Postcards from the Mothership

I was absolutely tickled when Kate over at One Tired Ema asked me to bring my posse of lactating Canucks into the conversation about an article in this month’s Atlantic called “The Case Against Breast Feeding.” You can go read the Atlantic piece if you like, or you can skip on over to Kate’s place and read her excellent summary and reply, and some really interesting comments. Be warned, though — block off some time, because it took me the whole bus ride home yesterday and then a bit more time today to get through it all!

The gist of it is this: as Kate so concisely summarizes, it’s an article “in which a white, upper middle class, urban mom of three–and journalist!–takes on The Popular Establishment, which purports to tell you that nursing is actually better than formula feeding.” She (the author, Hanna Rosin, not Kate) basically refutes the idea that breast is best and says all the medical findings are questionable at best. The literature she reviewed by borrowing a friend’s password to an online medical library showed “breastfeeding is probably, maybe, a little better” but that the studies are largely inconsistent compared to the way they are presented in the popular literature.

She then goes on to opine that we as a society are placing way too much emphasis on the importance of breastfeeding, and that our breasts are in fact ruining whatever slim chance we had at equality in the workplace and even in the home. She literally “seethes” (her word) at the burden placed upon her shoulders as a mother to feed the baby, and says “the debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives.”

Okay, so that’s the Coles Notes version. IMHO, she’s no different than the French woman who wrote the book about how motherhood is a trap for women a couple of years ago — she’s using inflamatory language and a shockingly unpopular opinion to stir the pot and rile people up. Hey, more power to her. It’s hard for me to imagine a mother of three — who, FWIW, seems to have nursed all three to a year — could actually believe what she says she believes, but she also seems to have been generally resentful to the whole process of nursing and maybe even motherhood in general. She says she’s “often tapping [her] foot impatiently, waiting for him to finish.” I cringed when I read that. Poor baby.

Anyway, all of that has been done to death around the blogosphere — just do a search on “the case against breastfeeding” and Google practically oozes the vitriol of the nursing masses — but there is one nugget in here that really interests me, and Kate drew it out.

One of the points that Rosin makes is that the American Academy of Pediatrics officially recommended in 1997 that babies be exclusively breast-fed for the first six months, followed by six more months of partial nursing supplemented with the introduction of solid foods. And we know that in the US, most women get maternity leave in the range of three to 12 weeks. I’ve often commented that I simply can’t imagine how new mothers are coping with being back at work and having a newborn at home. I think this is about the only legitimate point I’d give Rosin: demanding that mothers of young babies be fully functional in a day job AND nurse a baby six or eight times a day AND do all the other things a mother is supposed to do really does set up some unrealistic and often unattainable expectations.

Of course, the answer is change the policies, not change the recommendation to breast-feed exclusively. But I’d like to do a straw poll here and ask: how has your maternity leave affected your ability to — or, desire to — breastfeed your baby? If you’ve been around a while, you know the early days of nursing were hell for me three times over. If I had to be back at work a month after Tristan was born, I’m not sure I would have had the wherewithal to keep nursing.

And there’s the other side of the coin, too. Kate asked me specifically if the year-long maternity leave has affected my career path and my feelings of “equality”. It’s a good question, but also brings out my main criticism of Rosin’s piece: so many factors are at play here, it’s hard to suss out one piece of the puzzle and say it’s the mitigating factor.

I’ve had three years of maternity leave in the past seven years. Because I’m blessed with a job that gives me a full top-up to my original salary from the base that employment insurance provides, we’ve taken no financial ‘hit’ because of my years off. (*says a silent prayer of gratitude*) I returned from my first maternity leave into a new job with my old employer. It was a job I’d been working toward for almost a decade, and I was thrilled to finally achieve it — and then I was back on mat leave within the year. Within six months of returning from my second mat leave, I won a promotion. When I was pregnant with Lucas, I was identified as a potential “high-flyer” in our agency, someone to be groomed for an eventual management position. I was actually supposed to come back from maternity leave into full-time French training so I could start down that road, but as you know I pulled myself off that path by taking a different position and dropping down to four days per week. I’m still with the same employer, just doing a slightly different job.

My maternity leaves don’t seem to have affected my employers’ (writ large) opinion of my capabilities and potential, and I’ve been moving progressively up the ladder. I make just about as much now at four days a week than I was making when I was pregnant with Tristan and working full time. I love my job most days and I work hard, but I’ve made no secret of the fact that my family comes first. I’ve pulled myself off the fast-track in search of balance, and it was one of the smarter decisions I’ve made where working and mothering intersect.

So, the answer is of course having children and taking time to raise them and having them be the primary focus in my life has affected my career path. If our time spent, in Kate’s gorgeous phrase, “tooling around in the Badlands of Infertility” had come out differently, I would very likely be in a very different job, likely more senior, and I’d definitely more focused on my ‘career.’

And there would be a big aching void in my life, because being a mother is all I ever wanted out of life. I’m proud that I’m successful, and that I’m seen as someone with potential and worth investing in. But I’m also proud that Kate sees me as a mother whose opinion in this debate is valuable. And I don’t have to tell you how proud I am to be a mother.

In five or six years, Lucas will be in school full time and I’ll be able to refocus on this whole career thing again. If I were a more ambitious sort of person, maybe I would be resentful and see my role as a mother in terms of sacrifices I’ve made instead of joys I’ve earned. Certainly, that seems to be where Rosin’s head is at.

Do we have equality in our home? Hell, no. But we have balance, and I think that’s better. Some things are heavier on Beloved’s shoulders and some on mine, but we share those burdens. That’s why our relationship works, I think — we’re perfectly compliementary, but that doesn’t mean we’re perfectly equal. It works for us.

So, Kate, the short answer is yes, it seems quite likely that Canada’s generous maternity leave policies affected my ability to continue to nurse my babies for as long as I did in a positive way. And no, I don’t think the one-year leave of absence has had a detrimental effect on my career path. I’ve dialed it down myself, but that’s a choice with which I am not only satisfied, but delighted. And just wading my way through all this reminds me again that I am coming from such a place of priviledge, and even many of my Canadian sisters have not been nearly so blessed as me.

Phew, this ran long, didn’t it? But it’s a fascinating topic. Tell me, or tell Kate at her place, what you think: has a longer maternity leave interfered with your career and how do you feel about that?