On the Brutality of Breastfeeding

As my eldest son comes up on his 13th birthday, it strikes me that the following story, featuring him as a newborn, is an old one.  It must be out of date, irrelevant, belong happily for new mothers like I was in the ‘remember back when?’ files.  But hearing of a friend who recently had a baby and her own experiences with breastfeeding pressures, made me not so sure.  As a society, it often seems like we’ve been generally broadening our compassion for diversity of human experience, but when it comes to how we see mothers, you can never rely on that broadening to go quite wide enough.