Last night, I was grading papers at a corporate monolith bookstore and, at a nearby table, a young mother and father were doing college work with their tiny baby and another man. The baby looked to be three or four months old, was very, very skinny, and started out brightly interested in his surroundings. The mother was clearly the study partner who knew what she was doing, confidently explaining the work to the two men. After awhile, the baby got hungry. He began fretting and the parents started the bouncy-dance, moving into finger-sucking and pacifer manuevers well past the point when they would have pulled out a bottle if they rolled that way. The baby was not a loud fretter so he wasn't disruptive to anyone but his mother who obviously knew what the baby needed but wasn't going to ante up...and the baby did not look to me like he should be missing any meals.
It took about all I had in me not to go over and whisper to the mom that I nursed there all the time and that it was perfectly fine to do so. If I had felt certain that doing so would have made the woman feel supported and confident about doing what she doubtless wanted to do, I would have. I thought it all too likely that it would have made her feel more scolded than just the experience she was having probably already made her feel, though, so I didn't. The baby fretted his skinny self to sleep and the grown-ups got their school work done.
What was going through the mother's mind, I wonder? That she should have kept him home and not tried to be part of a study group? That she'd have to start him on formula so she could get stuff done without starving him? When she was tutoring the men, she had seemed confident and strong. When it came to feeding her baby, though, our crazy culture had her cowed into thinking it was inappropriate to meet her baby's needs in public. It made me feel sad. It's so wrong that nursing mothers have to put up with so much shit that we start second-guessing ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment