No. I am not Mom enough.
Not as TIME magazine seems to define it on their outrageous cover today. The one showing the willowy bombshell of a mother, staring defiantly at the camera, while her 3-year-old son stands on a chair next to her, the better to suckle at her exposed breast.
I am not Mom enough to take the bait. To accept TIME's deliberate provocation and either get mad at this woman for what I think I know about her from this photo, or to feel inferior, or superior, or defensive, or guilty -- or anything at all, if it means I am comparing myself to other mothers.
I am not Mom enough to think that the debate over how to feed our youngest children -- an important and nuanced conversation about nutrition, and workplace policy, and government responsibility, and gender relationships -- can be boiled down to a simplistic, unrepresentative, staged photograph.
The breastfeeding conversation is not titillating. The TIME cover is.
Breastfeeding is not a macho test of motherhood, with the winner being the one who nurses the longest. In fact there ARE no macho tests of motherhood. Motherhood is -- should be -- a village, where we explore each other's choices, learn from them, respect them, and then go off and make our own.
Women who breastfeed their children for three years are outliers, but they are not spectacles, and we shouldn't hold them up as either Madonnas or freaks. Women who do not breastfeed are not monsters, and we should not condemn them, or really have any opinion about their decision at all.
TIME wanted attention. They have gotten it. And the shame of it is that the article accompanying the photo and headline has moments of nuanced exploration of the global social questions raised by the attachment theory of parenting. "The arguments for and against," author Kate Pickett writes, "mirror questions about family and work that still divide America five decades after the advent of modern feminism, when nearly half the U.S. workforce is made up of women."
So, let's talk about that. But let's not wrap it in the tired trope of my-way-is-better-than-yours and parenting-means-choosing-a-camp and cool-we-can-put-a-breast-on-our-cover-if-we-say-it's-a-social-schism.
I refuse to see either a heroine or an extremist in TIME's cover photo. I won't condemn her or praise her. I will not stoop to the level of pretending that we are so unidimensional that we can be divided by a lifestyle choice.
I am not Mom enough.
Follow Lisa Belkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lisabelkin
Nice work-- everything you've said is so point on. We're not in competition, we're raising the world's future generation. Together. Love it
Suckle at the teet of rationality and logic!!!!!!!!! (;
Mothering, and parenting in general, is not an easy job, and no one does it perfectly. Whether or not you choose to breastfeed is your own decision, and most make after carefully thinking through their options. No course of action is right for every mother and every child.
All parents make mistakes, I know mine did, and I know that I will if (when) I have children. For TIME to turn this into some sort competition, to bring about a standard that all mothers should reach or they're bad parents is just so very wrong.
I breastfeed my two children as babies for a short time (developed infections requiring antibiotics both times, not from bf'ing but from kidney infections, and switched to bottles and formula). I have never felt less of a mother for doing this. love my children unconditionally and they love me. They are good, honest, trustworthy, kind people and I am proud they are in this world.
But I'm also a woman, and I won't deny like some women do that breasts are sexually. Just ask my husband of 32 years! He'll tell ya. And I don't apologize for that aspect of breasts either.
I AM woman, hear me roar!!!
But what this woman did for the cover was sensationalism at its worst. Just today I got a FB link from one of my conservative relatives (yes, I DO have them) and it was this picture only photo shopped with George Clooney as Mom and Barack Obama as Baby. I kid you not.
That's what this provocative cover has reduced breastfeeding too: a political joke!
At a time when we SHOULD be encouraging young mothers to breastfeed, this narcisstic mother has set the movement back!
The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, he said:
“Man.
Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.
And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present;
the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;
he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”