I wish for you the enjoyment of breastfeeding

Although the biological benefits of human milk are inimitably complex and still only partly elucidated, it is before all else the enjoyment of the physicality of love for your child that I would wish for you, for as long as you and your little one want and regardless of whether or not you're exclusively breastfeeding.

I would wish for you many hours during which a physical cherishing of your baby at the breast anchors you into the present moment. Which is not to deny those many "let’s get this done if you really must, sweetheart" kind of feeds! Or those feeds when you are trying to socialise or read or watch or listen to something at the same time.

Breastfeeding matters deeply to us as women, often more than our twenty-first century world wants to acknowledge. To my mind an enjoyable breastfeeding relationship inoculates your relationship with your child for the rest of life with a certain kind of somatic memory of your love. I'm keen to emphasise that there are other equally powerful ways of enjoying the physicality of love for your baby if you're not breastfeeding, but here, in Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation, I'm thinking specially about breastfeeding.

Often women who are unable to breastfeed grieve very deeply

Many women grieve very deeply when they find they can’t breastfeed, because they've had such a powerful longing to make it work. I am fiercely protective of the parents of formula-fed babies. I know the extraordinary efforts women make with breastfeeding before they decide they need to supplement or wean. Those of us who have been up close to the courage and the grief of a woman who wants to breastfeed but can’t, up close to her anguish as she makes her decisions (because she wants only the very best for her baby), will never again judge a formula-feeding parent.

I have profound respect for a woman’s right to choose how she uses her body in our complex twenty-first century contexts. But because so much in life is outside our control, and also because of our current health system failures, breastfeeding itself is not even an available choice for many women. In this case, a woman's own critical inner voices can be more than enough to bear. We should never have to listen to the subtle but devastating condemnation of phrases such as "she didn't persevere" or "her baby is picking up on her anxiety" or "she's obsessed with breastfeeding" or "she gave it up".

In Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation I write directly to the woman who is wanting to breastfeed

The trail-blazing work of breastfeeding advocates and researchers over my lifetime has been successful: contemporary parents know that human milk is best for their babies’ health and development. Women in advanced economies don't need health professionals telling them this when they are grappling with breastfeeding problems.

In the Possums programs and in The Discontented Little Baby Book, I have wanted all new parents, whether male or female or of non-binary gender, and all those who care about parents, to feel included regardless of how their baby is fed.

But it's true that I’ve written Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation (which I often think of as Breastfeeding stripped bare) specially for a breastfeeding woman, my heart to yours. This is the only way I could keep on writing over the past six years, with so much pushback about new ways of looking at things in the world of breastfeeding and lactation. (Sometimes I've wondered if 'cancelling' isn't the loudest of all 21st century shrieks, alerting us to what really matters!)

Day after day, night after night these past six years, I've done my best to practice self-compassion and ignore all that noise, so that I could write from my heart to yours.

Acknowledgements

The photo at the top of this page is of my daughter and a friend of hers in Brooklyn, breastfeeding their toddlers out the front of one of their homes.