Breastfeeding: It's about her shape

 

 

If you’re a given woman’s husband, folks will expect that you don’t write about breasts, especially if they’re not her breasts, and if you’re nobody’s husband, again nobody will think you are in the right position to write about breasts.

 

So to silence any such detractors, let me explain that if this were not the season for talking about breastfeeding, I would be talking less touchy issues.

 

Having said that, doesn’t it intrigue you how the balance between private interest and filial duty is always affected when a woman has her looks in the picture?

 

I doubt there is a woman in the corporate world, for instance, who doesn’t know the advantages of feeding the baby exclusively on breast milk for… is it six months? 

 

Yet my exposure to the corporate world shows that the average female there does not live by that creed. Yes, there is the dedicated mother who, after maternity leave ends, will express milk, leave it in bottles and instruct the baby-sitter on when and how to ‘administer’ it, but on average, the others will use the end of leave to begin reconstructing their shapes.

 

Motherhood, we all know, comes with its own additions, many of which don’t flatter the beauty-conscious woman. And whether they deny it or not, women want the beholder to remember them as that shapely woman who doesn’t look her age [and motherhood status. So since a leaking bust does not constitute ‘shapely’, many will think, the bottle can take over. 

 

Besides, successful breastfeeding demands diet adjustments that don’t favour grooming a shapely body. Both the foods a mother eats to encourage lactation and the frequency of eating will, by the bye, kill more than they enhance shapeliness.

 

So which corporate woman are you going to tell to pack bushera (millet porridge) daily, in the name of letting the child breastfeed until it is two years old?

 

It does not help matters, also, that there is a higher incidence of mothers who are not… er… not attached? Such mothers don’t want to close any doors as such, so they will leave the shapely body ace card fully displayed on the table… just in case. Breastfeeding endangers this shape. 

 

We keep wondering where some of the diseases children have come from, but when you consider the difference between the child whose mother is available to nurture it and the child of the mother battling image and employment demons, you will agree the corporate mother is likely to use her health insurance card more than the other woman does. 

 

Of course, there’s more to the corporate woman’s breastfeeding demands than shape. Since most offices are not built with mothers in mind, they have no room where mothers can freely let their motherly hair down.

 

So you find women in their three-piece suits squirming in the company kitchen, fighting to extricate the turgid breast, so they can either express the throbbing milk or feed the baby whom the maid has brought in for lunch. Woe is she if, just as she has got a good hold of the fleshy milk carrier, a male colleague bounders in.

 

Then trouble comes to the fore. Luckily, now you see blouses with windows of possibility for the woman who doesn’t want to engage in struggles in a society that seems not to give women room to be women.