I’ve had two biological babies and breastfed them both (one of them still!) and we’ve had our fair share of struggles. For no reason that I can really pinpoint I’ve felt this strong desire to make breastfeeding work for us. I truly did not do a lot of research on breastfeeding before I had kids, and no one in my life really was emphasizing how ideal it is. I knew it was healthier but I didn’t really understand what that actually meant. It was like I just had this innate suspicion that if this was the way God designed the process, then there must be something inherently good and non reproducible about it.
Because of the winding road of struggles we’ve had along our breastfeeding continuum, I made the decision to become a lactation consultant as an adjunct to the work I already do with infants as a physical therapist.
One of the very first things in my coursework was this phenomenon called “the breast crawl.” It sounds weird, but basically they showed us this video of a birth in India and as soon as the baby is born they place it in the center of mom’s chest with mom lying flat on her back. And without assistance from mom or any lactation consultant or healthcare provider at all, over a period twenty-ish minutes that baby puts to work an entire cascade of primitive reflexes. The baby is exercising the movements she was born already knowing how to do in order to position herself just perfectly so that she can latch completely by herself. And she does!
It brought tears to my eyes watching it, learning that this whole process was so much more thoughtfully and perfectly designed than I even realized. Throughout physical therapy school we were taught all about those primitive reflexes and how to check for them and what might happen if they don’t integrate (go away) as an infant matures. But I had absolutely no idea that they had a purpose.
This realization was so edifying. It’s just beautiful! You couldn’t even dream up that whole complex neurodevelopmental process if you tried.
This process has become over-medicalized and expedited and monetized (think of all the thousands of breastfeeding products that are out there) in our health system. I think back to my first daughter’s birth and a nurse telling me it’s time to feed her and showing me how to push her little hands out of the way and shove this in her mouth and blow in her face to wake her up, etc. And all along I was feeling like the whole thing seemed oddly similar to force feeding.
We get in our own way so often and think that we can do it better than the One who created the whole process to begin with. Maybe we can just make it more efficient.
In this fast-paced world, sometimes it’s good to get back to the basics.
And I know that things don’t always go as planned: babies are born early, medical issues arise, means of delivery vary. Intervention is often required and that’s okay. I’m an early interventionist, after all, and know what can happen if we don’t step in with extra supports when those are warranted.
But in the cases where everything goes right, maybe we should ask the question: “are we over-intervening?” Do we subconsciously think that we can do things better than the Creator of the process?
In PT school I had a professor who told me that the more he learned about human anatomy and physiology and the movement system, the more he was strengthened in his faith in God. The complexity of the human body was a huge factor in why he believed.
Same here.
I hope to never stop learning about and marveling at what our Maker has so graciously provided to us in the richness of the human experience.
