Dear Daughter,

You are four and a half months old. Your crazy curly hair that you were born with has been pulled up into pigtails and you are learning how to sit up. You smile, laugh and chatter in your own language which is full of meaning even though most of your communication comes in the form of body language and facial expressions with the occasional cry thrown in.

I nurse you now for the same reasons that I carry you, that I read to you, that I hug you.

I don’t hug you to make a statement, to make another mother feel bad, to show off, to stick it to the formula companies, or to be “mom enough”.

If I were to go back to work, I would pump your milk for you, just as I would try to make sure your brothers got healthy food at school and daycare. Just as I would do many little things to maintain the stability, sameness and healthy things in your life.

Here, in this life of ours, it is just the default. It is what is. My body makes milk, and I give it to you because it is there.

Our garden grows and I maintain it and pick the foods because it is there, it is growing. It is worth the work put in so that your brothers can eat healthy living foods picked fresh from the sunlight of their backyard.

When you grew in my belly, your growth planted the seeds for the milk that my body would make. To choose to feed you something else makes no more sense to me than it would make to cut down the cherry tomato plants that give us several pounds of food each week with less work than a trip to the grocery store.

In the beginning the nursing relationship is delicate and it takes some work, the same as anything new. But at this point we have settled into it just being the way things are.

It is as anything else is. When you understand it, when you do it, and when it simply fades into the fabric of day to day life, it becomes like breathing.

Right now we sit in the back of the minivan waiting for you to finish eating so that we can continue our ride.

I’m happy for this chance to hold you close and memorise the details of your face as you nurse. Just as I am happy for each chance I have to hug you.

Not because a study says I should, but because my heart does.

It is a part of the job of motherhood in which I find joy.

❤ Mama