Creating community

I have amazing friends. Some of them are scattered up and down the east coast, and others are around the DC area. Before having Ian, it didn’t seem too difficult to see out of state friends a few times a year. Our local friends, none of which really live in our area of DC, were easy to meet up with once we managed to mesh our busy schedules. I definitely complained that juggling schedules was annoying, and that we would have loved to see more of our friends. But over-all, I never felt that I was missing out on something by not having a neighborhood community of friends.

Everything has changed since we had Ian. Bennett and I knew we wanted parent friends that lived nearby, but we weren’t sure how to make that happen. With all of our challenges last year, we didn’t have a lot of time or energy reserves to invest in building a neighborhood community for ourselves. So now here we are, with an almost 18 month old, and still no local community. The fact that we have such amazing friends is still great, but it takes so much energy just to see our friends in the area (metro time traffic, dragging kids around on those commutes) that we truly do not see them enough.

When I chose to stay home with Ian, I knew that I would need neighborhood friends. I knew meeting people the way everyone suggested, through activities, just going to the park story time, would be very challenging for me. To meet people in those types of settings, you need to be able to see the people around you and recognize them the next time you see them somewhere else around the neighborhood. You need to be able to say hi and walk over to chat. If you are blind and can’t see them to do that, then the other person needs to intuitively understand that and do all of that for you. This almost never happens. So, although I have made some casual friends through play group and music class and such, I haven’t had the right environment for friend making.

The other week, Bennett and I decided that the neighborhood friend things weren’t just going to gradually happen; we needed to step it up and make it happen! We sent an email out over our Capitol Hill parent’s listserv seeing if anyone wants to make friends. Bennett and I jokingly call it our classified or dating profile because that is what it feels like. So, here is hoping that we will meet some new people soon that can become new friends!

Toddlerhood

Toddlers are exhausting! Please tell me that I am not the only one who feels this way!

I honestly feel like the last couple of months have been far more challenging than any time when Ian was an infant. Maybe this is because I know more about infants than toddlers…or maybe toddlers are just more of a challenge for me…I don’t know.

But I am tired…physically and emotionally. Between the crying tantrums, throwing things, and hitting, I am tired and the energy it takes to set gentle, firm, and consistent boundaries is exhausting. I know this is a phase. I keep telling myself this is a phase. I look at things from his perspective, and I completely understand his frustration and emotions he doesn't know how to control. But oh the exhaustion!

Why should breastfeeding be easy?

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend about how challenging breastfeeding can be and our try to breastfeed culture. My friend had a 4 week old at the time, and remarked to me that breastfeeding was hard. I agreed, but pointed out that how you contextualize the challenges within your over-all view of breastfeeding affects your perception of those challenges. Someone who believes strongly in the importance of breastfeeding, who sees the long term pay offs, is more likely to see a challenge as something to be worked through rather than something that might end breastfeeding.

Later that day when I was trying to settle Ian for a nap, I thought back over the conversation. It struck me that the point I should have made is: why do we think breastfeeding should be easy?

I’m not saying it should be difficult every step of the way. I’m not saying women should endure pain while breastfeeding. But, why should it be easy?

So many worthwhile things in life are not easy. Marriage isn’t always easy. Parenting is rarely easy. Breastfeeding is a relationship. It’s so much more than feeding a baby…so why should it be singled out from other relationships and be easy?

Certainly our modern birthing and parenting trends make breastfeeding more complicated and difficult then it should be. We tell people breast is best and then set them up to struggle with misinformation and unsupportive policies, providers, and cultural norms. We have lost the community of women and mothering that use to inform woman about babies and breastfeeding long before they became mothers.

Most of us become parents with no idea what a new born is like. Even those who have experience with babies, rarely have the intimate knowledge that really teaches you about infants. For many their own child is the first baby they have held or been around for more than an hour here or there. If you are lucky enough to have actually seen mothers confidently breastfeeding, and not just heard stories of trying and not being able to breastfeed, you probably haven’t heard a full account of what breastfeeding is like. We leave parents to tease out what are breastfeeding challenges and what are adjusting to new baby challenges with little guidance and compassionate support. We focus so much on breastfeeding in the early weeks that we fail to contextualize early problems, or any problems, within the long term breastfeeding relationship.

So, back to my original question: why do we think breastfeeding should be easy?

Having thought about this, I realized that my own view of breastfeeding as essential to my approach to mothering leads me to smooth over my own challenges when I speak about my breastfeeding experience. When a woman brings up a specific problem, I share my experiences and challenges, but when I talk about the big picture, I often say “we had a pretty easy time with breastfeeding”. But is that even helpful? My definition of easy breastfeeding is probably not the same as another woman’s.

My definition of easy includes a week of sore nipples, engorgement, latching challenges in the first week due to me being blind, a biting faze, a hitting while breastfeeding faze, blocked ducts, and now a baby that insists on breastfeeding while in down dog. And that’s not even including challenges related to breastfeeding like bottle refusal and disinterest in solid foods until around 13 months. All of these challenges were manageable to me so they have simply become part of our breastfeeding narrative.

I have had friends with much more difficult challenges, and I have had friends who seemed to me to have less challenges than I did, but to them, the challenges were much more difficult. Easy is relative. Problems are relative.

Breastfeeding is not just about feeding your baby; it is a relationship. Like all relationships, it takes work. There are good times and bad times. Sometimes, all we need is persistence and other times we need some outside help.

While breastfeeding shouldn’t be hard, there will likely be challenging times. The early weeks or months are for learning, and learning a new skill is often difficult. There are challenges beyond the new born learning time, but they will be interspersed with times where everything feels right and natural. But ultimately breastfeeding is a relationship and relationships aren’t easy.