Nourishment
Taking nourishment is a fundamental human activity to which we usually bring remarkably little moment-to-moment awareness, although it occupies enormous amounts of time, energy, and thought. A similar lack of awareness can cloud our ability to see and appreciate some of the most important aspects of providing nourishment for our babies, although it is something that parents engage in many times throughout the day and night. If we go into parenting with the understanding that human connection and relationality are of paramount importance, the seemingly ordinary but formative choices we make around feeding and, more importantly, the quality of the attention that we bring to it as we engage in it, will be more in tune with the full range of our infant’s needs, and more likely to feed more aspects of our child’s being than just his belly.
There is a kind of immersion, a soaking in bliss, that happens in those moments after the baby has been fed. At times, a mutual gazing arises, a wonderfully peaceful feeling and sense of palpable connectedness and devotion, captured in many Renaissance paintings in which the Madonna is gazing at her child.
The Ojibwa word for mirror, wabimujichagwan, means “looking at your soul,” a concept that captures some of the mystery of image and substance. If it is true that we are mirrors to our infants and that looking forms the boundaries of a self, then perhaps we are also helping to form a spiritual soul self during these concentrated love gazes during which time stops, the air dims, the earth cools, and a sense of deep rightness takes hold of our being.
Whether we choose to bottle-feed or breast-feed, we can feed our children in a way that is responsive to the cues they give us: feeding them when they need to be fed, holding them with sensitivity, close to the warmth and comfort of our bodies, making sure that there are plenty of times when we stay off the cell phone and the Internet, put down our book or newspaper, shut off the TV, give them our full attention, and cultivate the art of gazing. These are all meditations in and of themselves.
When a baby is fed on a schedule rather than in response to his cues, the food comes at an adult-determined “time for feeding,” whether he is hungry or not. Instead of getting to experience hunger and then feeling the hunger satisfied as we respond to the myriad ways he subtly or not-so-subtly communicates with us, the experience can easily become one of disconnection from himself and the person feeding him. He is denied the ability to self-regulate and is placed in a more passive role. Being fed can become more of a dissociative experience rather than an enlivening one, in which feelings of trust and connectedness between parent and child are nourished and strengthened.
Whether babies are breast-fed or bottle-fed, feeding them in response to their cues reinforces and builds a sense of their own agency. They experience their ability to get what they need and to elicit an appropriate response from the world around them. This inner quality of confidence, built upon repeated experiences of successfully achieving a desired effect, is known as self-efficacy. Many studies show self-efficacy to be the single strongest factor predicting health and healing, an ability to handle stress, and the ability to make healthy lifestyle changes. The foundation for a robust and wide-ranging self-confidence begins in childhood with these kinds of intimate and mutually responsive interactions.
There are situations in which, for one reason or another, a mother may be unable to breast-feed her baby. This can bring up a range of afflictive emotions, including frustration, inadequacy, and guilt. Just as was said in relationship to our strong attachments to things being a certain way around the birth, here, too, we have an occasion to bring some kindness and acceptance to ourselves and the situation. How we hold and see and respond to our babies is in the end more important than whether we breast-feed or bottle-feed.
If you breast-feed your baby, it helps enormously to have support from experienced individuals or groups. The initial period can sometimes be frustrating and difficult, depending on the particular needs of both your baby and your own body. It is easy to feel overwhelmed as difficulties arise, but there are often very simple solutions to sometimes seemingly impossible or frustrating problems. With knowledgeable support and a willingness to work with the problems that come up, you can make it through the first few weeks and come through feeling a strong sense of confidence in yourself and your body, and what it is beautifully designed to do. At a certain point nursing can become effortless, the foundation of a child-centered way to parent that nourishes baby and mother at the deepest level.
There is now much more public awareness of the health benefits of breast-feeding and a growing understanding of its other important dimensions, such as emotional comfort, maternal-infant bonding, physical and psychological tuning of biological rhythms (how the bodies and minds of the mother and the baby interact), and long-term neurological and developmental effects.
Observing our children when they were babies and toddlers, I (mkz) could see the deep states of relaxation that they would immediately move into as they nursed. No matter what was going on in the moment, no matter what upset had just occurred, I could usually count on nursing to calm and rejuvenate my child. It provided a momentary withdrawal from the stimulation of the world into a quiet, peaceful place of comfort, nurturance, and renewal. As toddlers, they would move from playing and exploring at a distance back to me for refueling. By that time, they were eating lots of different foods. They weren’t really nursing for food. They were nursing to renew other aspects of their being.
Another important and unique aspect of breast-feeding is the concentrated effort required of the infant to suck milk from the breast. With nursing, the milk doesn’t come pouring down into their mouths; they have to work for it. The initial sucking may give them very little milk, and then at a certain point, if you watch closely, you can see them switching to the long, slow sucks that show you that your milk has let down and is flowing. The child relaxes into a satisfying rhythm—focused, working, but relaxed. When the breast is emptied, they often continue to nurse to meet their needs for comfort, calming, relaxation, and connection.
Years ago, I attended a conference sponsored by La Leche League, an organization devoted to informing women about breast-feeding and providing support. It was in a large auditorium full of women holding infants and toddlers in their laps, some nursing, some snuggling. It was remarkable to feel the babies centering on their mothers. The importance of this embodied relationship is discussed in sociologist Robbie Pfeufer Kahn’s insightful book Bearing Meaning: The Language of Birth.
Breast-fed babies and toddlers see their mothers as the “source.” Venturing out and exploring is balanced by a return to the source of their security and nurturance. They stay within an expanded maternal sphere, because they are strongly connected. They are able to come and go, grounded in their relationship to her and to her body.
In that auditorium full of small children, I was struck by the sustained quiet in the room, the feeling of contentment with being held or nursed, embraced by the aura of the mother.