The Mummy Wars

Nipple Nazis. Lactivists. Formula Fascists. Working mothers vs stay-at-homers. Attachment theory vs cry cry cry theory. Childcare concentration camps vs. home isolation. Co-sleeping vs No-sleeping.

What is it with you people? Can we stop the moral attacks, for just one hot minute? While all you mums are busy hating on each other you lose the one thing that’s most precious to you – your solidarity!

A couple of days ago I was witness to my own little mummy war. Right there at our kitchen table, my wife and a soon-to-be-ex-friend were discussing that ridiculously violent book by Christos Tsiolkas called “The Slap”.

“Clearly Tsiolkas is anti-breastfeeding,” my wife said, “and possibly anti-breasts in general?”

I tend to agree.

Not a fan of the public or even private display of breastfeeding, Tsiolkas refers to breasts as “teats”, makes his female characters refer to their own vaginas as “cunts” and claims that women who breastfeed for “too long” are somehow failed human beings or weak or stupid etc. Their pathetic kids should be slapped and possibly their fathers and mothers as well. Tsiolkas is a self-consciously modern man and likes his women to be modern also. Which means, to Tsiolkas, limit the breastfeeding and get the hell back to work. Like Rachida Dati, for example, the French Minister of Justice who was famously back at work within hours of giving birth.

Anyway, the soon-to-be-ex-friend, claimed to love the book, in particular, agreeing with the idea that breastfeeding your baby for “too long” is “revolting.”

“Revolting, you say?” asked my wife, eyebrows raised.

I quickly moved to the other end of the room.

Standing up, she declared proudly that she breastfed both our babies for over three years- longer than the “at least” two recommended by the World Health Organisation. A heavily pregnant or three weeks overdue silence ensued, followed by some terse words, a quick exchange of statistics to support opposing positions, then an attempt to smooth it all over. And, finally, mercifully, a speedy exit, with perfunctory promises of “should get together again soon.” Yeah. Sure. As if.

And another female friendship bit the dust.

Over what, exactly? Some half-understood, half-baked stats from the WHO? Or some equally half-baked stats from the file of “recent research from some already-fogotten university study indicates….”?

We live in a fast paced world. Opinions and research change weekly, monthly, daily. One week it’s “breast is best;” the next week it’s “bottle is better.” It seems that all we can be certain of is that things are pretty uncertain. Clearly there are good reasons for breastfeeding. Just as there’s many reasons against it. And each woman will defend her position according to her own specific story.

I’m not going to bother with listing all the reasons why breastfeeding is better for your child’s health, IQ, emotional maturity etc. because I know these ideas will change and will be replaced with new “scientific findings”, which most of us will only hear of or read about in a very second, third, fourth or fifth hand way.

But there’s so much pressure these days on parents to get everything right. So much anxiety caused by well-intentioned experts who clamour for the attention of worried, uncertain parents.

I remember sitting our first born in front of Baby Einstein videos in the wild hope that he would become a baby Einstein or at the very least develop the brainpower of that wheel chair dude. He looked interested, then bored, and finally, tried to eat his foot. This caused me no end of concern. I was certain that because he wasn’t thoroughly absorbed by Baby Einstein videos he was ADD and sure to be a moron by the time he was 6.

And where’s the proof that Baby Einstein videos work? It was just another fashion in the increasingly fashionable world of the baby industry.

Back to breastfeeding. In the fifties it was essential to breastfeed. In the high times of 1970’s feminism the bottle was king. Now we’ve swung back to the breast. I’m not saying that there isn’t important and objective work being done on this. But it’s so clouded by moral crusades and ideology that we, as parents, are prevented from having a decent discussion about it. And somehow, one way or the other, women get hemmed in by it all.

I know a woman who had three kids. Two she breastfed and the third wouldn’t have a bar of it. She desperately wanted to breastfeed the little’un. But she would not latch on. She tried. She cried. And eventually she and her baby girl worked it out. She was a bottle baby. That’s how it was. No experts. No manuals. No high-booted magazine gossip bloggers. Just her and her, in that beautiful dialectic that can only happen between a woman and her child.

So please. Stop all the bickering. You can do it in your own way. You and your baby know what’s best. You really, really do.

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