Thu 22 Sep 2005
I was walking down a busy street with a friend, Ernie, and we stopped to get some melon on a stick from a street vendor. This was in Ernie’s neighborhood and he seemed fairly well acquainted with both the young lady selling the fruit and the other lady with her, who seemed too young to be her mother but was no doubt related. Ernie has a knack for striking up conversation and getting the locals to laugh and we had a brief but pleasant banter with them. An everyday, ordinary occurrence, perhaps, but notable nonetheless, for the entire conversation took place with the elder lady holding a suckling child to her breast, plainly for all to see. But, who’s looking?
This brought memories of my own experiences to play. When we were blessed with the birth of our first daughter, Blysse, Salomae and I were living in a suburb of Seattle, as progressive a city as one is likely to find in the US. We were highly fortunate to have as our midwife, Debra O’Connor, a veritable general in war against birthing alternatives waged by the mafia-like American Medical Association and associated organizations like the Nursing Commission of Washington State, who are doing their utmost to stamp out all competition. Blysse arrived peacefully to this world, save for her mother’s screams, of course, in a water birth to the soothing music of Ayub Ogada
Even in as progressive a city as Seattle, public breastfeeding, where a nipple might be flashingly exposed, elicited mixed responses, from happy doting looks to outright disgust and rage. I must say that nearly every beaming person who came up and told us how happy they were to behold such a beautiful sight was not from the US, with one elderly eastern European man standing out in my mind, no doubt because he regaled us with his stories for quite some time. We were, of course, confronting a sick and twisted portion of America’s collective value system. I know that sounds harsh but please! How can anyone honestly find anything at all sexual about providing the sustenance for life to an infant? (Fetishes, aside, that is!) In extreme cases, such people themselves are sick and twisted; no doubt because their sexuality has been so strongly suppressed that they can’t help but be aroused by such a sight. They are deeply ashamed of their bodies, especially any aspect which might cause them pleasure. Arousal = bad = must be banned. These are the people who eventually can’t help themselves and march up to you and demand you take your child and feed her in the rest room. To which you reply, “Fine, why don’t you take your sandwich into the bathroom with you?”
Things were different in Utah, somewhat, when Elyssia came along. We birthed Ellie in the bedroom of our new home. By this time we were even stronger advocates of natural birth and breastfeeding for the health of your child. In Utah, we found strong support. However, the modesty of most residents dictated that they cover the child and offending breast with a cloth or blanket. Fine, I suppose, if you don’t mind sweating and making your infant very uncomfortable, as we sympathetically witnessed time and time again while watching many a mother’s one-handed struggles to keep the blanket in place while the child endeavored to remove it. Utah was the best place in the US we found for providing comfortable rooms for nursing mothers to retire. This provided a stress-free experience for everyone, though there were still many startled stares at the blatant exhibitionist who defied tradition and wouldn’t cover up.
So, as Ernie and I were walking away, I mentioned how wonderful it was that they don’t feel this sense of shame toward this natural practice. To which Ernie replied, “True. But they feel shame in ways we Americans don’t - Confucian shame. They fear anything that will bring dishonor to their families.” Good point. I had a mental flash of a Chinese Jerry Springer and dysfunctional Chinese families revealing all on national TV and lobbing chairs at each other…
Not likely.
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