I will be breastfeeding a boy again.
This was one of the first thoughts that popped into my mind after learning that I was pregnant with a second boy.
All of a sudden a different feeling occupied my body when I imagined nursing a son rather than a daughter. It was almost imperceptible, like the needle on a scale jumping side to side before settling on the right number. If I had looked away from it quickly, I could have ignored it. I could logically make my feelings land on the spot that I knew to be true: Nursing any infant–male or female–is a natural process. And a baby doesn’t know its sex or gender. I will nourish and love this baby no matter its sex.
But I’d done enough emotional work in the two years since birthing my first son that I knew that there was something important in the feelings that had peeked out before I made the rational judgment. There was something to acknowledge and learn there. I didn’t like the fact that I felt different about nursing a boy than a girl, but I explored it with curiosity. I let the needle waver. I rested in the in-between. Why did I have a more peaceful feeling about nursing a daughter? A safer feeling, a simpler and more straightforward feeling. I felt more relaxed and confident.
I asked a few friends who are mothers of boys if they ever felt this way, and once they thought about it, they agreed. Yes, they felt different imagining nursing a daughter. This is a group of women who had all breastfed their sons, some past two years, entering the “extended breastfeeding” window. We didn’t get a chance to unpack our feelings that night, but I couldn’t just let mine end there. I wanted to understand it better.
What first emerged was that in nursing a daughter, I imagined passing down a piece of the sacred sisterhood, saying, “This is the magic and the power of our bodies. And I’m sharing it with you.” From the time she was an infant, I would be welcoming her into the feminine circle, teaching her about the strength of women’s bodies. I felt the opportunity of ancient body wisdom being passed down, nourishing her for the self-possessed woman she would become. I would be sharing, siphoning some of my feminine power and pride into her from an endless, refilling source.
When I imagined nursing my son, I felt more like I was entering shaky, perilous territory. I sensed tension in my body. If I really focused, I noticed a tightness in my chest, raised shoulders, and shallower breath. In putting my breasts in my son’s mouth, I was fighting a culture that objectifies women’s bodies, sexualizes our breasts, and equates masculinity with sexual aggression, dominance, violence, and physical power. Intellectually, I didn’t believe these characteristics defined my child, but the imprint of that culture was there somewhere deep.
How long would be “too long” to nurse him? Like, when would he awaken to that sleeping giant of uncontrollable male sexuality within him? In a land where you can find baby onesies that say, “Ladies Man” and “Little Heartbreaker,” what did this adult projection of his latent masculine intentions mean for me as his mother, tickling his nose and upper lip with my nipple in order to get him to open his mouth? I did not see my son as a smooth manipulator or as someone who is irresponsible with the hearts of those around him, but maybe the world did, and the seed was there. I felt more vulnerable. I felt alert. I felt defensive. I would be fighting.
Apart from the broad cultural influence of toxic masculinity, there was this: I am a survivor of long-term emotional and sexual abuse. My body had a memory of trauma inflicted by a man. What did this mean for me as a woman giving so much from my body to a young male child?
Love is so deeply connected to intimacy.
I’m not just talking about sexual intimacy. I’m talking about knowing the particulars of a person, building a history, and making connections. Trust and intimacy are developed from being known, from being seen, from filling a reservoir of experiences of mutual respect.
When you have a baby, it is a time when physical intimacy comes before you have had a chance to really get to know each other. This is a new person. Yes, he’s been living inside you for 9 months and you really can’t get closer than that. But for me, it was different once my son was on the outside. He was a new person I needed to learn. He felt like a stranger, a stranger I was biologically programmed to keep alive and protect. Caring for him felt more like following natural instincts than what I had known love to be.
Before I learned much of anything about him, I put my breasts in his mouth. I held him close to my body while he was wailing. I slept with my hand on his chest so I could feel his chest rising and falling, to be assured that he was breathing. Our bodies were closer than anyone I had ever known.
All this physical intimacy comes before knowing the person.
It can be rather disarming, especially for someone with a history of body trauma. I was not prepared for how vulnerable I would feel and how breastfeeding, along with all the hours of physical closeness and heightened emotions, could awaken feelings of danger and anxiety in me.
I wish someone had told me about this possibility before he was born. I wish this had been on my radar as a part of the standard conversation around mothering and breastfeeding. With one in three women worldwide having experienced physical or sexual violence, it makes me wonder how many women feel like I did: Out of my comfort zone physically with my child. Vulnerable physically and emotionally. Feeling tension between protecting myself and ensuring my baby’s survival.
I didn’t even realize what was happening within me. His persistent needs for breastfeeding and close contact even when it was physically painful, even when I was crying and feeling lost, even when all I wanted was to sleep…it could trigger visceral memories of the abuse I had suffered. I knew that I had never truly healed from the abuse and I knew that sex was a challenging territory for me, but I didn’t think it would affect my relationship with my baby. That would be weird, right? Because my relationship with my baby was not a sexual one.
I didn’t know how little power I had to separate the memory of my body from those different aspects of my identity: sexual being and mother. I didn’t realize how connected they were by sensations in my body.
Intellectually I knew that this was my innocent child and that I was safe. I knew it was not abuse.
I had agency, I made choices, I ultimately had control. But my emotional responses sometimes felt similar to past abuse: resentment of my baby’s dependency, feeling like my body was not my own, detaching myself from my body’s sensations, and having the urge to push him away emotionally. Numbing out. Disappearing from my body. Gritting my teeth and pushing through.
It wasn’t that I felt the way about my child that I did about the man who repeatedly abused me. It’s that the reverberations of emotions from the experience of breastfeeding hit the same frequency as past trauma, and hearing those same notes again–this time while sharing an intimate moment with my child–disturbed me.
It doesn’t help that the conversation around sex in our culture often references “men’s needs,” with particular pressure put on a wife to meet her husband’s “needs”. It’s the idea that men have a different need for sex than women do and that depriving them of sex is not honoring or respecting their needs as our partner, that it is our duty to meet their needs.
Well, my child had a true life or death need for food, and breastmilk was my choice of nourishment for him. But thinking of his needs was triggering for me due to the way masculine “needs” had presented themselves to me before.
It doesn’t help that the conversation around sex in our culture treats men as if they are out of control when it comes to sex, as if they cannot control their urges. It clouds their judgment and makes them irrational. It makes them beg at our feet. It makes them violent. Women’s bodies and hearts pay the price for their rabid urges.
Well, when my screaming baby was hungry for food or wanting immediate comfort, he pulled at my shirt, opened his mouth expectantly, and latched powerfully onto my breast. He could eventually do this without my even helping him. He seemed out of control, too. He was an infant with no emotional regulation. His desperation at times made me feel a surge of panic.
I was committed to breastfeeding.
I didn’t want to let my painful past interfere with something so important to me. I wanted to give my child the best nourishment, the best start. I felt breastfeeding was the best choice for his and my long-term health.
And I wanted to fight against the sexualization of female breasts. I wanted to nurse my baby in public with confidence, without shame. I wanted to stand in solidarity with my bare-breasted sisters who choose to feed their babies over choosing to yield to a culture that would have the female body controlled and hidden when not serving the male gaze. I wanted to reclaim the power of my body, to develop new connections with it that were not based on how it looks or who it serves sexually. I was amazed by the power of my body to not only grow a child inside me but then to continue growing the child outside of my body. It was healing to feel my body generate so much life.
I wanted to give my child the best. But was I the best as a breastfeeding mother? Did he get the best of me and did I get the best of me? Was I putting too much pressure on myself to breastfeed when I should have been listening to some of the emotional discomfort I experienced?
I was glad when our nursing relationship was established enough that I felt comfortable having Dad give him a bottle sometimes. I was glad when I eventually made the choice to give him a bottle for his daytime nap rather than nurse him. I was glad when he became a voracious consumer of solids and started asking for breastmilk less. And it was bittersweet on the day when he suddenly decided at 18 months that he no longer wanted to nurse. I felt a sense of loss in moving past that stage for us and in saying goodbye to my last drops of milk.
I don’t know if I made the right choices to be more committed to breastfeeding than I was to my feelings at times. I wanted to benefit from the amazing bonding experience of breastfeeding, but for how long did it potentially complicate my relationship with my baby and delay the integration of my identity as a mother?
I don’t know. I will never know. I do know that motherhood has broken me and built me up stronger, louder, freer than ever before. I do know that motherhood has made me walk through the world with less shame and with more unapologetic authenticity. It’s challenged me and changed me in ways I never expected. I wouldn’t change the path that I’ve traveled and the decisions I’ve made.
I do know that I have reached a state of deep compassion for the choices we make as mothers and how personal and layered those choices can be. I can now understand why a woman would choose to not breastfeed and never feel the need to give anyone else justification for it.
I didn’t used to understand. I used to silently judge.
Sometimes I would think, “Yeah, breastfeeding is hard, but I’m working through my shit. You should be working through your shit, too. Sure, you don’t want to breastfeed. The idea of it or experience of it makes you uncomfortable, but that’s something you need to face, not run from.”
I would make up these stories in my mind to explain other mothers’ decisions, based on my own fears: “You’re a woman living afraid of change. You’re a woman who doesn’t know the potential of transformation in facing your wounds. You’re a woman who doesn’t understand that she’s not accessing her full power. You won’t let yourself see how powerful you could be.”
As Brene Brown writes in Daring Greatly, “my underlying fear of not being the perfect parent is driving my need to confirm that, at the very least, I’m better than you.”
I think I felt so defensive about breastfeeding because I wanted to believe it was worth all the physical and emotional pain I was putting myself through. And I was afraid that it wasn’t. It was more than the sore nipples and the painful engorgement. It was the feeling of not wanting to be touched one more time that day and the aching gap between how I thought being a mother would feel and how the experience truly was for me. It was the fear that every aspect of parenting would tear me down to my foundation and leave me feeling lost, wondering who I really was and if I really had what it took to be a good mother. It was the fear that in the end, I was just too broken, unlovable and incapable of loving well.
I wanted to believe that my commitment to breastfeeding made me a good mother: resilient, persistent, educated, passionate, selfless. I wanted to believe that all my effort meant something.
And it did mean something for me. I was being a good mother. I did give my baby the best start I knew to give. I did learn so much about myself and my own power. I did learn so much about my child.
And I did have something I wanted to prove to myself. And I did struggle with familiar perfectionist achievement issues. And I did experience healing with my body. And I did come face-to-face with re-opened raw wounds at a time when I was already feeling vulnerable postpartum. And maybe it did me a lot of good and maybe it did me some harm, too. All of it. All of it is true. None of it is perfect.
I won’t tell a simple story where life feels anything but simple.
But I choose to look toward signs of wholeness, healing, and transformation in the end. I stand by the conviction that there’s a reason that these boys, my children, were sent to me. I had no idea how much healing I needed to work through until these children entered my life. I believe that these two souls are healing my relationship with the masculine, and I believe that I somehow hold just what these two individuals need in a mother. We are stitched together by blood and milk and heartbeat after cheek-skinned heartbeat.
Whatever is toxic, let it be overpowered by our love–a love of courageous conversations, of healthy boundaries, of curiosity, of a willingness to learn and be wrong, of pure intentions backed by moment-by-moment actions of integrity.
We belong together. We are safe together in the family we are building. We are sharing feminine and masculine wisdom. We are fighting for every speck of light in each other.
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For survivors of sexual abuse, I recommend the book When Survivors Give Birth: Understanding and Healing the Effects of Early Sexual Abuse on Childbearing Women. I’ve found it to contain helpful information even for those like me who experienced sexual abuse in adulthood.
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