boobs! part I

So, I've started volunteering at one of the city's public hospitals with the lactation coordinator, who is trying to get the hospital's breastfeeding numbers up, as per Healthy People 2020. This is both a result and an exacerbation of the large amount of time I spend thinking about boobs. 


I feed my son from my boobs. It is so awesome; it's like I'm the breastfeeding equivalent of all those women on The Business of Being Born who are strumming acoustic guitars over the wonders of their natural vaginal lacerations. I'm that crunchy over breastfeeding.

See, before, I hated my body so much. I hated it for being too fat, so I starved it, and then I hated it for being all weak-toothed and weak-boned and irregularly-ovulating from the starvation, and then I lost my first pregnancy and hated it more. And I had a mental illness, yes, but a large part of the appeal of that mental illness is that it's also a snarky little subversive reiteration of the way everyone else feels about my body, by virtue of it having a vagina and therefore, apparently, being everyone's business.

(Incidentally, if you were wondering, that right there is why a lot of women like me, women who hate the idea that anyone would choose to abort a potential baby, are committed to preserving that choice. Because it is exhausting and obnoxious to have your body be everyone else's business and then be blamed for that unwanted notoriety. Because it is infuriating, this idea that to properly be the person I am, the gender that I am, I am in need of constant correction, from the first instructions to sit with your legs closed, wait your turn to speak, and ignore the boys who are talking over you and feeling you up at the swimming pool, to the last instructions to cover your breasts when you're feeding your child, but don't expect to be able to keep them covered if someone with a penis wants to touch them and he's bigger than you.)

I get this attitude sometimes, this bizarre admiration for breastfeeding, still (!), when my son is already almost nine months old (!) Moms who quit sooner talk about "wanting their bodies back" and give the impression that breastfeeding was a big sacrifice for them. And I feel like a fake because maybe if it were a big sacrifice for me, I wouldn't still be doing it.

But really, it's not. I've never felt like my body was mine: if it were, why did I start being ashamed of it for not being sexy enough when I was seven? I didn't want to have sex with anyone at seven. Why was I fielding helpful blasts about how to "lose the baby weight" from my first trimester? Who am I getting my "pre-baby-body" back for?

My experience, being female, has always been one in which there are an endless supply of consultants ready to help me ameliorate the embarrassing mess of a body that is never good enough -- both because it is not a man's, though they rarely say that, and because it is not Christie Brinkley's/Kate Moss's/Jessica Alba's/Beyonce's. The gold standard changes, but my obligation and subsequent failure to meet it -- even when meeting it would do nothing at all for me, personally -- never does.

In this sense, breastfeeding feels subversive, not because half of the Crown Heights-Bed-Stuy-Fort Greene trifecta has now seen my boobs, but because my boobs have been commandeered by my son. My boobs are no longer up for discussion, because now your critique will inevitably be met with: I walk around generating food to sustain a human life out of this inferior body; please, tell me more about how your belittlement of women and their bodies justifies your space on the planet.

It's possibly the biggest act of self-determination regarding my body that I've made. It's even better than getting married. When I got married, I got to reject everyone else's claims to my body because they were superseded by the claims of a particular man. My body wasn't fully mine; it's just that it wasn't everybody's anymore.

But even my husband -- who I love and also resent for having the "right" to evaluate my worth, by virtue of being male -- can't say shit to me now. Even if my body isn't good enough for him -- itself a much more comfortable standard for me than the one I spent twenty years trying to attain -- my body is good enough for me, because it feeds my child, and while my child isn't literally my entire life, he's much more my life than trying to be sexy ever was.