Not Like Tea Time

All the literature about breastfeeding promotes it as this loving moment between mother and child, replete with eye gazing and bonding. They lie. They have not met the Barracuda. Or as people whose nipples are not clamped in the Baby Death Grip call him, Jonas.

Before I had Jonas, I pictured breastfeeding as something like tea time. Genteel and refined, we would discreetly disappear into the other room three, maybe four times a day to engage in this ritual. Perhaps we would have a biscuit or two. We would then emerge triumphant, doe-eyed baby and triumphant mother.

Ah, simple, simple me. Not only does he eat non-stop (the lactation expert called it “cluster feeding’ which I’m totally going to use the next time I finish off a pint of ice cream), but he makes sounds that spind roughly like that of a flesh eating zombie on speed. During these bouts of baby cannibalism, he also has a tendency to rear his head back and dive at my nipple like it’s the last piece of chocolate at a cannabis club. Which makes it really, really hard to discreetly feed him.

It was in the middle of one of Jonas’ marathon feeding sessions that I ran across The Case against Breastfeeding by Hanna Rosin in the April issue of the Atlantic Monthly. In it, Rosin points out that many of the much ballyhooed benefits of breastfeeding are actually the result of observational studies, not scientific studies. The result is that is that it is difficult, if not impossible to separate what might be the benefits of breastfeeding from the benefits of other elements (e.g. the mother’s educational background in the case of the purported benefit of an IQ boost). Some scientists even speculate that perhaps it’s the act of breastfeeding and not the milk itself that is the cause of any perceived benefits.

Either way though, I’ve got my bases, if not my nipples, covered—The Barracuda gets a mix of both--after all variety is the spice of life.