Come, take a journey with me. Two years postpartum after my second child, my best friend Jo and I compare breasts (as one does) in the bathroom at a good friend’s wedding back home in Mauritius. She, like me, has had all the meat sucked out of her once perky bosom. Mine are similarly deflated, though still determined to point forwards.
“You know I only managed about eight months between them,” I remark. “So much pain and stress for so little. If I had to do it again, I’m not sure I would breastfeed.” Her eyes widen – larger than I have ever seen them. Glancing around us at the empty bathroom, she presses a fearful finger against my lip. “Shh, Liz!” she hisses. “Don’t say that!” “Why not?” I whisper, confused, “Who’s listening?”
This is one of my funnier memories of my experience, though there are plenty I could recount that are a lot less amusing: having my baby pushed on to my dry breast after a harrowing, hyperemesis pregnancy, three-day labour, triple haemorrhage and third-degree perineal tear; being told I just needed to try harder; being force-fed every supplement and old wives’ tale under the sun; hearing my baby scream after nursing for two hours and being refused a bottle, despite knowing in my gut she was still starving; watching her down 240ml of formula at 4 weeks; being overcome with guilt that my body could not do this basic and apparently essential thing for my child.
I know the benefits of breastfeeding. Me and every other woman on the planet. In the western world, where I currently live, a woman’s choice to have a baby is very rarely a misinformed one. Medical infrastructure, family services, government campaigns, childcare provision, the internet and social media have replaced our ‘village’, as we have moved further from our mothers and grannies and aunties. Very few women, certainly none of my acquaintance among my mum friends in Europe, the US, Australia and Africa, have not, at some point, come across the message that ‘breast is best’. It’s good for baby; it’s good for mummy. It’s wholesome, natural, completely fit for purpose. No one in their right mind would argue otherwise.
But when it comes to women’s issues, no single opinion exists in a vacuum. When we are born with a vagina, it’s as if our bodies are, by default, public property: to be observed, judged, enjoyed, criticised, ridiculed, lusted after. This only gets worse when we are with child. The world and its mother feel they have a right to tell us what to do with our bodies – what to put in them, what to put them in, how to use them, how they should look. Arguing that women should breastfeed, or should be told to breastfeed, or, heaven forbid, forced to breastfeed (as a very disconnected Brazilian supermodel once suggested!), is to shackle women once more to a practice that should be utilitarian in the act of mothering, not definitive of it.
Following my frustrations about a JUNO Instagram post during National Breastfeeding Week, I took my concerns to Twitter, conscious that I might be basing my assumptions on my own experience. Over 127 mums and dads responded to the poll, with an overwhelming majority saying they had been encouraged or pressured into breastfeeding, with only 8% of respondents saying they had been encouraged or pressured not to. (You can see the poll here: tinyurl.com/breastfeedingpoll.)
In my capacity as a home-schooling mother, a teacher, and a point of reference for many mothers in my community, there is only one constant I believe in when it comes to motherhood: a happy mum is a good mum. If breastfeeding, or formula feeding, make a mother happy, she should be free to do either, with no fear of what anyone will think about her choices. Of course, we know that formula milk might never have exactly the same properties as breastmilk, just as we know that we should exercise daily and avoid processed food, and yet people are still unfit, and McDonald’s is still in business. Womanhood is hard. Motherhood is even harder. And yet mothers are still held to a rigid standard of wisdom, selflessness and perfection, when in fact they need the most support of all of us.* As a society, and particularly as mothers ourselves, we shouldn’t be contributing to this toxic rhetoric. We should be looking for ways to make things easier for mothers, so that they can focus on what really matters – raising their children in safety and love.
Some mothers want to breastfeed and can. Some want to and can’t. Some don’t want to. None of these choices makes any of them a bad mother, and it is frankly none of anyone’s business how a mother chooses to feed her child, as long as the child is being fed. To suggest otherwise is to fuel a discourse that supports a system of ownership and judgement over women’s bodies and their choices, which, in the fragile postpartum moments of motherhood, is enough to send any woman over the edge, spiralling into feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Is that really what we want for mothers? Should we not, rather, be focusing our efforts on creating more spaces and resources to support them as they raise the generations to come? Paid maternity leave, affordable childcare, family welfare, postpartum medical care – there is so much that we could be fighting for, rather than fighting over whether or not a baby is fed from the breast or the bottle.
I stand by what I said all those years ago in that empty bathroom. So much pain, stress, sleep-deprivation. Blood, cracked nipples. Fenugreek, rooibos, malt extract. My poor breasts, once so valiant and upright. I’m not sure I would do it again. And that’s absolutely fine with me.
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Elizabeth M. Castillo is a British-Mauritian poet, writer, workshop teacher, and a two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She lives in Paris in a house full of children, cats and plants. Elizabeth’s writing explores the different countries and cultures she grew up with, and themes of race and ethnicity, motherhood, womanhood, language, mental health, and a touch of magical realism. She has a bilingual poetry collection, Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras, and her debut chapbook of feminist ecopoetry, Not Quite an Ocean, is published by Nine Pens. elizabethmcastillo.net and on Twitter and Instagram @emcwritespoetry
Photography by Sarah Chai
*Along with the most vulnerable in our society, who face an altogether different set of challenges, or mothers whose identities intersect with these groups.
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Published in issue 87. Accurate at the time this issue went to print.
