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.
