Yesterday, I went to one of the city's breastfeeding meetings, and, as the student who just kind of showed up and started following my supervisor around, I was in the position of explaining myself to a number of different people, one at a time, as they trickled in -- not because they were running late, but because, at 9 am, most of them had already been in the hospital, checking in with new moms about their babies. (I love nurses.)
Thinking about breastfeeding in the context of the kind of health problems I'm studying in Med-Surg, I'm like: do I believe that breastfeeding is literally The Issue, the way that I believed education and college access was The Issue when I was working in charter schools?
Maybe not. The wonderful thing about being a nurse is that you don't actually have to decide The Issue by yourself. You figure it out from your patients, and it changes -- both from one patient to another and, if you are lucky and effective, for the same patient over time.
But breastfeeding is a huge issue to me because 1) it is a big issue for a lot of the moms I saw on OB clinicals: their babies are already at risk for a number of diseases and problems, and breastfeeding seriously reduces that risk; 2) the moms are similarly at risk for a lot of health problems, and breastfeeding reduces those risks, too; 3) I have had such a positive experience with breastfeeding in terms of my relationship to my body, and to my son, and while I understand that this was probably easier for me because my body is written on differently than are the bodies of most of my patients, I still believe this experience can be made accessible to moms of all colors, in all situations.
Mostly, of course, low breastfeeding rates is not an intractable problem. It's a created problem. And it's a simple, if not easy, problem to solve: if we give mom the resources they need to breastfeed, the way Enfamil gives moms what they need to formula feed, then breastfeeding rates go up. We're not touching on problems of big kids going hungry, here -- problems in which someone like Mitt Romney has to give up tax dollars and cry over his $50,000 plate over that one in five American kid who is hungry and thinks he's entitled to food and whose parents will be voting for Obama. The food this baby needs is right there, inside his mom, who, however "shiftless" she is otherwise, is growing food for little babies inside her body (shouldn't that be a Republican symbol of some sort?)
Anyway, the personal-and-feminist parallel that I am seeing in my own life right now is the tendency of everyone in the entire world -- from Paul Ryan to Rachel Maddow to myself -- to capitalize on the national/global pastime of judging women. This is not to say that any of us exclusively judge women, but that passing judgement on women is so much the craze, now and pretty much since always, that you can make an entire Times cover about how an otherwise-ordinary mom is breastfeeding her pre-schooler -- which is the norm and a total necessity in much of the world.
And, in that sense, Pine was totally right: it's ridiculous that her breastfeeding was considered news, and whoever is advising those students should probably address that with them -- not so much because Pine was somehow victimized by the story, but because it's a stupid story, and we need to be moving in the direction of fewer, not more, stupid stories in the media.
Speaking of created problems: instead of reading an entire newspaper to gain an understanding of what's going on In the World, most people direct their browsers to Yahoo and are presented with individual headlines to glance over and then evaluate: what do you think about Obama, now that you've read Romney's secret speech? What do you think about this illegal alien wanting to go to college? The focus is less and less on the actual story and more on what everyone and their Twitter feed thinks about its subject.
One of the amazing things about reading is that it can challenge the reader to imagine how other people live and feel, and, by doing so, it can develop compassion and empathy. But when "new stories" are developed in order to encourage readers to project their own feelings onto their subjects, they play to one of our lowest common denominators as people: the sense of accomplishment and assurance we derive from articulating the failings of those around us.
This judgey-ness has been identified as a divisive factor within feminism and among women, specifically -- but I think it's a larger, and growing, problem in our culture and society as a whole. In fact, I'd trade a fistful of searing commentaries and witty asides for a few more deliberate actions, taken to assist others or to correct the systemic problems that play into the behaviors we're judging.
All this to say that, in my own life, kvetching about how Pine had other options is itself a distraction, and I shouldn't have let it distract me. Either the difficulties of privileged and education single parents in academia are worth addressing or not. It would be very helpful if sick leave policies for professors didn't interfere with parents' getting tenure. It would be great if adolescents were less scandalized by the realities of babies and boobs. The fact that that's not where I choose to focus my energy doesn't really necessitate a critique of those who do. The fact that I felt drawn into one reflects a bigger problem in the way public discourse is functioning now -- and that (like formula feeding!) is a created problem, one that every reader has absolute power to correct, at least for him- or her-self.
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