World breastfeeding week 2025

I wrote a whole post about world breastfeeding week then accidentally deleted it while I was breastfeeding. So here I go again...

I'm on five years and counting into nourishing babies, about half the time I have been a mother. It was the thing I was looking forward to the most third time around and also one of the biggest considerations about whether I felt able to commit to nourishing another child. Initiating a tether that might be in place for years to come.

I would dream of it years after weaning my last baby. My body remembers. It's built into my embodied memory and my psyche. The delight of it - their eyes wide and roving, the little gasps, the mouth open like a baby bird as they try to find the breast. The rapid suckling and then the deep and dreamy swallows as the milk pours out and oxytocin and prolactin settle over you like a mantle of calm.

Waking up in the dark of the night just as they stir and drawing them close, as they latch on and you both drift off into the land of sleep.

Your toddler falls over, and wails, and you settle them within seconds.

For my fellow type B mothers who may forget to pack snacks but it's impossible to forget your own breasts.

The day after I gave birth, feeding my third child, I remarked "I feel like I've got a superpower back. Like until now I was missing a limb."

Like anything, it's a mixture of light and shadow. The tongue tied baby where it felt like I was putting my nipple into the mouth of a shark. When she would only feed in the daytime if I stood wearily swaying and feeding her in the sling so she could control the flow.

DMER. Where my body became so overwhelmed by the domestic abuse I was living with, it gave me panic attacks when the milk let down. Luckily that disappeared when I left.

The sickness bugs where they vomit all over you and ask to latch on again. The toddler nursing aversion where you swear to all the gods you could do anything except feed them again, anything except that, but then they ask and you find the will to do it again. Somehow.

It amazes me that something so fundamental to us as a species has largely been lost in our modern society. In the UK we have one of the worst breastfeeding rates in the world. This is multifaceted and something I've explored in other posts in the past. There are so many possible solutions, reducing the medicalisation of birth, increasing visibility of breastfeeding, more trained support. 

From what I've observed there is often a war between wanting to breastfeed and societal expectations of how a new mother and baby should behave. 

For somebody as experienced as I am, I still feel a wave of anxiety latching my new baby in front of somebody I don't know very well. Especially if I feel some part of them disapproves. And that is exactly the sort of thing that stops the milk flowing and makes a baby fussy. I may flippantly say "you see more on the top shelf in the newsagents" but my body doesn't feel the same.

Postpartum women were never meant to be around what the body considers strangers or threats. More wisdom we have lost.

For breastfeeding to work for nearly every mother who wants to, I feel we would need a complete societal overhaul that I don't think I'll see in my lifetime.

So fruitful she uprooted herself

The land always mirrors what is happening in the womb. I've been experiencing this for years now. The hen that cut her brooding prematurely short when I miscarried for the first time. The baby pear tree with no roots that foretold my second pregnancy loss. Then the chick that hatched the day my son was born.

Today - the apple tree that had not borne fruit for years, that sheltered us for my Mother Blessing, fell over with the weight of her abundant harvest.

Uprooted, secret places now exposed to the light. Raw, exposed and blinking. For years she slumbered in the garden, safe and stagnant, until now. I joked with my husband the reason the orchard is fruitful this year is because of my singing. He said to me today "what has your singing done now?"

She is me - toppled and uprooted by her own desire to bring life into the world. All that was hidden is now painfully revealed.

I have seen this nature mirroring happen with clients as well. The womb path is not a permanent blissed out state of "love and light"... it's holding the balance between life and death through the human body and the cosmic portal, and experiencing them as intensely physical, intensely spiritual, dark and thorny and beautiful. It's being the altar where the work happens. It's sad and holy and synchronous in ways that are miraculous.

The fierce and primal labour ward birth of Ted

Every birth is a lesson. I'm still waiting for the wisdom to unfold. It seems to me that to be postpartum is to be translucent - like a fairy's wing, the light shining through you.

Still touching the veil, not fully of this world. The spirit wandering while the body is tethered. Through the womb that bleeds, the eyes that weep, the breasts that feed. I pour with life, a vessel that is filled only to be emptied over and over in service to another.

To be postpartum is to be a beautiful, vacant shell, where a creature once lived, washed out by a wild storm. The shell remains, but a new creature has not come to claim the body as home. Yet.

My last caption and self-portrait before he came - Harvest. The old ones understood that every harvest demands a sacrifice.

The fierce and primal labour ward birth of Ted. My undisturbed, wild pregnancy culminating in the place I wanted to avoid. So far from what I planned, and yet I knew too much to ignore the signs of my body in labour that home was no longer the safest place to be. The stages of grief as I came to terms with my choice in that hospital room where I laboured all night on the floor.

The denial, the bargaining, the anger, the depression... The self-pity, the uncontrolled sobbing and wailing dredged from the depths of my being. I watched myself outside myself with the wise eyes of a doula and smiled and thought... good, good, knowing with every emotional release comes a further opening and descent. And eventually the acceptance as I slipped into the water of the pool and felt my hips widen and my waters break.

I have never been so loud in birth. Have never worked so hard to move a babe through my pelvis under such stressful conditions. I made sounds that I've never made before to bring him into the light. Then it was the job of others to help him fully transition into life.

In my second birth, the ego death was taking responsibility for my birth and baby and learning to find all my answers within, no external validation. For this third birth, I was being asked to allow the identity I built up around my freebirth to die. You already know the sound of your inner voice. You've received the dreams, the messages. The choice is yours. The power is yours. The unfolding will be what it will be...

So often I observe in my work that these babies come here to bridge gaps in our consciousness, to awaken us to an unconditional love that is beyond ideology. There was so much I had deconstructed in my mind already, but the body's wisdom is older and slower. It would have been easier to walk away from birth as a portal completed, thinking I'd learned all I needed to. And yet I chose to plunge back into the deep end to be scoured clean. For the walls of my hyper self-reliance to crumble.

Eternally grateful to Sam who was by my side the whole way. I keep thinking of the psalm "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me"

There is more to share but it's not for now or this space. I have no regrets - I would make the same choices again.

So here I am - with the wind still blowing through me. If you hold me to your ear you might even hear the roar of the sea.