Overcoming the Nature to Nurture: My Nursing Story

I knew that I wanted to breastfeed pretty much from the time we found out about our son's imminent arrival. I had no idea how to go about something like this, however. I had been bottle-fed, as had almost every baby I had every come across. Formula and the almighty bottle saturated my culture. I had diligently held the bottle to my own baby dolls' lips--in fact, I can't even remember at any point ever receiving a doll for a gift that didn't include its own milky white, pristine plastic symbol of artificial feeding. Images of breastfeeding were foreign, few and far between--like the National Geographic profiles of people who couldn't even "afford" Western clothing. The thought of exposing my breasts, even to my own infant, felt uncomfortable, even sexually deviant somehow. I thought of them as toys, as amusement, as a part of my sexuality. I wasn't a cow, for goodness-sakes!

Obviously, these feelings are common to first-time mothers. Especially ones that were raised in a very mainstream, conservative environment. Humans are social learners. We gage how much we know by what others do and we explore our experiences based on what we've seen. Little girls that watched their mothers breastfeed their younger siblings would carry that memory to adulthood and hopefully use it as a tool in deciding their own feeding choices for their children. Likewise, if they had trouble or ran into problems, they had the ability to contact their mothers and ask for help. So few women grew up with this experience, however, since formula became the norm (doctor-recommended of course) for most of the twentieth century. No wonder we struggle! We are no different from a chimpanzee in captivity who is unable to mother her offspring. She has never seen it done! And breastfeeding is inexplicably tied to mothering, as any nursing mother will tell you.