Dear Daughter,

Ramping up to your six month growth spurt, I don’t remember how many times we’ve nursed today. I don’t count. I have not counted in a long time, since sometime after your oldest brother was born. (Excluding the little checkboxes that kept me company at the hospital and that drove me nuts as I had to keep finding my phone to get the times when you started and stopped and started again.)

At every doctor’s visit I’m asked how many times you nurse. I say “on demand” and I’m asked for a number.  Do people really count those things? I remember that I nursed you for a half hour when we woke up because I set my alarm so that I can nurse you before I get your oldest brother up for school. I remember that I was nursing you on the floor of the laundry room while I loaded the washer. I know that I nursed you outside while I pushed your brother on the swing but I’m not sure if that counted because you got excited and bit me pretty quickly because you wanted to grab at a moth that flittered by to land on the morning glories overhead. I nursed you at lunch while you tried to grab all my food. I also nursed you a bunch of other times doing all the things that I do all day and every day.

I’m not sure what would happen if I started counting. Would I find it depressing and become concerned about my supply if I found that you nursed fifteen times per day? Would I become paranoid and make you nurse more if you inexplicably only nursed six times a day? Would I be worried if the numbers went up or down by a few times per day?

I go by the brown wetbag hanging upstairs. Each day your diapers fill this bag and make it heavy. Each day the moses basket with all your clean diapers empties itself as you work your way through the supply. Every two days I load the washing machine with your brother’s diapers and yours, and I wash them clean.

I don’t count the number of times I kiss you. I don’t count the number of times that I tell you that I love you. I don’t count the number of times that I tickle you, or sniff your head. But I understand that we are well bonded and that you are firmly attached to me as you recognize me when speak, soothe when I dance with you, and root around to find me when you wake in the dark of the night. Because you squeak only when I’m not there and do not launch instantly into wailing, and your squeaking calms as soon as you are in my arms before you start to nurse.

Numbers like that are for other things and fit poorly into breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is one of those things that is easiest if you simply do it the same way you breathe. Because it is necessary, it is normal, it is automatic, and because you live attached to me in these early days of your life.

Six to eight times would not be enough if I was refusing you when you asked. Fifteen times cannot be too much if it is what you need. We’re not coloring by the numbers, we’re living by your needs.

<3 Mama

Dear Daughter,

Five months and ten days from when you were born, you are perfect and unspoiled and everything that a baby should be. I do not wish to destroy that.

When you were born you were perfect. You knew little about the world that you were born into. You had curious little dark blue eyes and tiny hands with long graceful fingers that grabbed purposefully at the things that you wished to hold onto rather than grasping at everything that they touched. You are perfect, still.

I refuse to spoil you, daughter.

When you cry, I try and listen. Not only to the sound of your cries but to the way that you move your body in search of what it is that you need. I do not wish to spoil your understanding of your needs by assuming that I know when to meet them and when they can be ignored. I do not wish to spoil your understanding of your needs by insisting that you be pacified above your objections and your demands that I help you fix what is wrong. Later in life we will have talks about wants and needs and the world of today and how our bodies sometimes tell us things through instincts better adapted to times past than to today. Later in life we’ll talk about hormones and how they make us want things that are not healthy for us in the world that we live in now. We’ll talk about hunger in a world of abundant and unhealthy foods. We’ll talk about order and simplicity in a world of chaotic stimuli. But I will not teach you today that when you have a need it is something that you must deal with on your own before you have the ability to understand or cope. I will not teach you today that love comes at a scheduled time of convenience.

There are many things that I want for you, little one.

I want someday for you to find a man (or a woman) that you trust the way I struggle to be able to trust your father who has given me no cause to distrust him. I want you to recognize when someone loves you simply and permanently and without strings attached. To recognize that it is safe to speak freely of the things that you feel and to seek context for the things that make you happy, sad, angry, lonely, and deeply in love. I want you to be able to trust a person who is trustworthy, and to speak freely of your needs and wants and joys and feelings and hurts and angers without the fear of not being listened to, of chasing him away, of being manipulated by the things that you feel, or of being manipulative with simple descriptions of what you feel.  I never want you locked in a ball where you feel unable to speak the simplest of things for fear of being misunderstood and held accountable for something that someone else has chosen read into your words.

I want you to always understand how much I love you and how hard I work to understand what it is you are feeling and what it is that you need, so that you will clearly hear the warning bells clanging if you ever meet someone who takes the shortcut of convenient assumption. I want you to understand that I will not pass judgement on your reasons for the needs that you have, even if I try to help you understand where those needs fit into the life that you have and the obligations and responsibilities that you have to your family and to your life. I want the chance to work with you at helping you make yourself understood clearly through the upset of another without sending you off to your room to try and struggle to formulate the words for your feelings before you have the insight to do so.

There is too much talk about spoiling children and too little talk about preserving the qualities that they are born with. I believe strongly that they are one and the same. I can spoil you by ignoring the things that need to be paid attention to just as easily as I can spoil you by burying you in toys and candy. And I can spoil you more easily by denying you trust and love when you need it than I ever could by being there for you when you need those things.

I can spoil you more easily by making you wonder when I will be there for you willingly and when I will not. By teaching you to work harder to gain my attention for the things that you want deeply or judging you for the expression of want and disappointment rather than simply understanding your hurt and holding you through you tears until you do as your older brother does now at two. “All done crying. Alexander feel better now, mommy. Let’s go play.” Something that I want your oldest brother to understand in us even as he learns distrust elsewhere. Something that I want all three of you to understand even as you move out into the world into the lives of those who have had their trust spoiled and who seek to spoil the trust of everyone else by constantly suspecting their expressions of feeling as attempts at manipulation.

I refuse to teach you that needing to be held is manipulative, and that having the need to cry in someone’s arms is a weakness. I refuse to allow you to go through childhood believing something that someday will earn you an abusive relationship rather than the ability to curl up in the arms of someone who loves you deeply. I refuse to spoil that thing that will someday give you comfort and closeness. I will not teach you that it is okay to curl away from comforting arms in the darkness when you could be held close by someone who will never hold that need against you. I refuse to send you away to cry alone so that I will not need to deal with the strongness of your emotions.

I will not spoil you like that, daughter. I refuse to spoil you.

<3 Mama

Dear Daughter,

My parenting methods apparently oppress me and render me a servant much to the undoing of all the decades of feminism. You see, I cannot possibly choose to breastfeed you, to hold you, to use cloth diapers instead of disposables. I cannot choose to carry you instead of adopt you, I cannot choose to birth you without pain medications. I cannot choose you over myself. Because to make a choice to do these things is to be oppressed.

I will now raise my eyebrow a little bit, and make a very skeptical face.

You are five months old and the world is a crazy place where one faction of women is attempting to recover the ability of women to choose to breastfeed after decades of sabotaged efforts. Another faction of women really doesn’t want to breastfeed and wants to be free to make their own choice. Annoyingly enough both sides seem to think that the other side is horribly oppressed by some sort of whackadoo notion that makes them choose.. *gasp* something different from what they personally would choose.

Let me summarize my feelings: I am not oppressed by my choices which are freely made. I am oppressed by those who attempt to decide what my choices and role in society should be.

There’s a movement in feminism that suggests that “natural parenting” is sexism dressed up as something else. That says that breastfeeding, elimination communication, responsive parenting, home cooked meals, stay at home mothering, and many other things are designed to destroy feminism and you can’t be a feminist and be all of those things or make the choice to put your children first.

If you are breastfeeding because someone told you that you have to because otherwise you are not a woman… Yes, that is an incredibly anti-feminist notion. But if you’re going back to work and giving up breastfeeding and using formula instead because someone told you that you have to because otherwise you are oppressed, wasting your potential and not a feminist… That is a ridiculously anti-feminist notion as well.

Feminism is about freedom of choices, and about choosing what is important to you rather than having your choices be dictated by someone else.

Is it anti-feminist for a woman to sacrifice her lucrative career to go to a disease ridden part of Africa and help build wells and teach communities how to sanitize their water? She is putting others ahead of herself and her career. Clearly she is oppressed and the whole notion of putting anyone else ahead of yourself is so anti-feminist.

And teachers? They are anti-feminist as well. Making the choice to teach school in impoverished districts rather than holding out for the highest bidding private school or choosing a better career. The idea of wanting to help other people is so anti-feminist. Clearly they are oppressed.

If you choose to be a mother, if you choose to breastfeed, if you choose to co-sleep, if you choose to WIO instead of CIO.. I will support your choices. If you choose to never have children, if you choose to formula feed, if you choose to use CIO instead of WIO, I will support your choices.

This is your life. The idea that it belongs to anyone else is ridiculous. The idea that anyone gets to choose your place in life is what is “anti-feminist”, not whatever form of life you choose to craft for yourself.

Breastfeeding isn’t anti-feminist unless you DO NOT WANT TO DO IT.

Stay at home parenting is not anti-feminist unless you DO NOT WANT TO DO IT.

Elimination communication is not anti-feminist unless you DO NOT WANT TO DO IT.

And if you do not want to do it, don’t do it. The idea that you need to trample all over the choices made freely by another woman and call her “oppressed” because her choices are different than yours.. That is what kills feminism. Not choices that are made freely by other women.

The thing that kills feminism is the idea that you have to do something that you really don’t want to do.

For some, that thing is breastfeeding and natural parenting. For me, it would be using bottles and parenting in a way different from the way that I choose.  I parent you the way that I do because I love the choices that I make. They feel right. They feel good. They make my heart happy.

Sadly, the feminists screaming that natural parenting is anti-feminist don’t realize something simple: Their attempting to do something that they really did not want to do and then feeling guilty about it means that they are not quite as confident in their feminism as they might wish to be. They still feel as though they have to live by the choices of someone else and then if they discover those choices are not for them.. Instead of seeing that “this was not for me”, they feel that they were once again oppressed and it is clearly the fault of the choice. Even as other women make that very same choice freely.

As a woman you must remember this: The choices you make freely are always compatible with feminism. Because you are a female and they are your choices not the choices of a “man” and certainly not the choices of some other woman who is a ‘better’ feminist than you.

Feminism is about owning choices. Own yours. And please remember to always let everyone else own their choices as well.

<3 Mama

Dear Daughter,

There was a day in elementary school that I simply stopped running during gym class and walked instead. It was the day that I became aware that I was not the fastest runner, and the day that no one sat me down to explain to me that the reason for running isn’t to be the first person across the finish line. Or the second. Or the third.

There’s this odd social consensus that if we can’t do things easily, it’s a good idea to just stop. When we don’t stop we’re subject to mocking by the bullies that simply never grow up. They’re there to mock us at every stage of our life and every stage of our existence for how slow we are, how funny we look if we dance, or how badly we sing.

They’re there to tell us in the hospital that we “can’t” breastfeed. Or if they don’t tell us that, we sometimes tell ourselves this.

It’s supposed to be natural.

I can’t coordinate getting my baby to the breast.

The latch looks good but it HURTS.

I failed again.

Failure takes a lot of time, little girl. When you stop running because everyone passed you.. You haven’t failed, you have made a choice to stop trying. And when you “fail” to breastfeed before you have even left the hospital, you haven’t “failed”. You have made a choice to stop trying. A choice that has been made because you don’t fully understand the options available, or because you’re like me and one day you chose to stop running because it felt too terrible to be so far behind everyone else.

I’m hoping to raise you to the understanding that when you’re behind you keep running even if you are that last person. You choose your pace, you feel your feet hit the ground, and you focus on breathing. Not because you will be the best. Not because you will pass others. But because you need to learn how to do each thing and how to stretch your limits and understand where your true limits are rather than where you compare to others that very first time that you have tried.

Don’t judge others that have stopped running, because we all stop running sometimes. And do not judge yourself if this is an area in which you choose to stop. Instead try and recognize when it is that you’ve “stopped” and when it is that you’ve “failed”, because it helps you make different choices in your future when you have the chance again.

When your oldest brother was born and I was trying to breastfeed.. I was failing. Over and over and over and over again I was failing. That’s when I started to run again. That’s when I looked around at the photographs of all the moms that were breastfeeding their babies and I looked down at your brother and realized that I was that clumsy creature running  behind everyone else.. And it quite simply did not matter to me anymore.

I put in the effort. I yelped in pain when he latched on. I slathered everything with lanolin and ground my teeth through the pain. I bled. I cracked. I blistered.

I didn’t have to go through any of that, I realize now. I could have sought out the support necessary to understand all the things that you can do to fix those things. I could have insisted on seeing the lactation consultant after I was told to “just give him formula if you’re worried”.

I could also have stopped running. But I didn’t. And I hope you won’t, either.

Because it’s not where everyone else is on that track that matters. It’s the ground under your own two feet. It’s your own record that matters. It’s your own successes, no matter how small. It’s your own definition of “success” and “failure”.

Don’t stop running, little girl. Not until you know what your true limits are. Because when you stop without having truly tried, you always wonder. When you give it your all, you earn the peace of mind in knowing that you have truly tried. It’s not about being a better woman than someone else. It’s not about a competition.

It’s about not giving up just because you’re a bit behind.

<3 Mama