Carrie Frye, knowing my fondness for the lurid and the gory, pointed me towards this old New Yorker story (which you seem to be able to access!) by Joanna Greenfield about being mauled by a hyena, and it is everything you thought it could be and more:
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First, let’s get some mandated paid maternity leave in this country, because trying to establish a decent supply of breastmilk that can then be maintained by pumping on the breaks your employer is technically supposed to give you but GOOD LUCK WITH THAT if you have a crap job and are hesitant to agitate for the rights you may only be hazily aware you possess is REALLY HARD, then we can see how it goes. Also, if you deliver a full-term baby and live in a country with clean water, there is nothing wrong with formula and your baby will be just fine and I am willing to come to your house and make you cups of tea and reassure you about that in person. Breastfeeding rates in the United States are a structural failure, not a personal one, and family values are a goddamn JOKE. Or, honestly, you might have all the education and resources and will in the world, and it might just not happen for you, and thank God you live in a time where strict nutritional standards are applied to any formula sold in stores. Okay! Anyway. No strong feelings here.
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Also, formula is really, really expensive, so here’s my helpful guide to get more of it for FREE. Basically, formula companies have one goal and one goal only: to get your kid established with THEIR brand of formula (bc switching is a pain and you usually have to do it gradually) so they will send you massive sample packages in hopes that you will start using theirs and then just keep doing it. Now, since, again all formula in the US is required to meet exactly the same nutritional standard, there is really no goddamn difference. So pick one. Let’s say Enfamil! I want you to go their website, and request their mailings to a dumb email address you rarely check, and GIVE THEM YOUR PHYSICAL MAILING ADDRESS and they’ll send you stuff. Whole packages of formula, and tons of coupons. Ask your best friend to do it for you. Ask your aunt. Ask your kid sister. If you’re just the friend of a new or pregnant mom, quietly do it on her behalf (always to your address, obvi)! The company doesn’t care that you’re not the mom, they leave “other” as an option, bc THEY JUST WANT TO PUSH PRODUCT. And then, if she uses formula, give it to her. If she doesn’t, HOOOOOORAY, take it to a women’s shelter! You have now robbed the rich to feed the tiny. Ugh, even if you don’t know someone who’s pregnant, you should do it and then give formula to shelters.
Also, because Obama, if you have health insurance they have to get you a breast pump now, and they cost a FORTUNE, so call your insurance provider in your third trimester and ask them what to do.
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TEAM CAROLINE. TEAM RIGHTEOUSNESS.
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AN ORAL HISTORY OF GALAXY QUEST:
Dean Parisot (director): At the risk of sounding pretentious, there are a whole lot of themes playing in there. The movie needed to begin as a mockery and end as a celebration. That’s a hard thing to do. Part of the mission for me was to make a great “Star Trek” episode.
George Takei (as quoted on SciFi.com in 1999): [“Galaxy Quest” is] a chillingly realistic documentary.
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Some of these crowd-sourced tales of getting (non-sexually) lucky are AMAZING.
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The new “Dear White People” trailer is out:
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The Femilisk, of course, is very real.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I have no children, am not planning to have children any time soon, and the shit about breastfeeding I read on the internet makes me SO ANGRY. Breastfeeding and the controversies surrounding it actually terrify me more than most other things about having children. Which is foolish! And one of many reasons why I’m not pregnant! But good Lord, some of this shit is just absurd.
(Obviously I am not speaking of Nicole’s very calming and reasonable advice above, but anything with the search terms “breastfeeding mommy wars” used in earnest.)
I click on so many of those headlines, I think the targeted advertising things would be really confused about me if my work’s filter wasn’t so aggressively anti-ad. And I’m a “no plans for kids, y’know, ever” person.
But it’s such a perfect example of so many Feminism 101 concepts. Which I’ve been practicing on so many people in my life. The subtle ways patriarchy gets to tell women what to do or care about. The ways women can internalize this, and perpetuate it on each other. The definition of “concern trolling”.
As well as the bigger theoretical questions: how do we celebrate the contributions of women without perpetuating harmful gender roles? Can we celebrate “motherhood” as distinct from “fatherhood” without (even unintentionally) furthering the agenda of those who seek to make motherhood the “best” thing a woman can be?
So far, mommy wars are The Worst Thing, but also The Best Teaching Example
Oh, and obviously, it’s a great example of ways the “official feminism” narrative can be co-opted by the issues of a relatively small group of mostly middle-to-upper-class women.
My real-world, we-all-have-to-survive-in-this-shitty-patriarchy advice: Stay the hell off the internet for the first, oh, 6 months or so of your baby’s life. You’re not totally rational in the postpartum period, and the judging can get to you. (Realistically: Avoid Baby Center, mommy blogs and any magazine geared toward white middle class liberals.)
Once your baby is older and you know them and have your bearings, you start to realize you’re the expert in their (and your own) life, thank you very much, and all the garbage rolls off your back much easier.
+10,000
As a fellow mom, every time Nicole publishes one of these blurbs on motherhood (breastfeeding, birthing, maternity leave, etc etc) I find myself nodding my head so hard and quickly that my neck nearly breaks.
I mean, do we really have to go all better-than-thou over FEEDING BABIES? At least they’re being fed!
Literally no-one has the right to make another person feel like an abusive shitbag over how they’re fed, or what nappies are on them, or what they play with.
Ugh breastfeeding. I stopped over a year ago and I’m still irritated by the whole thing. I nursed (it was easy for me) and got so much weird smug congratulation from other breastfeeding mums, with a lot of weird oblique criticism of people who didn’t thrown in. Whatever, most real healthcare professionals will admit that while there are likely benefits, the data is terribl and the magnitude of the benefit is small. Also!! The breastfeeding facists have an insane belief in the powers of breastmilk. They rub it on their and their kids boo-boos and rashes. They think that it is a magical substance rather than just a biologically ingenious way of feeding young infants. Why just this morning on my neighborhood parent’s listserv, there’s a mom looking for recommendations for a new pediatrician because she breastfeeds her >1 year old, and the kid doesn’t eat much because she nurses a lot, and is small and anemic. Her current pediatrician had THE AUDACITY to suggest she reduce the number of feedings and add in some more solid, iron rich foods and consider an iron supplement. Woman I promise you, anemia will do more damage to your kid’s development than food that is not breastmilk. UGH, people.
This whole breast milk is magical thing is so common and so infuriating. My daughter was exclusively breastfed until she started solids and still had a lot of ear infections and I actually had people say “how can your daughter get sick, she’s breastfed?” I’ve seen mothers advise other mothers that a 2 year old who was being breastfed wouldn’t get chickenpox because of the mother’s antibodies, even though the impact of the mother’s antibodies in the milk stops after a baby is around six months because their gut linings become less permeable in preparation for moving to a non-breast milk diet. (If you google this you get a lot of nonsense woo websites but my doctor told me it was true so I’m going to believe it.)
I’m willing to believe that it might help, say, cradle cap, or at least not hurt it and be a fairly harmless placebo for stuff that mostly clears up on its own. Otherwise, you get into some pretty heavy magical thinking. Exclusively breastfed babies have been dying from preventable childhood diseases since the dawn of man. I believe breastfeeding is great and beneficial, but not somehow filled with magic powers.
The first paragraph of that breastfeeding article is stuffed so full of ~trendy~ cultural appropriation it gave me a rash.
THEY ALWAYS ARE. There are whole blogs devoted to “African Babies Don’t Cry.”
…?
Oh Christ I thought it would be a joke but IT WASN’T. “She could give birth in the Lotus position like a Balinese woman” OH GOD. Let’s talk about how non-western cultures aren’t here for trendy upper-middle-class white people to appropriate, shall we?
Nicole, SERIOUSLY
There are too many quotables in your breastfeeding rant to pick. It’s perfect. And so are you.
Seriously, I want to print it out and nail it to the door of… something.
Oh nooo, the “Femilisk” page has vanished 🙁
but will that save the men who failed to help her?
Nothing can save cishets.
It’s OK, I’m back! http://sjwiki.org/wiki/Femilisk I sort of have a comic about me too: http://blatantmisandry.wordpress.com/
YES. I exclusively pumped from when my baby was 3 months old to 10 months old ,and before that went through months of shitty latching, guilty supplementing, and generalized misery. I had a snacky baby who never wanted to go 20 minutes without a nipple in her mouth. I was losing my fucking mind. When we started supplementing with formula, I could at least get a nap and a walk. When I switched to exclusively pumping, I could get six hours of sleep every other night. When I went from exclusively pumping to feeding formula and solids, I got my real life back – gym, sleep, socialization.
I don’t regret not making it to a year and beyond – I regret not switching sooner. And I am an earth mama, non-hospital non-medicated-birth, placenta-tincture-owning hippie of the most serious degree. If breastfeeding is what you want to do and you can pull it off, awesome for you. If you want to do a mix, that is totally okay. If you never want to even try, FUCKING FINE.
Okay, I am loving the breastfeeding politics and mom-support, but also: Galaxy Quest ORAL HISTORY?! Nicole, you are wise in the ways of the link roundup.
Yessss. I’ve added Drop Dead Gorgeous to my “hunt down a copy and watch” list, but Galaxy Quest is on my “mandatory watching at least twice a decade” and has been since it came out and I made my parents take me to see it in the theaters multiple times.
So very true. I loved that film before I was even aware I was a sci fi geek
Galaxy Quest is one of my favorite movies, partly because it’s A Thing with my family. It’s just the most ridiculous and perfect. The main takeaway from the oral history piece, for me at least, is that Tim Allen is a HUGE ASSHOLE and Sigourney Weaver didn’t put up with any of his bullshit at all, I just want to read about her sassing him all day long.
It is A Thing with my family, too…we have used the phrase “straight on through the chompers” so often that I forget it doesn’t make sense to laypeople (laypersons?).
Part of the mission for me was to make a great “Star Trek” episode.
…guess i’m seeing this now.
it’s GREAT and you will love it (I hope), I haven’t seen Star Trek but I still laugh my face off every time, I guarantee it will be better if you’ve seen the show.
Patrick Stewart loves it and said he cried in the theater.
…that last bit may be apocryphal, but the point is, he thinks it totally captures Star Trek and the relationship fans have with it. IT’S A GREAT MOVIE.
Aw!
I think breastfeeding is GREAT, by the way, and I’m really hoping to succeed next time around. I have a few little things I want to do from the start that I think could have helped (pumping as soon as milk comes in while I’m still in the hospital, immediate fenugreek, etc.) but my MAIN PLAN is to not get so emotionally enmeshed with the idea of breastfeeding. In the comments on The Hairpin article, someone said that feeling guilty at failing at breastfeeding is like thinking you “failed at kidneys” or “failed at pancreas,” and that was really helpful to me.
And if I have a less sleepy baby who actually wakes up to feed every hour to help build a supply (I probably will!), I might be fine! But, you know, it was REALLY AWESOME to have a super-sleepy baby and now she’s 2.5 and still sleeps 12 hours a night and takes a 2.5 hour nap most afternoons, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
It wasn’t possible for me for the first but was for the second. This whole breastfeeding mystique is just one more Herculean Task that our culture wants women to feel guilty about.
I’m so glad I was so busy with babies, work and grad school that I knew nothing of Mommy Blogs, or I might have used my little creme brulee torch on them
GREAT NOW I WANT CREME BRULEE
The fact that you have a creme brulee torch means you’ve already won
Everytime we went to a doctor or lactation consultant about BF problems and they said, “your body will just know what it’s supposed do!” I wanted to scream. The entire reason the medical profession EXISTS is because human bodies often do not do what they are supposed to do.
WTF is up with the right breast thing, you know? Come on, lady – I say to mine – you can do it! I think the left one is just tapping all the milk out and my right one is like an accessory to it.
That New Republic article felt very classist to me. White middle-to-upper-class moms should bring back the wet nurse, but who exactly will these wet nurses be? What about lower income women who work multiple part time jobs and therefore don’t qualify for breaks that allow them to pump? I don’t know, the whole breastfeeding controversy seems to be centered on white women and that bothers me.
I mean, who do you think were the wet nurses back in Ye Olde Europe Times? (Louis XIV had a wet nurse not because his mom couldn’t breastfeed, but that it was thought of as uncouth for a queen to do such a thing.)
Exactly. See: “Many infants from poor families died, which was a great entrepreneurial opportunity for their mothers!!”
Wasn’t it also because breastfeeding can delay the next pregnancy, and queens were expected to have lots of babies?
that too! I’m sure they were also kind of linked (Queen has to immediately go back to Being Queen, which doesn’t include things like ‘taking care of infant’, just producing infant. After that she has to go back to wearing fancy clothes and stuff. Let a poorer person do the work.)
The practice of hiring wet nurses in Europe caused a very weird tiered wet nurse structure like so => ruling class farmed out their babies to urban nursing mothers, for whom it was more financially feasible to hire their OWN wet nurses, who then sent their infants to the country and/or abandoned them via institution. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes about the increase in child abandonment numbers during the years when wet nursing was firmly entrenched, when such institutions had a child mortality rate of over 90%. Maternal mortality also increased dramatically during that time. WHO THINKS THAT ANY OF THIS IS A GOOD IDEA.
I mean, feminism in general is centered on white women so why should this be any different?
Fucking PREACH on universal paid maternity leave (and paternity leave, so as to not give employers incentives to discriminate against women of childbearing age!) and breastfeeding and formula.
I am SO MAD this country is so goddamn backwards on paid parental leave. (And universal child care, while we’re at it.) I don’t even have kids yet, but it pisses me the fuck off. “family values are a goddamn JOKE.” Truer words never spoken.
My grandmother found out after the birth of her first child that she was unable to breastfeed due to infections and blockages in her ducts, and she’s still pissed about it. She’s eighty-six years old.
CARRIE FRYE RULES
I just wanted to stop watching myself get eaten
holy shiiiiiiiiiiiit
I’m lucky enough to have been able to breastfeed my now three-year-old daughter for 17 months (take that people who claim c-sections make breastfeeding impossible) and I’m all for it and it’s great and beautiful blah blah blah but middle class white ladies have so much angst about it that it makes me feel ill. I should know I am a middle class white lady and boy was there angst, especially in the beginning when it wasn’t particularly great. And I had maternity leave and help from lactation consultants and a supportive partner and no health issues, so I was pretty much the poster child for first world white ladies breastfeeding, and it still was hard and made me cry a lot in the first two months.
And despite having a pretty epic supply, there’s no way I would breastfeed anyone else’s child – ok, barring some sort of end of the world type disaster – and I think it’s unlikely to become standard practice. However I think the soft version of this is actually recommended by a lot of breastfeeding advocates – if you’re having trouble breastfeeding you should acquire milk from another woman, either a milk bank or a friend or you can buy it off the internet from some random stranger. Because, you know, there’s just so much spare breast milk floating around and it’s totally cool feeding other people’s bodily fluids to your baby, when there’s a perfectly safe and well-regulated alternative available for first world parents.
Anyway I’m going to be really angry about the idea of wet nurses all day for all sorts of reasons, but the one that I am now going to rant about is that breastfeeding and pumping are actually hard work, and like childcare in general it’s the sort of work which is disregarded by society, and I can’t see having poorly paid working class women acting as wet nurses for upper middle class women as anything but further entrenching the idea that bearing and feeding and looking after children is something best done out of sight and for very little pay.* So yes, qua Nicole, let us first establish a world where child rearing is seen as a pretty important thing, with parental leave and childcare and flexible work practices, and then if some women just love breastfeeding so much they’re happy to be wet nurses then go for it.
(*And the history of wet nursing is the history of poor women taking in rich women’s children and then children very often dying as a result – either the rich woman’s baby or the poor woman’s. And it become so common in places such as England because royalty and nobility basically wanted to breed their women like cows, and nursing can suppress fertility, and who wants that?)
There are so many stories going around about how nannies are abused and treated like the people they work for own their lives. My thought is that it would be 10 times worse for a wet nurse. The employers would feel the need to monitor the wet nurse’s every move from what she eats to her sex life, because STDs can be transmitted through breast milk. And babies need to eat 24/7, so do you have shifts of more than one wet nurse or are you taking one woman away from her child/ren to feed yours? So many problems with this. And the fact is we have a fine solution to the problem, formula. It is not poison, it is food.
” I can’t see having poorly paid working class women acting as wet nurses for upper middle class women as anything but further entrenching the idea that bearing and feeding and looking after children is something best done out of sight and for very little pay.”
Standing ovation!
Clearly child-rearing is really just too inconvenient for the working world, so how’s about we do away with all that pesky female biology and outsource it to the less ‘valuable’ workers. Fuck you, TNR, humans aren’t fungible.
I HAVE ONE JOB ON THIS SHIP
Can you fashion some sort of rudimentary lathe?
WHOEVER WROTE THIS EPISODE SHOULD DIE!!!!
My husband’s only reaction to “Dear White People” is “My body is ready.”
Also, I can’t pinpoint what it is, but I really like this trailer over the original teaser!
I think it’s cause it feels like it has more of an…arc? Like the characters seem real? The original one was basically a pitch, and this is for a real movie, and it shows.
That is definitely it! Thank you for IDing that. 😀
That is a great idea about the formula and the women’s shelters, but GALAXY QUEST ORAL HISTORY?!?!?!?!?
Can’t waaaaiiitt to see Dear White People! Thanks for bringing that to my attention!
Oh man, when my ex’s brother’s gf had a baby we had to like, get his mother to leave her alone because she decided breastfeeding was not for her. WHICH IS A PERFECTLY VALID CHOICE. But his mom would be all, “But the baby willl be stupiiddddd!!” and we would be like, “calm down, she has a Ph.d she is aware of all of that research and you are just stressing her out.” (Pretty sure she was still feeding the baby breastmilk, just pumping instead. Which, ugh, it was so annoying.)
Breastfeeding question threadjacking time! Has anyone had the opposite problem–with weaning? My breastfeeding experience was basically fine (I was good when it was an actual baby and medium-to-terrible when it was a pump), but I’m finding it very hard to STOP. My son is 13 months old and every time I drop a feeding I get anxious and depressed in a way that feels extremely chemical. Sometimes I get incredibly stressed out that he’s hungry even when I see him eat an enormous dinner of table food and then sleep like a rock. IT IS NOT NORMAL NOR HELPFUL. He is down to one feeding a day but every time it’s so horrible I dread stopping completely. I’m afraid to look it up online because of the breastfeeding craziness that has infected the internet. Do any wise ladies have thoughts/experience with this?
My take would be see your doctor? I did not have this issue with weaning, but am generally sensitive to the effects of hormones, and it sounds hormonal. There may be something they can do to even you out while you drop feedings, like put you on the pill (or changing pills or taking you off, if you’re on one).
It took me about three weeks to wean off the pump (I was exclusively pumping) and I was straight up classically depressed for most of them, despite my regular regimen of Zoloft. It’s very normal and very common and it should resolve itself not long after you’re done weaning. If it doesn’t, or if it is too tough in the meantime, you could talk to a doctor or nurse.
But yeah, I hadn’t gotten any heads-up about that from the breastfeeding literature so it was an unpleasant surprise. It is a legit chemical misery as your system tries to process the change in oxytocin levels.
What is that art of the blue haired Cthulady? It looks like Flatbear but there’s no credit. 🙁
It’s of User:Femilisk on SJWiki and RationalWiki. It’s by Chris Armstrong (User:Armondikov on RationalWiki). There’s a whole cartoon series: http://blatantmisandry.wordpress.com/ – The Adventures of Miss Andrist and White Knight.
Nicole, you are a wonderful person. I am not a mother, but hope to one day become one, and I feel like everything you write about being a parent is like a balm to anyone out there who is struggling with all the parenting bullshit that gets squawked about.
guys, I have never seen Galaxy Quest and this makes me feel like the worst Star Trek fan ever, I’m pretty sure I’m Doing It Wrong
Find one of us near you to watch it with! It’s so, so funny.
(I mean, I’m sure there are people out there who didn’t like it, but I don’t know any of them, so I am running on the assumption that you’ll laugh at it too)
When it comes to what you have or haven’t seen from the canon (or in this case, fanon I guess), you cannot Fan Wrong. You are worthy! Watch the thing for fun, not duty!
I got to see Dear White People a few weeks ago at a special pre-screening. It rocks and everyone should see it.
My sister-in-law, a pretty standard middle-class white lady, is just like, “Nope, I didn’t breastfeed, it’s not for me.” I admire this, because I don’t think I’ve ever been able to be that nonchalant and guilt-free about ANYTHING. I fully anticipate being a wreck about breastfeeding, should I become a parent and have any sort of difficulty with it.
Yeah – the pressure to breastfeed is just ridiculous. After an emergency c-section (Failure #1!) my milk just never seemed to come in. I seriously saw every. single. lactation person I could find. After leaving the hospital, my daughter began peeing uric acid crystals, a sign of dehydration. Rather than advise me on formula feeding, I was put on a “pumping marathon” in which I was supposed to breastfeed her directly every hour and then pump every 30 minutes. Somehow, despite the absurdity of it all, I tried – and managed to produce a whopping 3oz. We ended up having to take our daughter in to children’s hospital b/c of her dehydration. (We were supplementing with formula but not enough, and no one would give us info, because EVERYONE CAN BREAST FEED and anyone who says they can’t is just a liar) When we left the hospital, I tried to pump for the first three months while giving her formula. I was so convinced that if she didn’t get those magical few ounces I was able to make, she’d somehow never grow up. The most I ever produced in one day was 9oz. She was on formula ever after – and Target brand, at that (keep an eye out for their end-of-season sales following their club store promotion. the two packs of GIANT formulas end up like 50% off) and is now starting Kindergarten. WE BOTH SURVIVED
Oh hi I also have a breastfeeding rant. (And a car-buying rant, but that’s in progress.)
Namely: before I gave birth to my older daughter I was told about something called “nipple confusion,” which is the idea that if you let the baby have a bottle before breastfeeding is fully established, the baby will get addicted to the ease of taking formula from a bottle and will refuse the breast from there on out. Now, I can’t tell you this never ever happens, but the whole concept took a bad situation (she lost more weight than she should have in the hospital) and made it worse, as I was FREAKING OUT over the possibility of giving her a bottle (which my strongly-BF-encouraging pediatrician was encouraging me to do by this point) and thus Ruining Our Breastfeeding Relationship Forever. To cut to the chase, she breastfed for 14 months. So did my younger daughter, who was born a late preemie and thus got formula supplements from the get-go.
So: if you are ever in a similar situation and hearing about “nipple confusion,” remember that (a) it does not always happen, (b) you can always pump if it does, (c) you are not a bad mom.
Also: the magic of feeding, whatever it might be, comes from holding the kid in the middle of the night and watching People’s Temple documentaries on your electronic device of choice. (Says I.) Bottle-feeding does *not* mean you will not be able to bond. (Breastfeeding does not guarantee that you will.)
Finally, I have a friend who recommends Dr. Sears wholeheartedly, and I love my friend dearly, but I would not recommend Dr. Sears on this particular topic.
Breastfeeding sidenote. The hospital where I work is a collection site for a regional milk bank. One mom recently brought in, I kid you not, like 400 ounces of frozen breastmilk in one trip. I guess she has a walk-in freezer at home or something, because this was multiple full-size camping coolers full of bags of milk.
Anyway, donating your extra milk if you have the supply for it is an AWESOME thing to do. The milk goes to preemies NICU whose mothers literally weep with relief when they find out that we can provide it for them.
WTF is up with the right breast thing, you know? Come on, lady – I say to mine – you can do it! I think the left one is just tapping all the milk out and my right one is like an accessory to it.
Dear White People looks really smart and funny, but the real reason I will be paying cash money to see it in theaters is because I really need to know if the “educated white males have the hardest luck on the job market” bro gets the smackdown he deserves.
Dear White People looks really smart and funny, but the real reason I will be paying cash money to see it in theaters is because I really need to know if the "educated white males have the hardest luck on the job market" bro gets the smackdown he deserves.
I actually went home and looked up moving to Norway because he went on about all the job prospects over there. He got into my mouth and into my mind.
Not in a gross way.
My mum just listed 'Fanny and Alexander' and 'Galaxy Quest' as her top two favourite films.
He's touching your teeth, and touching your heart! (Or maybe not.)
Thanks, I'll look into this!
Nicole’s Hairpin piece on breastfeeding is, no exaggeration, one of the most important things (for me, personally) I have read online. I foist it on any parents in my life who are having a hard time with parent things. I may add this comments thread to my list of required reading.
Daughter was a c-section (as someone above said, failure #1!), so my milk supply took forever to arrive and the lactation consultant who descended on my hospital room was full to the brim with completely insane ideas that would leave me without sleep or presence of mind to think about my new, tiny human. Moreover, new, tiny human seemed inexplicably disinterested in learning how to latch correctly. I decided to go with formula on day four and the fiftysomething, judgement-free nurse who brought the two ounce bottle of it to my furious daughter still numbers among my heroes.
As it turns out, my kid has a sensory processing difference that makes sustained physical contact extremely difficult for her! Little hugging, no kissing, and hand-holding only when it has been designated as necessary for personal safety. She loathes skin-to-skin contact (will not sit on my lap if I’m wearing a skirt and no tights, for example). Breastfeeding must have been a white-hot nightmare for her (WHAT IS THIS IN MY FACE?).
So, yeah. No shame for making the choices that feel right for your family. Because they *are* right.
I missed the femilisk AND the hyena attack. That’s what I get for dawdling, I suppose.
The Femilisk didn’t miss you, we watch your every move, we are legion. http://sjwiki.org/wiki/Femilisk
PS: Also http://blatantmisandry.wordpress.com/
Femilisk approves of this post.
That hunger article… I guess I’m really surprised at how many people need food assistance in some areas, but on the other hand I realised, we don’t really have the same programme here, and if we did, then my family and I would actually be on SNAP. They really hit the nail on the head about food choices and time and preparation. And yep, I have been in the position where one of my children has asked for fruit after dinner, and I’ve looked at the fruit bowl, calculated how long until we get paid, and how we’ll divide up what we have left over those days, and told her to have a piece of cake or a cookie instead. (I had baked the cookies and cake myself, but still.)
Also, I starting reading the comments. Haha. Yeah…
That hunger article… I guess I'm really surprised at how many people need food assistance in some areas, but on the other hand I realised, we don't really have the same programme here, and if we did, then my family and I would actually be on SNAP. They really hit the nail on the head about food choices and time and preparation. And yep, I have been in the position where one of my children has asked for fruit after dinner, and I've looked at the fruit bowl, calculated how long until we get paid, and how we'll divide up what we have left over those days, and told her to have a piece of cake or a cookie instead. (I had baked the cookies and cake myself, but still.)
Also, I starting reading the comments. Haha. Yeah…
That is definitely it! Thank you for IDing that. 😀