The Spendthrift's Progress

How I spent Black Friday and stuff about breastfeeding.

I am pleased to report that we utterly failed to take advantage of whatever sales were offered for the day after Thanksgiving.

Instead, I slept in after downing some vitamin C, letting the boy watch the girl while I rested up for fighting off the various colds to which we were exposed. It seems to have worked, knock wood. I woke up stuffy and feeling a bit under the weather, at which point, I decided not to surface again until close to noon, waking halfway for feedings before pushing them both out of the bedroom so I could shove my head under the covers. When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I felt much more human.

Once I regained my sentient state, we made a frittata (using up most of our past-prime veggies--frittatas are great for a cheap and tasty breakfast), and I took back the baby reins while the boy started in on the basement sorting project.

We've been putting off the sorting project for a while now, as more important things have come up whenever we've planned on doing it. Months and months after we first discussed the project, we're finally getting around to it.

It's like going shopping in a way, as we unearth things we'd completely forgotten we owned. The hope is to reclaim storage space while finding perfectly good items we can use as Christmas gifts for family members.

I'm not sure how much luck we'll have with that, frankly, as most of the things we have stored are either broken or gifts we never got around to using because they were pretty useless novelty items. The Goodwill donation station may be seeing a lot of us this year.

Still, I don't think we'll really have to do much shopping. I have a store of things that I can pull from for the women in the families. The men are going to be trickier. As a back-up plan, in case the basement hunt reveals nothing giftworthy, I've checked out some knitting and crochet books from the library. The menfolk may just wind up with hats this year, assuming I can find where I put my crochet hooks when we were making room for the girl. If I can't find them, I'm stuck with knitting, a craft at which I am far less skilled. If I have to knit, then it's Scarf Central for the XYs.

Children are going to be trickier, but excluding our own, who is too young to care, we really only have two of them on our list, and I will probably cement my position as cranky old fuddy-duddy aunt by giving them books.

Speaking of books, my journey to the library produced another two books on the politics of breastfeeding.

I've only managed to read Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding. It covers a lot of territory, which leaves it feeling unfortunately slight. There's a lot of emphasis on the Nestle boycott and the impact of formula advertising on breastfeeding rates in developing countries, but not enough depth or focus on the (somewhat less fatal) impact that advertising has in the developed world. A lot of history, not enough analysis. While there's a chapter on working and breastfeeding and the effect of maternity leave policies on breastfeeding rates, it's toward the end of the book and feels like a bit of an afterthought. I got more out of At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States.

As with At the Breast, when I finished the book, I found myself feeling pessimistic about seeing any real changes in social policy that would positively affect breastfeeding rates in the United States.

While I still feel that the economic benefits outweigh the costs of the ones usually suggested (paid maternity leaves, longer maternity leaves, on-site or near-site care with nursing breaks, and so on), said benefits are all of the long-term variety, and I guess I doubt the dedication to long-term planning in our cultural climate. And as pro-breastfeeding as I am, I have to admit, with everything else we're faced with as working mothers, I seriously see the appeal (in the abstract, that is, as I rather expect my mother* would disown me if I even considered it) of using formula as the path of least resistance. After all, breastfeeding can be damn hard work, especially in the early weeks, and pumping's even worse. I'm sure somewhere out there is a person who loves to pump, and more power to her, but most of us are none too keen on it.

Of course, as long as we're willing to stick to that path, those changes I'd love to see happen won't, because it will continue to be seen by employers as a simple issue of a choice between near equals, so if there's a sensible alternative to it that doesn't put the employers out, why should they bend over backwards to encourage breastfeeding?

Still to come: Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. I should probably hold off on that one for a couple of days, as too much rage and frustration in a short time fails to do a body good.

* My mother had three children between 1960 and 1976. She breastfed all of us, and was a working and breastfeeding mother with my older sister. See previous backstory on my mother, her expectations, and our expectations.

posted by mohmlet @ 2:23 AM