Gumdrop Tits

in freewrite •  6 years ago 

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Mother’s milk is best. Oldest of ten, I grew up in a homebirth family, one in which my mother nursed all of us and it seemed the entire time I was growing up there was a nursing baby. Ripping at my mother’s shirt at the grocery store or on the church pew, always she was nursing a child in our living room when my friends came to visit. This was happening throughout the eighties when most other mothers used bottles from birth. With each consecutive child my mother nursed just a little bit longer and the questioning looks probably began when these toddlers were called in for nap, running and starting to ride bikes.

Me too—I nursed all four of my children beginning with my first-born just a month after I’d turned seventeen. I nursed him for twenty months despite his pediatrician telling me it was verging on sexual abuse? The second was two years and the third for two and a half. I was nursing her while I was pregnant with my last thinking that I’d try tandem nursing—two at once--even though my great-grandmother worried about my health in doing so.

But, during the seventh month of pregnancy, I felt an instinctual urge to chase her off in the same way you see mother cat’s biting at teen kittens who won’t leave her alone. My youngest, well, I nursed him until he was nearly five! We had a cute little nursing song, “Your cocoa nurrey’s, come get your nurrey’s,” and he’d come running for love!
All in all, I had a baby at my own breasts over a decade!

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you always have to do what you feel is right!! a Mom always knows best!

Yep! And, the customer is always right ;)

Such a sweet post! I was a homebirthing, breastfeeding mama back in the day (although my decade of that was between 1991 & 2003) This is such a wonderful post. I really love it :)

Glad to know, Byn! Interesting to get so many positive responses for homebirthing and breastfeeding, but I guess it's no surprise many of those with alternative ideas have gathered here on steemit. Nice to be around writers, mother's with some of the same idea's about living/being.

Right? It's pretty awesome that we keep finding each other :)

I was a homebirthing breastfeeding mom as well. I weaned my son when he was 4 and a half and I was tired of tandem nursing. Later, when he was a teen and was really mad with me, he threw what he thought was the ultimate evil I did to him: And you weaned me!!!

So funny. My daughter weaned herself when i was pregnant with my 3rd. But she was 4 at the time... (marianne)

Funny about the weaning story! My mother drove around with a bumper sticker on her car that read, stop infant circumcision. Anyway, she'd circumcised some of the older boys and not the younger and one of my brother's told her he was going to sue her for his foreskin :) Thought you might enjoy hearing that one, as it reminds me of your sons' response :)

hahaha - yep. Kids...

I did what I could, but nothing came out.
For the rest I wonder if children know best. Put a bag of sweets in front of them and they won't say no till it's all gone.
I feel compelled to add from an anthroposophic nutritional perspective there is a vitalising element to learing to eat independently and by the time you say I your mother may become another I without the reward of pure bliss. This for those who wonder why feed till your kid drops off your tit is not advocated as the most natural and wholesome approach to child care.
Clearly, no harm done otherwise. (Let's keep sex out of it!) No need to fault any moms for feeding one way or another. It's a private affair at the end of the day, between mother and child.
There will always be reasons that do what you feel you must do. Food is a great way of bridging all sorts of complex needs and forging networks that go beyond substance based diet.
It's the same story as goes for people who don't eat at all. Not the way forward for all good men, but it is what it is as a personal happy place.

Yes, sexual references to breastfeeding ought to be kept out, but there's always someone standing around ready to shame women in some way :(
I think by the time my children were over the age of two or so, breastfeeding was just as much an emotional comfort as much (or more than) a food source. I do agree becoming independent as a child is important and something many are still struggling with by junior high as far as I can see at the school's. I once saw a documentary comparing American to French schools and how the French were in preschool were allowing children the use of real glasses and cutlery and just how independent they were. So, I did do this with my children as well--no plastic sippy cups and they were allowed to light fires, use pocket knives all of these sometimes restricted of children here. I think as a result they're much more adept and independent.

I love the sound of all that broken glass and clashing cutlery in your kitchen!
It is artificial materials and circumstances that keep us infantile at forty!
Restricted environments are not to be confused with controlled ones. (Give a child access to your normal kitchen, but keep your bleach on top of your cupboard instead of the under the kitchen sink.) Protection is not identical to prevention (be around when your child plays, but you don't have to put it on a lead). Endorsement and encouragement is the clue, as you and I well know but how to pass it on? We do what we can: giving our own children the task to set the table with our (basic) crockery, with weight and temperature and its connection to earth which is to give them trust. One meal flows into another and this sets up a stream of trust to flow out into larger life.

P.s. The number four is still echoing on in my head (yes also with regard to your wands, but more on that later). You write 4, don't you? Just checking. I'm skipping the bit about anyone having TEN children, if you don't mind: rattles the brain too much. (How to survive siblinghood in that scenario! More posts please!) But FOUR already makes me bow down low to kiss your saintly feet.

However, even if any number over one is more than I can handle, it's not that you have so many children I marvel at, but at the significance of how specifically I kept seeing you with many children yesterday, at dinner, under the shower: putting the two together I suddenly hear the hum that is always around you of different streams running to pool in your mother heart.... water music at its most miraculous.

Yes, four!
And, wise to skip the ten--just too many for a lot of reasons.
Thank you for thinking of me and mine and the water music. It hasn't always been easy, but I do feel blessed in the experiencing and complexity of it all.