Of Breastfeeding and Babies...

Perhaps its because I have so many friends who have had babies, or are going to, recently that this article has materialized. Much of what I write is very raw and real- what is written here is entirely me, and much of what gets posted is written because I am currently processing something and I want to pass it along.


I married young, a whopping 21. Mmm, some may say too young, but I don’t think I would agree. Some might say I had babies too young, but I am not sure I would agree with that either, given my health history with my last two pregnancies. One thing I would say is that I entered into motherhood with a Pollyanna view of the world.

Born and raised in The Movement, and all of the heights of its legalistic dogmatisms, I entered into marriage with some ignorant assumptions that were preconceived by me, originating from my mother and other influential Movement mothers who helped to brainwash my thinking. The first one was a very naïve view that one should have as many children as humanly possible, because God wouldn't give you what He couldn’t help you provide for. The second was, to use any form of man-made contraception was directly interfering with God’s design for a husband and wife relationship (sex as seen as strictly procreational, and if you have fun while doing it-great. If not, try again until at last you conceive.). The third was that children are a blessing, and only worldly-minded people view them as “work.” The fourth was that all natural forms of delivery and childcare should be practiced because, again, to use anything man-made would be to interfere directly with God’s design for human life. Naïve, naïve, naïve. And extremely judgmental, harsh, and intolerant to say the least.

First comes love and then the baby carriage aptly applied itself to my situation. We were pregnant with our first son, two weeks after we married because we told ourselves that God would only give us a child when He wanted us to have one. And nine months later, in May, I had an incredibly easy birth and brought our first son into the world. I was so young. I look back on those days and just want to hold that young girl’s heart in my arms and tell her everything would be OK. I assumed that because of my patriarchal upbringing that my mom would be an active part of my new motherhood journey and my heart was shocked when she rarely came around. Whenever I had questions for her, her answers were shrouded in spiritualism, platitudes, and judgmental statements that only made me want to retreat from her; and left me feeling utterly and completely alone.

I was so unprepared to be a Momma. Really, who is, but I was seriously lacking in the preparation category. I got pregnant so easily and then I was deathly ill for six months. Talk about fun times during the honeymoon phase! I told myself that this was all a part of God’s plan. In truth I was scared to death. I was such a young girl and I had barely even scratched the surface of living life apart from my parents (a whopping eight months!) when I got pregnant. I downplayed my feelings of anxiety and told myself that God would be there to help me figure it out. There’s nothing to having a baby. Nursing is going to be this wonderful, joyous thing that will help me bond with this perfect, angelic nursing babe and it will be a little bit of heaven on earth. Right?

My delivery went so quick I had no chance to mentally prepare for this major life change. Again, a young 21-year-old thinks she can do that during delivery. I look back on myself and tenderly smile. And there he was, beautiful as a baby can be- fully alert with gorgeous mounds of dark brown fur all over his perfectly round kissable head. I was scared out of my mind and I felt like I wanted him to be put back where he was safe- and where I could have some more time to get prepared for motherhood.

God doesn’t take returns though, but I felt like such a bad mommy for even thinking those thoughts that I didn’t even voice them to anyone. Instead, I told myself the next thing I needed to do was to try to nurse him. And that didn’t go as planned. My child had a mind of his own! I didn’t even have the first clue about what on earth nursing was going to be like! I was told that it was God’s design, so it had to be the perfect plan, and since it was perfect, nursing would be…well, perfect.

Not so. My little guy hated nursing as much as I hated doing it. He would cry, scream and wail. He would never want to latch on. When he did, he zonked out into an infantile coma that required ice cubes on his feet to wake him up. Every feeding was a miserable battle that ended in frustration and tears. No one told me about engorgement, no one told me about mastitis, no one told me about how you would smell like a walking milk bottle, and no one told me that nursing wasn’t for everyone. The only thing I heard was how wonderful it was, and I believed it!

Oh, and I forgot to mention how much fear I had when I brought him home. I felt detached from him- and it was really due to the fact that I had so much that I hadn’t dealt with, and the fact that I was so very young and naïve, that I had a lot of trouble bonding with him for the first few months. And he had colic. Badly. Every night at 5pm, he would scream and cry and scream and cry until he fell asleep. It was hard as newly weds with a little baby who felt alone- with no help and no support. We were truly clueless and we muddled through the next few months until we emerged from the haze of those early days.

And then, when our first was four months old, we were pregnant again with baby number two. Women weren’t supposed to get pregnant while breastfeeding! This must be God’s design for our family. And there I was, not even physically recovered, sick once again and unable to give my beautiful son (who had just emerged as a joy!) what he needed. And nine months later, number two entered into the world.

I say all of this to give some context to some of the radical views on babies and family planning within the Movement. And I am not just saying this because I have left The Movement, but because these dogmatisms that I was trained to believe affected me. I have always been a girl who wants to do what is right, and since I believed that these things were “right” whenever I questioned their "rightness" for my family and myself, I was wrapped in a tremendous amount false guilt. And the false guilt kept me from doing what truly would have been right for my family.

I eventually reached out to my grandma who heard my desperation and encouraged me to sign up for WIC and put our little guy on formula. It took a bit of convincing on her part, because that was another hurdle. To accept “government hand-outs” went against every grain in my body! But once I admitted that this was something that I needed, life became so much better. He was on formula and bottle-fed. What a relief it was to me! It was clearly the right thing for us, but it took me six months to get there. Of course, when my mother got wind that my son was on formula, I got the ninth-degree. This was the first tiny step I took in standing up to her and doing what was right for me, and I look back on this and find myself cheering myself on!

We finally decided to use contraception after baby number two came along, and that as well, proved to be the right thing for our family. I know, looking back, that if we had put the brakes on this, we would not have done our children or our marriage any justice. Children are a blessing yes, but to do your job well as parents, they require a lot of time and work. This was something that my husband and I had to come to terms with: Children are a blessing, but they are a responsibility and require a lot of resources in the areas of commitment, time, and money. And no, it is not worldly to want to ensure that you have enough money to provide clothing for your children, put good food on the table for them, and want to have the financial means to provide for their medical needs. These things are commanded by God, and all too often downplayed as being worldly by Movement homeschoolers.

I was young, and so was my hubby. We muddled through, but it took a lot of heartache to reach some of the conclusions that the Movement Kool-aid on family planning and child-birth does not make you holier, does not make you closer to God, does not make you more faithful. All it does it make you farther from grace, farther from mercy, and farther from understanding that not every family is created equally. And neither is every child.

So if you are a young momma, coming out of the Movement, and have a lot of guilt surrounding child-birth, nursing, vaccinations, and other things of that nature, don’t let everything you hear or read persuade you from doing what you know, deep down in your Momma’s instinctual heart, is right for you and your baby. Don’t let others cause you to feel guilty! You will be the best Momma (and Daddy) in the world when you stop doing what is right in everyone else’s eyes and do what is right for yourself, your marriage, and your baby.