Or, in other words, I may just love Disney songs too much. That's not really a good lead into my topic for the day, though.
One of my biggest concerns for post-pregnancy life has been the concept of breastfeeding. I grew up next to a cow pasture, and so I'm pretty familiar with milking cows. Mind you, I love milk, and it doesn't really bother me where it comes from, but I've seen all the machinery that goes into dairy farms. Anytime I think of breastfeeding, I think of all of those childhood images of dairy farms and their milking machinery. I really don't want to be a cow. It got even worse when the topic of what type of pump to buy and how often to pump started coming up. Before at least I had a baby in front of me, but with pumping you really are just like a cow, hooked up to a machine just to put milk in a package! Again, I really don't want to be a cow.
Yes yes yes, I know breastfeeding is a natural process and that alone makes it beautiful (though I can think of plenty of natural processes that aren't beautiful, like the whole digestive system. yuck), but admittedly for me, the biggest draw to breastfeeding has been the economical value. Formula is wicked expensive and breastfeeding is free, so it's really hard to not consider breastfeeding. But then I ran into the problem of feeling like a cow, and it just spins around in circles of what is right for me.
Now that I'm only a few weeks out, it's been on my mind more, and so I've had a few dreams about it. I think Heavenly Father is trying to tell me that things will be OK, because I tend to do just fine in the dreams and I always wake up happy after those dreams. I hope that's how it'll be in real life.
Since I've been thinking more and more about the topic of breastfeeding, I've also been paying more attention to all of the discussion surrounding breastfeeding in public, which has also helped me calm my nerves about breastfeeding because I've challenged myself to form an opinion, and I happen to like my opinion.
What it comes down to is two questions: 1) Should women be allowed to breastfeed in public? and 2) How much exposure is appropriate when breastfeeding in public?
The first question, to me, is fairly easy to answer. Of course women should be allowed to breastfeed in public. After all, breastfeeding is most likely to be that kid's only source of food, and when you sit down and consider that the size of the baby's stomach is around the size of a cherry at birth and a large egg after two weeks, that kid needs food more often than the rest of us grown-ups. Adult stomachs are closer to the size of a fist or baseball, and most of us can't make it through three hours of church without feeling hungry, so imagine what a baby must go through.
The second question seems to be the bigger issue at hand. Many women cite the over-sexualization of the breasts as the main point of contention and that the argument goes, "it's a natural process and if a man gets worked up when seeing my breast while I'm feeding my kid, it's not my problem" or it goes the other way of "I cover up or go somewhere else because I don't want men to get a good look at my breasts while I'm just trying to feed my kid." How about we take a step back and take men out of the picture? When I did that, I found my opinion.
My desire to cover up or to go to a separate room is so that I can keep the experience an intimate moment between me and my son.
We read in the scriptures that our bodies are like the temple. When I go to the temple, I don't mind that other people are there, but the bottom line is that my experience at the temple is my personal time with God. I'm OK with treating my body during breastfeeding the same way. There are going to be times when other people are going to be there, which is perfectly fine. The bottom line is that this is my time with my son, and when I treat it as something special, I don't think of myself as a cow supplying milk on demand. I'm a mom providing a moment of closeness with my child, and to make sure that everyone else recognizes it, I will cover up or go into another room. It may sound cheesy, but I feel a lot more at ease now with the idea of breastfeeding.
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