It looks like the pressure is on again to keep Maltese women barefoot and pregnant, or fiddling around the farmyard like a bunch of brood mares. The breastfeeding fascists are leaving their training compounds once more, and are out in force, trying to get every woman who gives birth to suckle her baby for six months. They are so aggressive – they like to call it “persuasive” – that women who would rather use a bottle are racked by guilt and doubt. Women who want to suckle but can’t, end up on their doctor’s doorstep, collapsing in a heap of tears and hysterics because they think they’ve failed. Failed at what, for heaven’s sake?
The last thing you need when you’ve just had a baby and are hovering on the edge of the blues is people bossing you around and trying to put pressure on you to “breastfeed” – there’s a word for it, and it’s suckling – when you can’t or quite simply, won’t. I’ve just written a Thursday piece about this – find it on line if you haven’t already seen it – so I won’t go into all the arguments again. But in the face of all the simpering twits who wrote in to tell me why I am wrong – and believe me, there is no simpering twit like the one who thinks that suckling is holy and that bottles are evil – I will repeat this. The results speak for themselves. The country is full of suckled infants who have grown into puny, stupid, sickly and unattractive teenagers and adults. They are puny, stupid, sickly and unattractive because that is their genetic heritage. No amount of milk from their mother’s bosom was ever going to change this. The country is also jam-packed with strong, intelligent, healthy and attractive people who were bottle-fed within hours of their birth, or after just a few days or a couple of weeks of suckling. I don’t like to say it because it sounds dreadfully conceited, but I really think this point has to be shoved down the throats of the breastfeeding Nazis: I am one of those people, and so are all three of my sons. I won’t speak about them, because it can be dismissed as a mother’s pride and they will want to kill me in any case, but I will speak about myself because I am fed up of these offensive fools who wish to suggest that bottle-fed babies are the inferior product, or that their mothers did them wrong. As advertisements for bottle-feeding go, I think I’m a pretty good one, because I’m as tough as an ox and always have been. I don’t shatter mirrors, I’m 12cm taller than the average for a Maltese woman, and some say that I’m quite quick-witted. My point is that we are the result of our genetic heritage and general upbringing, and not the result of breast-milk or bottle-milk.
Bottle-feeding is dangerous in countries where there is poor hygiene and not much medical care, which might lead to babies dying of gastro-enteritis from dirty bottles and water, but not from the bottle-milk itself. Bottle-milk might even be beneficial in building up the baby’s size and strength. I was the classic Ostermilk baby, like one of those in the advertising pictures: the size of a small thug, and according to contemporary reports, by far the biggest baby being paraded around in a Silver Cross pram. I look at the photographs and I think: “Good God, girl – one thump from you and teddy is a dead man.” And before Saint Nipple and her plethora of breast-feeding buddies writes in to harass us all about childhood obesity and bottle-feeding, I’ll explain that I wasn’t fat, just very big and tall, and by the time I started school I looked like a set of pipe cleaners. So there.
The breastfeeding Nazis are free to espouse their own opinion. They are even free to express it on giant billboards at traffic roundabouts. They are not free to bully women, at one of the most vulnerable points in their lives, into suckling their infants for six days, six weeks or six months, by brainwashing them into thinking that they will be letting their babies down if they don’t. There is nothing wrong with bottle milk. It doesn’t cause any harm or have any negative effects in the short run or the long run as long as you maintain proper hygiene. I feel it necessary to repeat this because I know that lots of women listen to what I say and I want to help undo some of the great psychological damage being wrought on vulnerable post-partum women by the breast bullies. What does cause babies harm is a sobbing, unhappy mother who is racked by guilt because she’s not up to it or just doesn’t feel like it – or worse, a mother who is suckling against her will, going to it with teeth clenched in resentment. One tiresome person wrote to say that “breastfeeding is an act of love” – yes, an act of self-love in many cases, and an attempt at saving oneself from guilt. The real act of love, my dear sir, is in raising your children to be decent, well-adjusted and properly socialised adults, and not in dangling them from your nipples for the first six months of their lives.
The nipple fascists should take careful note of the fact that this is one area in which they really should mind their own business. They are a bunch of interfering busybodies who are doing more harm than good. Just stay out of it, folks. If you want to “breastfeed” for six months or six years, go ahead and get your kicks. Let every other woman do as she pleases. A woman’s mental health is more important than the kind of milk her baby gets. What the baby wants is a calm and happy mother. As long as it gets its milk it doesn’t care whether it comes out of a nipple or out of a rubber teat. That fact might be damned hard to swallow, but swallowed it has to be.
And what can I say about the strange maniacs who suckle their children for two years? They are so pleased with themselves and think that it is something to boast about, rather than something to be ashamed of because it smacks of perversion. A couple of these “holy mothers” wrote in. I could just picture the smug and sainted expressions on their faces, as they composed their missives with a suitably superior tone. How I wish I had a return address or telephone number. Then I could have got in touch to ask how they managed to persuade a two-year-old boy to suck at their breast, and why they considered it necessary to do so. Mine were eating proper meals in restaurants at that age, answering back, going to school, and tearing around in the fields and on beaches. I can’t imagine anything as ludicrous as forcing a child like that to dangle from your tits, and if he wanted to do it, then I would be seriously worried.
Do you know what I think? I don’t know why I ask, because you can always count on me to tell you. Women who insist on continuing to suckle their infants even after they have teeth (biology’s way of telling you that the kid needs to be weaned) and can crawl or toddle (at which stage they are beginning to develop a separate sense of self and a strong independent will) are abusing their children to fill a gap in their own pathetic and desperate lives. Instead of boasting about their sad perversions, they should stop and think seriously about what they are doing – or perhaps the people around them could knock some sense into their heads. I don’t blame them for staying off the subject, though, given the hysteria which greets any suggestion that suckling isn’t always the right choice. I really wouldn’t like to be the husband who says: “Look here now, Mary. John is three years old. Don’t you think you should stop clamping him to your tits and let him play football with his friends instead?”
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Next week I’ll give you part two of the brood mare mini series, and tell you why I think the archbishop is wrong to glorify stay-at-home mothers and to say that they should have State support. He’s not just wrong, he’s offensive to all those of us working mothers whose children are far better socialised than those of many stay-at-home mothers. It’s time that we bottle-fed babies and working mothers told these people where to get off. There was only one Madonna, and her son died on the cross.