Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
We put out the call a bit ago in our free facebook community, the Rising Tide Women Sisterhood , to see what was on everyone's mind when it came to breastfeeding.
We answered a whole spate of them in our 7th episode of our Wednesday morning Rising Tide Doula Jam on our facebook page, and I'm sharing them so you can get the info, too!
Since we are heading into World Breastfeeding Week, I obviously want to talk about breastfeeding and chestfeeding. (If you know me in person, you probably know that's not limited to just the first week in August; I kiiiind of talk about it all the time.) One of the things I like to talk about with this subject is what I call our 'Cultural Knowledge Deficit' around breastfeeding. As a mainstream culture, Americans know very little about how breastfeeding works or what it looks like or what's normal.
One of many, many things I love about this work is when I meet someone new and they ask me what I do (unless they already know what my husband does for work; then they almost never ask me what I do. Which tells me we have a lot of work to do around expectations of women and work and spouses. But that's another ranty post for another day, I guess). I love getting asked what I do because when I take a second to think about it, I feel so full of possibility and I can feel my eyes start to sparkle.
As happens from time to time on the internet, there are some breastfeeding horror stories making the rounds. I won't link to them because I don't want to give them traffic; scare tactics are a cruel way to make your point, whatever your point is. And to that end, I want to say something about 'activism' and the natural parenting community (and the broader world in general): if your 'activism' tactics center around shaming individual people for making choices you don't agree with, you are not an activist, you are an asshole. If your 'activism' tactics center around scaring people into following your advice, you are not an activist, you are a fearmonger.
That's not what we are about here at Rising Tide Women. Our goal, always, is to help you be informed about the decisions you are making and then to support you in what you've chosen. This doesn't mean we believe that all choices are equal and we should all just hold hands and sing together.
