Wednesday 4 June 2014

Breastfeeding in public - by Hema



I’m a small chested girl trapped in the body of a big chested girl.  I’ve never been  comfortable with having whoppers so I knew the whole pregnancy and breastfeeding thing was going to be tough on me.  Apart from trying to find clothes that fitted my  top half, breastfeeding in public became the ultimate challenge.  The Mama scarf I  had bought pre-birth proved to be too small and such a fiddle that it drew more  attention to myself as baby squirmed and wriggled.  I would break out in a sweat trying to keep my eye on everyone else's gaze while making sure I didn’t reveal myself.

I was not a cool breastfeeding Mum and paranoid thoughts fuelled by the  comments of the few dominated these moments. It’s hard, very hard to conceal such generous proportions but when baby is wailing on  a hot summers’ day, I was forced to sit somewhere and pull myself together.  I tried to read people's faces,  see if they knew and were judging me.  I tried to be casual  and pleasant in the hope that either nobody would notice or that they would be nice about it.   In  the end I  wasn’t over-exposing myself and as I had picked National Trust gardens,  I may have benefited from the relaxing atmosphere.  After a while, I became quite good at finding solitary corners and adopting a subtle manner.

Of course, if I stopped breastfeeding, they would return to their normal size (yes,  still going on about that) which would have made me feel better.  However, something unexpected had taken place.  This tiny little being had done away with  some -although not all- of my vanity.  Or maybe it was because I had fought tooth and nail to make breastfeeding work that I needed it to go beyond my planned six months.  In fact, I continued until my daughter was around seventeen months old for many  reasons; some good, some silly, some just plain egotistical.  However, from difficult  beginnings, breastfeeding had transformed into something rather beautiful.

It had taken six to nine months to recover from the shock of motherhood so I had only just  begun to really appreciate my baby as I had imagined I would and giving up  breastfeeding at its highest point suddenly seemed like saying no to Daniel Craig, it's  nuts.

Hema Simkins