I am a mom who has spent a large portion of my life being pregnant or breastfeeding. My first boy, Richard, was breastfed till he was 10 months.In 1995 I weaned him because I was 5 months pregnant with Amanda. At the time I was in Italy, and the only advice I could find was that breastfeeding while pregnant could make the milk go "bad" or that it could bring on labour. So at 20 years old, and lacking resources for information, I weaned.
Amanda, was breastfed till she was 1 year old. Again I was pregnant, but this time I had been informed by a lovely German mother of 9 that it was "ridiculous" to wean for fear that it would bring on labour and also that she had continued breastfeeding throughout her pregnancies, yet they were mostly born post-dates. So I continued till Amanda was a whole year old, by which time I was 7 months pregnant.
The next child, Terence, was also fed till a year, at which time I was 8 months pregnant with Clarisse. Clarisse was on the breast till 1 year, then I decided to become pregnant with Derek. Derek was breastfed for 17 months when I then became pregnant with our sixth child, Fiona. Fiona was breastfed till she was 2 1/2 years old at which time I made a trip overseas to visit relatives. She was weaned when I came back.
The WHO says that breastfeeding till around 2 years old is the ideal.
Unfortunately, breastfeeding has become a bit of an issue. Whether you breastfeed,or not seems to be the main thing that makes everyone go on the defensive, as if you need to defend your choice. Otherwise your peer mothers might view you as a bad mother.
I have spent this morning reading dozens of blogs by women who feel the need to defend their choices. Even blogs of dedicated lactivists. Why is there a need to defend our choice to breastfeed or not?
At least in part, it's because we know that breast milk is the perfect food, and breastfeeding is a part of the bonding process between mother and child. We have been brought up to believe that we need to provide the best when it comes to our children.
We mothers seem to carry a lot of burdens based on the opinion of our peer mothers. In some circles, if you don't have your figure back within a set amount of time, you are looked down on, or if you don't have the latest gear. In other circles it is whether you wear your baby in a handy wrap around sling, or use any chemicals in your home.
It seems when someone becomes a mother, or father, for that matter, there are a lot of new minefields into which you might step. Why cannot we practice non-judgmentalism?
People do things a certain way for many different reasons. Many times a new parent is fumbling around trying to find their way and learn a host of new skills, while at the same time trying to look like they know what they are doing. One persons experience will not be the same as that of another person, and we all see life and our children and their upbringing through the filter of our own life experiences and the information we are given. This means that neither right nor wrong exist, only how we see it in relation to our own experiences.
I want to share a paragraph from Eckhart Tolle's"A New Earth".
"There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is an identification with a mental position-a perspective, an opinion, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: You need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are. Not only a person, but also a situation can be made wrong through complaining and reactivity, which always implies that "this should not be happening."Being right places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself."
So our egos are all working overtime when we are looking around at other parents and being critical. We are try to bolster our own ego with the hope that it will give us more confidence to be parents ourselves, when in actuality our ego is only concerned with itself, it does not look at what others need. The ego is therefore the antithesis of what a good parent needs to be in order to care for children.
