a poster created by Judy Chicago in the 1980s called "The Rainbow Warrior - a Tribute to the Efforts of Greenpeace". A subtitle states that "According to a Native American legend, when the Earth's creatures have been hunted almost to extinction, a rainbow warrior will descend from the sky to protect them." Maybe the rainbow warrior speaks up through each of us as we make our creative contributions (as professionals or carers or artists) in these most precarious of times.

If you're interested, Judy Chicago speaks about her pioneering work, The Birth Project here and you can read a short piece on its context here. I pay homage to Judy Chicago's permament installation of The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum as often as I can when I visit my daughter, who lives in Brooklyn. I remember the powerful impact that The Dinner Party had on me when it first came out in the late 1970s - its images had even reached the 1980s backwaters of Brisbane, at least in feminist circles, and profoundly inspired me as a medical student and young doctor.

Acknowledgement of women's grief

I tuck this dedication at the end of Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation Intermediate, rather than at the beginning of Foundations, out of respect for those heroic women who try so hard to breastfeed and can't, and who might wrestle with grief each time another woman celebrates breastfeeding. It was never your (or anyone's) fault that breastfeeding wouldn't work. So much in life is outside our control - and our health system also has significant blind spots concerning how to help women breastfeed. The transformative experience I describe above doesn't depend on the physical act of breastfeeding. The transformation of mothering is deeper than outward form.