ElementalMom

This has got to be the most spectacular pro-breastfeeding video I’ve ever seen. Not only does it make me proud to (still!) be a nursing mama, but it also makes me miss Puerto Rico horribly.

La Teta… to give the breast is to give life…

La Leche League founder Edwina Froehlich died last Sunday. She was 93.
I am completely devastated. Edwina pretty much embodied everything I admire in an activist. And also proved that even if you come late to your passion, you can change the world.

My favorite article about her, so far, is the Chicago Tribune piece. Some tidbits:

In the 1940s, Mrs. Froehlich witnessed her older sister Pauline go through what were then standard hospital childbirth procedures: plenty of drugs, the use of forceps and no fathers allowed, said another son, state Rep. Paul Froehlich (D-Schaumburg). Her sister also was discouraged from breast-feeding.

“That experience led mom to seek a better way,” Paul Froehlich said.

Newspapers would not run stories or meeting notices that included the word “breast,” so the group used the Spanish word for milk, “leche,” for its name.

How fabulous is that? Smack into some stupid arbitrary rule, and work around it creatively. See what’s wrong with the world, and change it. Some other fun bits from the New York Times piece:

Edwina Froehlich,… was inspired to help found La Leche League to support breast-feeding after being told at the age of 35 that she was too old to make breast milk for her baby…

A pioneer on several fronts of motherhood, she worked for Young Christian Workers, a Roman Catholic lay organization, before marrying John Froehlich when she was in her early 30s. She had her first child a couple of years later, making her comparatively old to have a first child at the time, and she made the controversial decision to forgo giving birth in a hospital in favor of a more natural delivery in her Franklin Park, Ill., home, with an obstetrician attending.

“We used to tell the mothers the three main obstacles to successful breast-feeding were doctors, hospitals and social pressure,” Mrs. White said.

It is so hard to be an “older” mother. It’s so hard to stand up when the world wants to shame you for doing what’s biologically appropriate in birthing and feeding your offspring. Having had a cesarean with my first baby, and feeling that breastfeeding was at least something I could do right, it’s because of Edwina’s work that I was able, 2.5 weeks out from that cesarean, to participate in the Berkeley, CA Guinness World Record Breastfeeding event. It healed a lot of the “broken” feelings I was working through. Breastfeeding has also been a really good arena for me to use in my birth activism work, to show mothers how very wrong doctors can be about very basic things.

But at the time Edwina and her six cohorts (Marian Tompson, Mary White, Mary Ann Cahill, Mary Ann Kerwin, Viola Lennon, and Betty Wagner) got started with LLLI, breastfeeding in America was down to 20% of women. It’s not a whole lot better now, but without them to hold back the tide, who knows how much harder it might have been for me to get the support and encouragement I needed for this critical aspect of mothering?

So thank you, Edwina, for standing up for what you believed in, and making it that much easier for me to do so as well. You’ll be missed.

The latest “sky is falling” panic to hit the homeschool lists is this case, wherein a judge basically declared homeschooling illegal unless you have a credentialed teacher in front of the child each day.

Naturally, mayhem, speculation, and doomsaying commenced.

My friend Tammy really summed it up nicely on her blog, where she states:

But right now, the best course of action is to know that we are strong here. We aren’t afraid that everything will fall apart, and we don’t need to spread panic in order to feel better about something we don’t know a whole lot about… If we panic now, how is that any different than being sucked in by sensationalist news on TV? Let’s rise above and be calm, wise and ready.

Precisely. It boggles my mind that people can think for themselves enough to become homeschoolers, and yet still do the Chicken Little thing on email lists, when a quick common-sense check tells you that the already overburdened, underfunded, and closing California state schools are NOT pushing for a return of the homeschoolers. While I’m the first to admit that our government is not always out for our best interest (HA!), even they would not set up such a scenario. At least, not in an election year. In 2009, maybe I’ll worry again.

This hit my feed reader this AM:

http://yellodyno.typepad.com/yello_dyno_blog/2008/02/realistic-fake.html

Realistic fake photos challenge child porn prosecutors.

Each week, about 100,000 sexually explicit images of children arrive on CDs or portable disk drives at Michelle Collins’ office.

Although challenges to digital photos come in all types of criminal and civil cases, they are especially pronounced in child-pornography cases because of a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on computer-generated child pornography. Defense attorneys are trying to use the ruling to introduce reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds about the images’ authenticity. And many law-enforcement officials worry that the time and money needed to withstand any challenges will only grow as technology improves and makes it more difficult to tell a computer-generated image from a real one…

Some of you work in the this arena. Please give us more insight into this issue so we can help to ensure children’s safety.

So please, if you have the talent (and the heart) to help, please contact Jan at YelloDino.

It’s been a long time, blog fans. I’ve been dealing with a ton of things I wasn’t emotionally ready to blog about, and they were all big enough that they kinda blocked out any other things I wanted to write about. So I’ve been having what singers refer to as “dark days”, where they spend their time being utterly silent, allowing their voices to rest.

Well, today, I’ve seen stuff I could not stay quiet about.

First, go read this article. Normally, I wouldn’t direct you to a Peggy O’Mara article, because I’m so pissed off at her antagonism towards EC, but this one is worth it.

OK, now go read this. And if you aren’t yet a member of PROTECT.org, sign up while you’re there. Oh, and since I’m on a tear, go watch this too.

So what’s the theme, here?

It doesn’t matter how much we love them. It doesn’t matter how much we care for and about them, whether we EC’d them, breastfed them and then provided them organic, locally-grown high-quality foods, coslept with them, put them in the carseats with the highest safety rating possible, researched their education options until we were cross-eyed, engaged only in positive discipline. It does not freaking matter.

They are under attack. Every minute of every day. If it isn’t for profit, it’s for sexual gratification.

Do I sound paranoid? Most likely. But I think Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s comments were clear enough. I do not think I’m exaggerating when I say that it does not matter what I do for my kids, if I fail to protect them.

Swimming lessons? Language, music, dance, art? Nope. Yello Dyno. Consumer awareness. And staying far away from people in white coats.

I have no wisdom, no great point. I’m as scared and as unsure of how precisely to make sure my kids are safe, as any other parent.

But I know this. I must not fail them.

I just heard a few minutes ago that Cindy Sheehan has resigned from the peace movement. This blog on Daily Kos explains why.

I don’t even know where to begin. I have watched her get attacked over and over, in increasingly ridiculous, harsh, and anatomically impossible ways, all for saying that a mother’s grief trumps a politician’s greed. Well it appears today, the bad guys have won. Cindy will no longer speak for mothers.

I am devastated by this.

I cannot imagine what it must be like to send off a living boy full of ideals about what he’s doing, and receive back a telegram telling you that your baby is gone forever. And to have the President who sent him off to die refer to you as “Mom” while your grief is still raw (does it ever get unraw? Ever? I can’t imagine that it would.) Maybe Cindy escallated, but maybe, just maybe, that man in the white house could have talked to her. Just once. Maybe he could have answered the question about what noble cause Casey died for. How hard would that have been to do? It’s not like he was constrained to tell the truth; he could have said anything. But in the end, for whatever reasons, he would not face her.

Personally, I arrived at the same conclusion Cindy did, but I did it years ago. This America is not the America I was raised to believe in. The Federalist Papers didn’t address the unchecked greed, the viciousness, the stupidity, I see around me. When my husband resisted voting because it was pointless, I encouraged him to come with me, to make it a family outing. And then George W. Bush turned that into a complete farce. Who won the election? Who knows? Not us, any more.

Where will my family end up? I have no idea, but I know it isn’t here, and I believe in my heart that while staying and trying to inspire change from within is a noble sentiment, I, like Cindy, figured out a little while back that this empire needs to topple; it cannot be fixed, not with all our might. And if this nation is going to be as violent, as vitriolic, and as hateful to the grief of a mother as it has been to Cindy, I have to ask if it’s worth being saved at all. And I find myself being very, very sad that the conclusion I come to, is “no”.

I do not think Cindy started out to be a voice of mothers, but to me, that’s what she ended up being. A mother who stood the hell up and fought the senseless death of her beloved child in a stupid war. I hope to God that I will have the same grace, the same strength, the same courage of coviction, and the same spark, that Cindy Sheehan has, should the time ever come when I am tested as harshly as she has been tested.

Thank you, Cindy Sheehan. You’ll never read these words, but I want them out there, to try to counteract, just a little, all the hate you’ve had to soak up. You have been a beacon to me, of what it can mean to be a mother of boys, and I will admire you forever.

It took me a while to begin this post, because I couldn’t decide if the title should be what it is, or “Our Culture Is Hopeless.”

Recently, we flew to Puerto Rico, from Oakland, CA. Due to the logistics, this entailed going through four security checkpoints. As onerous and ridiculous as these can be, we have gotten pretty used to them (which is a sad commentary all in itself), and were basically OK sailing through them.

Except, of course, for the formula.

Jason had Rowan in the Ergo on him, I had Kestrel on me. Kestrel is 21 months old; not a baby any more by anyone’s definition. He’s walking, talking, and pretty huge. Not A Baby. And yet I got pulled aside at each and every checkpoint, to get grilled about whether or not I had formula for the baby. One zealous agent even went so far as to search my bag for the formula I assured her was not there.

OK, follow along here, sportsfans. I am travelling with what is clearly a toddler. And every one of these people assumes my toddler is still on formula.

And yet Emily Gillette was kicked off a plane for breastfeeding a child just a few months younger than Kestrel.

So which is it, folks? If a baby is formula-aged, they’re breastmilk-aged, and that should be OK, but it isn’t. If they’re not breastmilk-aged, they sure as anything shouldn’t be sucking down formula. Where did we get so off-course? How did we become so backwards, so contrary to millennia of human evolution?

It’s a quandary that I ponder… while I nurse my not-such-a-baby. Good thing none of those guards wanted to check my carry-on milk supply.