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Lactation Limericks (via KellyMom)
Advice
“I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy. I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it.”
Art Williams
“My birth instructor said this…: The breast is like a muscle you haven’t used yet. ‘Remember taking up a new sport?’ she asked… ‘Remember how much the new set of muscles you used surprised you by aching so much?’ Well, she said, that’s what it’s like to use your breasts, for the very first time, for the purpose they have been awaiting all your life.”
Julia Glass, Unbuttoned
“Such advice (re: breastfeeding and HIV positivity) reflects the Western prejudice that artificial milks are innocent until proven guilty, whereas breastmilk is guilty until proven innocent.”
Short RV. “Breastfeeding, birth spacing and their effects on child survival” in Nature
“We have to stop leaving all the decisions to the so-called decision-makers, but take matters into our own hands; realise that each one of us makes a difference, and that if everyone who cares, acts in a way that is ethical…..then the world would be changed very fast.”
Jane Goodall
Katie McCarthy with her nineteen-month-old, Riley. Photo Credit: Ana & Ivan Lifestyle Photography
Bottles
“Bottles fill his stomach, but breastfeeding fills his soul.”
Diane Wiessinger, IBCLC
“…the idea of bottle feeding just to ‘involve the father’ is one more instance of preserving the status quo at a price to the baby.”
Marni Jackson, The Mother Zone
“They convinced our mothers that if a food item came in a bottle — or a can or a box or a cellophane bag — then it was somehow better for you than when it came to you free of charge via Mother Nature….An entire generation of us were introduced in our very first week to the concept that phony was better than real, that something manufactured was better than something that was right there in the room.”
Michael Moore, Here Comes Trouble
“Certainly, before bottle feeding, mothers had no choice but to let the infant suck pleasurably from her body, and in the absence of ‘baby foods’, this tended to go on for a considerable time. …A great deal of modern drug and sex behaviour has its roots in the desperate effort to set things aright–to give the pleasure principle a belated chance to assert itself, after denying it too early.”
Bruno Bettelheim, The Children of the Dream
“A breastfeeding support kit from a formula company is like a vegetarianism support kit from a pig farmer.”
Annie at PhD in Parenting
“I think anywhere you give a bottle, you breastfeed. I didn’t feel the need to be immodest, but also feel like that’s going to vary from woman to woman. I would try and be, absolutely, respectful and conscious of the community I was in, but I don’t believe you need to cover up a baby eating, anymore than you need to cover up a baby drinking a bottle.”
Mayim Bialik
Aisha Zakia with her son Diesel. Photo Credit: Ana & Ivan Lifestyle Photography
Humor
“If breastfeeding is sexual then a bottle is a dildo.”
Author unknown
“My opinion is that anybody offended by breastfeeding in public is staring too hard.”
David Allen
“Bosoms, are for bedrooms and breastfeeding. Not for any occasions with dignity.”
Kathryn Stockett
“There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we’d all been weaned too soon.”
Günter Grass, The Flounder
“Whoever said ‘there’s no use crying over spilled milk’ obviously never pumped six ounces and accidentally spilled it.”
Author unknown
Kelley Clark with her eleven-week-old, Lucas. Photo Credit: Ana & Ivan Lifestyle Photography.
Literary
“‘Have you got a watch?’ Norine asked, yawning. Priss told her the time. ‘Are you nursing?’ she asked, stealing an envious look at Norine’s massive breasts. ‘My milk ran out,’ said Norine. ‘So did mine!’ cried Priss. ‘As soon as I left the hospital. How long did you nurse?’ ‘Four weeks. Then Freddy slept with the girl we had looking after Ichabod, and my milk went on strike.’ Priss gulped; the story she had been about to relate, of how her mil had run out as soon as they gave Stephen a supplementary bottle was hastily vetoed on her lips.”
Mary McCarthy, The Group (most of Chapter 14)
“Ah, the joy of suckling! She lovingly watched the fishlike motions of the toothless mouth and she imagined that with her milk there flowed into her little son her deepest thoughts, concepts, and dreams.”
Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere
“All four of these boys I had seen on the breast, and here they were now, like half a football team…The incredulity my children excite in me never diminishes. I contemplate a child of mine, and I can’t believe that a creation in which I shared has gone on to gain such contour and quiddity and mass. Watch the way they fill up a car, a room. In the bath – look at all the water they displace.”
Maring Amis, Experience: a memoir. Part 2, 3. The Magics
“Michelangelo was put out to nurse by Lodovico in that village with the wife of a stonecutter: wherefore the same Michelangelo, discoursing once with Vasari, said to him jestingly, ‘Giorgio, if I have anything of the good in my brain, it has come from my being born in the pure air of your country of Arezzo, even as I also sucked in with my nurse’s milk the chisels and hammer with which I make my figures.’”
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors and architects
“His mother took him to her breast with the exhausted will that makes heroes of most mothers. Those millions of mothers and their million gallons of mothers’ milk, millions of instances of small-talk and baby-talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes for death’s amusement, flung on the mighty scrapheap of souls, all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by the mill-stones of a coming war.”
Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way
“When she went by, perfumed and heavily plastered with paint, wearing loud and garish clothes, in the streets of Alexandria, Beirut, Constantinople, and saw women giving the breast to their babies, her own breasts tingled and swelled, her nipples stood out, asking for a tiny childlike mouth as well.”
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
“Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.”
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
“When you hold a child to your breast to nurse, the curve of the little head echoes exactly the curve of the breast it suckles, as though this new person truly mirrors the flesh from which it sprang.”
Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber
“Verily, my wife grew round and gave birth, and her breasts, those lovely baubles, became mammary glands, lactate factories, unfirmed unto womanliness and not a bit less lovely. I was put out not so much by four years of near monopoly one child, then another, wrought upon her chest—she was generous as she could bear to be—but by the bond between her and those babies.
Bottle-fed myself, I felt a formal bow accruing in the vicinity of my mother’s buttons. Always between us some membrane of man-made cloth, my most powerful muscle, the jaw, and the blood-deep mammalian impulse to suck satisfied on a bland protuberance of mass produced rubber. And I have tasted (I told you she was generous) my wife’s first oozings of colostrum and known in my heart
I was the interloper there, stranger if not to the child just then too sleepy to nurse, then to the breast itself, its ambrosial sap. My sad delectable pain. No one loves the skin of which I speak more than I. The arduous weanings are long past, I have gathered all my playthings unto me repeatedly and made my fealty known: I am possessed, inhabited. I am happily lost.
And I do not blame my mother. We were twins then, my sister and I, in that postwar, techno-euphoria responsible today for dead rivers and nuclear havoc all across America. I lived my first year on something ominously and frankly called—even today—“formula.” But O children, all children, I miss it, I miss it so: my youngest son used to rise red-faced, eyes rolled back in his head, and murmur, ‘Other side,’ then fall again, to what I know I never knew.”
Robert Wrigley, Reign of Snakes
Photo Credit: Ana & Ivan Lifestyle Photography
Makes You Think
“In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband’s fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried.”
Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny
“The moment it is born, the cord is cut or clamped, the child is exhibited to its mother, and then it is taken away by a nurse to a babyroom called the nursery, so called presumably because the one thing that is not done in it is the nursing of the baby.”
Ashley Montague, Touching
“Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality.”
Iris Marion Young
“…when people say that breast-feeding is ‘free,’ I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.”
Hanna Rosin
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
John F. Kennedy
“The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.”
Rajneesh
“Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman’s breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.”
Robert A. Heinlein
“…eyes for nipples, and tears for milk, have so often stood in for one another in art and literature, encapsulated in the idea of ‘expression.’ There is also a physiological link between the two, as the dip in estrogen causing the postpartum ‘third-day blues’ is a change that allows the milk to come in…’I encourage my patients to welcome the change in mood, because when the tears flow, so does the milk.”
Fiona Giles, The Secret Life of Breasts
“While breastfeeding may not seem the right choice for every parent, it is the best choice for every baby.”
Amy Spangler
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Mama’s Milk
“Breastfeeding is a natural ‘safety net’ against the worst effects of poverty. If the child survives the first month of life (the most dangerous period of childhood) then for the next four months or so, exclusive breastfeeding goes a long way toward canceling out the health difference between being born into poverty and being born into affluence…. It is almost as if breastfeeding takes the infant out of poverty for those first few months in order to give the child a fairer start in life and compensate for the injustice of the world into which it was born.”
James P. Grant
“If a new vaccine became available that could prevent one million or more child deaths a year, and that was moreover cheap, safe, administered orally, and required no cold chain, it would become an immediate public health imperative. Breastfeeding can do all of this and more, but it requires its own ‘warm chain’ of support – that is, skilled care for mothers to build their confidence and show them what to do, and protection from harmful practices. If this warm chain has been lost from the culture or is faulty, then it must be made good by health services.”
Lancet, “A warm chain for breastfeeding”
“Mother’s milk, developed through evolution with thousands of ingredients to build the human brain, body and immune system, is incomparable with a man-made product of a couple dozen ingredients that are non-human and in wrong proportions.”
Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D., Breastmilk Wipes Out Formula
“When we trust the makers of baby formula more than we do our own ability to nourish our babies, we lose a chance to claim an aspect of our power as women. Thinking that baby formula is as good as breast milk is believing that thirty years of technology is superior to three million years of nature’s evolution. Countless women have regained trust in their bodies through nursing their children, even if they weren’t sure at first that they could do it. It is an act of female power, and I think of it as feminism in its purest form.”
Christine Northrup
Photo Credit: Ana & Ivan Lifestyle Photography
Mothers Say…
“When a child is starting to be independent, to be able to come back to the mother and hold on, they are processing things when they are nursing. The world is a big place for us, imagine what it is for them. For children, it’s a nurturing, cuddly place to come back to that’s safe, where they can process the world that they are in.”
Tandem-feeding actress Kelly Rutherford
“All I ever heard was everyone bitch about [breastfeeding], nobody ever said ‘You are not going to believe how emotional this is.'”
Actress Jennifer Garner
“The baby was perfectly healthy, but the mother didn’t have milk. He was very hungry. I was weaning Valentina, but I still had a lot of milk that I was pumping, so I breast-fed the baby… You should have seen his eyes. When he felt the nourishment, he immediately stopped crying… I think it’s a beautiful thing, because motherhood is a very strong place for women to connect and understand each other.”
Salma Hayek
“When I see my precious son gaze into my eyes and grin that milky grin – the same eyes that looked into mine minutes after he careened out of my body; the eyes that convinced me that my only job was to keep this child thriving with the miraculous resources given to me through my body- not much else matters.”
Mayim Bialik
“I persevered through some bumps in the road, to say the least, with breastfeeding because I just felt it was such a natural, beautiful, generous, organic, animal, existential, biological imperative.”
Singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette
“People need to understand that when they’re choosing between breastfeeding and formula, they’re not deciding between Coke and Pepsi… They’re choosing between a live, pure substance and a dead substance made with the cheapest oils available.”
Chele Marmet
“I feel this [breastfeeding until 3 years old] is why he is the athlete he is.”
Deloris Jordan, mother of athlete Michael Jordan
“I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament.”
Singer-songwriter Alanis Morrissette
Photo Credit: Ana & Ivan Lifestyle Photography
Observations
“A pair of substantial mammary glands has the advantage over the two hemispheres of the most learned professor’s brain, in the art of compounding a nutritious fluid for infants.”
Oliver Wendall Holmes
“Breastfeeding’s worst enemy is separation.”
Dr. Nils Bergman
“Imagine that the world had created a new ‘dream product’ to feed and immunize everyone born on earth. Imagine also that it was available everywhere, required no storage or delivery, and helped mothers plan their families and reduce the risk of cancer. Then imagine that the world refused to use it.”
Frank A. Oski
“Mothers and babies form an inseparable biological and social unit; the health and nutrition of one group cannot be divorced from the health and nutrition of the other.”
World Health Organization
“A newborn has only three demands. They are warmth in the arms of its mother, food from her breasts, and security in the knowledge of her presence. Breastfeeding satisfies all three.”
Dr. Grantly Dick-Read
“Breastfeeding is a mother’s gift to herself, her baby, and the earth.”
Pamela K. Wiggins
“All things being equal, breast milk is best for babies. Yet all things are not equal, not by a long shot.”
Susan Maushart, “The Mask of Motherhood”
“Many children died young, and so the bonds of affection between parents and children were of necessity looser than those of the modern West, where most children can be relied on to survive into adulthood. The consequent culture of detachment manifested itself from the very beginning of infancy, for every woman who could afford it sent her infant children to wet nurses to be breast-fed (sic), thereby depriving them, and herself, of one of the most intimate bonding experiences between mother and child.”
Eamon Duffy, “The Cradle will rock” (review), New York Review of Books
“And hence at our maturer years, when any object of vision is presented to us, which by its waving or spiral lines bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom, whether it is found in a landscape with soft gradations of rising and descending surface, or in the forms of some antique vases, or in other works of the pencil or chisel, we feel a general glow of delight, which seems to influence all our senses.”
Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life
Photo Credit: Ana & Ivan Lifestyle Photography
Religious
“Mother’s milk is, I think, a symbol of compassion. Without mother’s milk we cannot survive, so our first act as a baby together with our mother is sucking milk from our mother, with a feeling of great closeness. At that time, we may not know how to express what love is, what compassion is, but there is a strong feeling of closeness. From the mother’s side also, if there is no strong feeling of closeness toward the baby, her milk may not flow readily. So, mother’s milk is, I think, a symbol of compassion and human affection.”
The Dalai Lama
“Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.”
Psalm 8:2
“But Hannah did not go up; for she said unto her husband, So soon as the child shall be weaned, then I will bring him, that he may appear before the Lord, and abide there for ever. And Elkanah her husband said unto her, Do what seemeth good in thy eyes; tarry until though has weaned him; only may the Lord fulfill his word. So the woman remained behind, and gave her son suck until she weaned him.
Samuel I, I, :22-23
“From the God of thy father, who will help thee; and from the Almighty, who will bless thee, with blessings of heaven above, with blessings of the breasts, and of the womb.”
Genesis. XLIX, 25-26
“Like a shepherd will he feed his flock: with his arm will he gather the lambs, and in his bosom will he carry them, will he lead gently those that suckle their young.”
Isaiah XL, 11-12
“The mothers (including those divorced) shall nurse their children for two whole years if they wish to complete the period of nursing. The father shall bear the cost of their feeding and clothing on equitable terms. No soul has a burden laid on it greater than it can bear. No mother shall suffer because of her child. Similarly the father should not suffer. The same duties rest upon the heir (that is, if the father dies). If they (that is, the parents) both decide on weaning (the child) by mutual consent and after due consultation they are not to blame.”
The Qu’uran
Photo Credit: Ana & Ivan Lifestyle Photography
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