Breastfeeding Ending Quotes

You know how your brain turns to mush? How it starts when you’re pregnant? You laugh, full of wonder and conspiracy, and you chide yourself, Me and my pregnancy brain! Then you give birth and your brain doesn’t return? But you’re breast-feeding, so you laugh, as if you’re a member of an exclusive club? Me and my nursing brain! But then you stop nursing and the terrible truth descends: Your good brain is never coming back. You’ve traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood. You know how you’re in the middle of a sentence and you realize at the end you’re going to need to call up a certain word and you’re worried you won’t be able to, but you’re already committed so you hurtle along and then pause because you’ve arrived at the end but the word hasn’t? And it’s not even a ten-dollar word you’re after, like polemic or shibboleth, but a two-dollar word, like distinctive, so you just end up saying amazing? Which is how you join the gang of nitwits who describe everything as amazing.

I try to feel my own edges in the low light. I send my mind to the outer edges of me — where do I end? I send myself to my innermost edges, and I see that in both directions  I am infinite.

You know how your brain turns to mush? How it starts when you’re pregnant? You laugh, full of wonder and conspiracy, and you chide yourself, Me and my pregnancy brain! Then you give birth and your brain doesn’t return? But you’re breast-feeding, so you laugh, as if you’re a member of an exclusive club? Me and my nursing brain! But then you stop nursing and the terrible truth descends: Your good brain is never coming back. You’ve traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood. You know how you’re in the middle of a sentence and you realize at the end you’re going to need to call up a certain word and you’re worried you won’t be able to, but you’re already committed so you hurtle along and then pause because you’ve arrived at the end but the word hasn’t? And it’s not even a ten-dollar word you’re after, like polemic or shibboleth, but a two-dollar word, like distinctive, so you just end up saying amazing? Which is how you join the gang of nitwits who describe everything as amazing.

women found physical hardship more endurable than anxiety, their ‘nerves’, and the consciousness that their never-ending reproductive state could lead to death.

You can maximize your child’s brain power in plenty of wonderful ways. After breast-feeding, focus on open-ended play, lots of verbal interaction, and praising effort—fertilizers statistically guaranteed to boost your child’s intellect from almost any starting point.

One of the most helpful things a partner can do is to be a buffer between you and other relatives and friends who may be uninformed or even opposed to breastfeeding. If your mother or mother-in-law didn’t breastfeed, or tried to breastfeed for a short time but ended up weaning early, she might feel that your decision to nurse your baby is a subtle way of criticizing her choices and decisions. If breastfeeding was difficult for her, she may want to protect you from the pain and struggles she went through. Or she may feel that a longer breastfeeding relationship than hers is not only long but wrong.

The Circumcision Decision If you have a baby boy, chances are you’ll be asked whether or not you want to circumcise him in the hospital. Most of us have inherited a vague sense that circumcision is somehow cleaner or healthier. But these are myths. We’ll share a few facts to jumpstart your research. - The significance of the infant’s pain is often overlooked in circumcision. Hospitals use painful Gomco clamps that sever nerve endings, and most docs make the cut without anesthesia. - Many infants go into shock as a result of the pain they experience in circumcision, and the breastfeeding relationship may be compromised as a result. - The circumcised penis is no cleaner than an intact penis, and requires far more care during the healing process. - “...[P]rofessional societies representing Australian, Canadian, and American pediatricians do not recommend routine circumcision of male newborns.” ~American Medical Association What if you plan to circumcise for reasons of Jewish faith? In Jewish circumcisions, - Boys are circumcised eight days after birth, when natural levels of Vitamin K are the highest. - Anesthetic is traditionally given (in the form of a tiny amount of wine and/or numbing agents). - Mohels (traditional circumcisers) don’t use painful skin clamps. Overheard… After reading up on circumcision, I knew I didn’t want to go through with it. The first reason was medical: the AAP doesn’t recommend routine circumcision. My second reason was emotional. It went against my mama bear instinct to protect my baby. Convincing dad was more difficult. He wanted to have his son like him. (I asked him if he and his dad compared their penises; the answer was no.) My husband watched videos of the procedure being done but had to stop them before they were over. He’d thought it was a simple snip of the ‘extra’ skin, but it’s not. The foreskin is actually fused to the head of the penis, like a fingernail to a nail bed. We took our baby home from the hospital the way he was born, and we haven’t regretted it. ~Lani, mom to Bentley Want to learn more? Check out the Circumcision Resource Center online, a helpful resource filled with medical and psychological literature for those questioning the practice.

Breastfeeding is the natural human way of providing exactly that continuous stimulation to the child’s developing microbiome and immune system. Partial breastfeeding continued through the first year would ensure a greater likelihood of tolerance, ending the pointless but confusing wrangle over four versus six months as the better age for introduction to other foods. Strong medical advocacy in support of the WHO goal might just be enough to generate the societal re-structuring that would be needed for such breastfeeding to become possible for more than advantaged minorities.

As it stands now we are all told that breastfeeding is the ONLY option for feeding your child, if you actually love that child and ever want them to have more than a third-grade level reading ability. If you don’t breastfeed your baby you might as well just drop it off immediately at your local prison, because that is where it’s going to end up anyway, with such a horrible start to its life. Breastfeeding is beautiful and natural and the best and only socially acceptable way to nourish your baby. It is the most natural thing on the planet, you see. Fast-forward to a severely sleep-deprived, hormone-riddled new mom whose baby is not latching on correctly. If maybe perhaps she had been warned that breastfeeding would not necessarily be easy-peasy, then maybe perhaps she wouldn’t have to add “severe guilt” and “feelings of extreme failure as a woman and mother” to her already long list of postpartum difficulties. So say it with me now: “Breastfeeding is really f’n hard.” Repeat it to yourself, even as you attend classes and read books.

In the first book of On Virgins, St. Ambrose spoke of a scriptural and prophetic, virginal Jesus, who had fully functional breasts and made himself the once-male, feminized partner of every believer. In this virgin allegory, St. Ambrose goes so far as to say that Jesus produces believers from his masculine womb, and feeds them with the milk of his breasts. In Ambrose’s words, Jesus was the masculine “rock” that developed nourishing breasts in order to facilitate his role as the breast-feeding mother of the Church. In fact, Ambrose carries the point acerbically by ending his description of the feminized Jesus by claiming that it is perfectly natural that the son of god has his own teats.

Oh well, at least I'll get a 90 minute break until the next feed. That's when my lactation consultant delivered the real tit-punch. The every-90-minute stopwatch does not start from the end of one feeding. It starts from: the beginning. I've never been great at math but if you're supposed to feed a baby every 90 minutes from the moment they start eating, and the feeding takes 90 minutes, then you are feeding a baby every minute of every hour of every 24 hour day. If I could've fainted when I heard this news I would have, but since I was already dead, I couldn't. I was in a very real sense being eaten alive.

If you have two X chromosomes, as most women do, it’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll end up being red-green color-blind, whereas roughly 10 percent of men are. If red-green color vision was obviously selected for in diurnal primates, why was it located on the X chromosome? It’s possible this type of color vision was more advantageous for the primate Eve than for her consorts and sons. Perhaps being more efficient at spotting more nutritive foodstuffs (extra-sweet berries, extra-tender young leaves) made a real difference in pregnancy and breast-feeding. If Purgi utilized the same sex-specific parenting strategies as many living primates do, foraging for herself and her infant offspring, then the survival of the young depended far more on the female than the male. In other words, there was more pressure to see red and green on the newly diurnal Purgi than there was on her male counterparts. The second possibility is that Purgi foraged for food with a group, as some of today’s New World monkeys do. In that scenario, it’d be advantageous to have both trichromatics and dichromatics working together, grazing not only in daylight but in the dim light at dawn and dusk, when the dichromats would be better at finding the good stuff. Or both of these things were true: our Eve, as the female, had the most pressure on her to be able to see red and green, but in a highly social species that did some amount of food sharing, it would have been advantageous to have some dichromats, too.

Notice especially that, although males and females may look different and one is capable of birthing and breastfeeding babies and the other is not, this passage does not create two different sets of instructions for men and women. Not just men, but women too, are given authority as God’s vice-regents, which is an aspect of our full humanity.

They will end by destroying our planet and making us believe their wasteland is what we want