Zatera Ul

I have not had much to say here lately, though I’ve been reading a lot.

OLC and I went to a La Leche meeting Tuesday. Fun–this time OLC wasn’t the only mobile baby there. She was a little wound up the whole time, crawling after the other kids, and going up to meet and “talk” to all of the other moms.

Anyway, many of these other moms use breast pumps so they can go off to work. Me, I don’t want to have to use one ever again; using one for a week at the beginning to get my milk supply going was more than enough for me. It was exhausting to be nursing AND supplementing AND pumping for each feeding, around the clock, while I was anemic enough to not want to be out of bed at all. Luckily, it wasn’t for very long. So I’ve completely refused to pump for work, but I work almost entirely from home anyway. It has meant declining a couple of business trips, but so what?

I’ve been thinking some about a couple of other blogs’ posts on breastfeeding/pumping: here and here.

From the second one:

And I sat next to two very lovely ladies from Australia that commented that our obsession with pumping – which pump to buy, when to pump, pumping instead of breastfeeding, etc – is primarily an American obsession. In Australia, mothers and babies are together (only in the nursery if in intensive care), mothers have 24-hour access to their NICU babies, mothers have long maternity leave, mothers have true breastfeeding support and culturally, BREASTFEEDING is the norm.

That’s what I want (and actually have) for my work life: the ability to keep my baby close and just nurse her. I didn’t have much of that when OLC was in the hospital, and that’s one reason I now loathe breast pumps (and formula) so much: they were used as inferior substitutes for the mother-baby closeness that we should have had full-time then. I can now be away from OLC for a few hours here or there, but for the most part, she still needs me to be that available. So we do it. Pumping would make it easier for me to Get Away and Get Important Things Done, but it really wouldn’t save me any time or money.

I’ve also been thinking about the implications of remaining open to having more babies. I don’t think serial childbearing is compatible with a full-time career at all. I’ve all but quit my latest graduate program, but that’s ok; I have impressive degrees already. Working from home half-time is semi-possible with one baby, but probably quite impossible with more than one. So I will become a SAHM at some point. (I’m still wavering on the barbed-wire electric fence as to exactly when that will happen.)

I suppose it’s possible to pump at work for a kid or two, but I can’t picture anyone doing it for year after year after year for one child after another.

Then, for another whole new can of worms, I’ve been thinking about the implications of C-sections on serial childbearing. The C-section rate is still going nowhere but up in this country, for the flimsiest of reasons sometimes, while VBAC availability is going way down. I think the natural childbirth subculture is growing some, but it’s still quite out of the mainstream. Anyway, serial childbearing is safer and easier without uterine scars, for sure.

I keep going back to using the cavemama and cavebaby as a reference point; it helps me see what is really essential. (Really, I should use Adam and Eve setting up their lives outside the Garden of Eden, I suppose.) Cavebabies don’t have bottles or cribs (or car seats, hah!) or pacifiers or feeding schedules. Cavemamas don’t use breastpumps so they can go away on long hunting trips. They stick close to home and do lighter work with the cavebabies underfoot.