I’ve got my brain back. I have finally weaned the youngest, the hormones are almost back to prepregnancy levels, and there is a distinct feeling of the fog clearing after three and a half years.
As a junior doctor, I had messianically and rather glibly extolled the virtues of breast feeding. When my own turn came, I found that the reality was indeed rewarding, but it proved to be an unexpectedly major undertaking. Never mind the cracked nipples, mastitis, and leaks—it was the sheer time involved. Over the past 40 months I have breast fed for around 3600 hours. That is an average of three hours a day (range one to six hours; case definition: time directly feeding and commuting time to get to baby during lunch breaks). This is the equivalent of a 40 month half time job if you adjust for a five day week and take into account holidays.
Impassioned by how hard it was in practice I wanted to change the system
The first time round was free of major problems but still challenging. The second time round I had a baby with reflux (at least that was the label), who screamed nightly for over a year. I got postnatal depression (at least that was the label).
As a nursing mother choosing to work full time, my reality included bringing baby and sometimes toddler, too, all round Australia, England, Ireland, Bosnia, and Serbia. It meant feeding the baby at the computer, on field trips, while teaching classes, in research meetings, and at conferences. On the side, I donated milk to a friend’s sick newborn baby, and occasionally fed my sister’s child. I encountered no childcare options at conferences run by organisations that purported to encourage the inclusion of women, hospitals with no place for working staff to express and store breast milk or on site crèches, and tired mothers covertly expressing milk in the toilets.
And I spoke out. In my research, writing, speaking at conferences (often while carrying a baby). I got baby changing facilities put in in several places and am now working on Queensland’s first statewide breastfeeding strategy. Impassioned by how hard it was in practice I wanted to change the system. In some small ways I did.
For some colleagues I was superwoman, for others just the “pest with the breasts.” A particular feature I experienced having babies late in life and while peaking in my career was the precipitous transformation from golden haired girl to milk stained mess.
Reading recently published work on the effects of lactational hormones on behaviour—oxytocin makes you both more passive and more open to social engagement—I began to see how breast feeding itself might affect the way that I interacted with my working environment. Although I continued to swim with the sharks I no longer wanted to spend ridiculous amounts of time engaged in endless territorial circling activities.
I got back my brain but with a reformatted hard disk—enlarged and irrevocably changed by the experience of breast feeding. The secondhand “expert” understanding of child rearing and feeding is gone. In its place is a broader understanding of putting things into practice, an ability to juggle several things at once, a way of getting the most important things done first, and a new direction in my research.
My current and previous employers (the University of Queensland and the World Health Organisation’s European Regional Office) both have policies that encourage women in senior roles and extol the benefits to society of breast feeding. In practice they were not interested in how I fed my child or how I was integrating this into my working life.
Integrating work and personal life and finding a balance is the only way that people can stay sane, and employers have a direct and active part to play. Nursing mothers need supportive working environments so we do not just drop off the face of the working planet when it all gets too much, but we stay there and ultimately add our newly acquired skills and understanding to build the kind of diverse workforce that our world must have. But do not leave us to construct workplace support systems on our own—we are far too busy.
Mouthing the mantra of WHO and Unicef policies and passing on “breast is best” advice without any idea of the costs or consequences is not enough. Check that the hospitals, surgeries, and other places where you work and the communities where you live do not have a gap between rhetoric and reality. Baby changing facilities, good childcare, and flexible employment practices are a start. But above all, mothers who choose to nurse and work must be acknowledged and valued, and mothers who choose to take a full or partial break from paid employment should be welcomed back when they are ready.