On some occasion I have explained it to you. When my son was two years old (7 years ago) we went to the hospital because my sister gave birth to her son, my nephew, and Jon asked my wife for a breast. You know: you are in an unknown place with people, a different situation for him, you are still and calm, he doesn't know what to do and ask chest. My wife gave it to her, as always since she was born, without thinking if it was right, wrong, better or worse.
At that time the nurse arrived and for whatever reason he decided that he would go to I don't know where. But I wanted to go with mom still in the chest. He walked and she followed him for a moment, still joined by the mouth-chest hitch until he said "go wherever you want, but let go of me man." The nurse's face was a poem, as if she had just seen an apparition, a ghost: "Is he your son? And take breast? And walks? And you have milk? And…? "He didn't add up to anything he had just seen, clearly showing that in many places there was still a lot of work to do to normalize breastfeeding in older children (and I speak of a nurse).
Now it is more common, more and more is seen, and until the Spanish Association of Pediatrics recently published a report so that something like this is not repeated, that is, to reach health professionals and whoever wants to read it, and that they understand that it is not only normal for an older child to suck, but it is even recommended. A step forward that may not be the only one, because fathers and mothers, those who live in the first person, still have much to do. And this is what a photographer and a lot of mothers have decided to do when they come together to create a vindicating collection of photos of mothers breastfeeding older children, showing themselves to the world, trying to normalize breastfeeding in children and passing a powerful message: we are only mothers who breastfeed their children.
We are not breastfeeding "yet", we are only breastfeeding
The collection's mission and objective is to explain a little about the daily life of these mothers and that is why combine the photographs with the experience of each of the mothers. They explain that it is not something they do to be better, or as a goal they would have set themselves, or to receive an award or be recognized. They do it simply because it has arisen like this, because they began to breastfeed their children at birth and continue to do so in a natural way. They are the same children, but older.
For some it is a special moment after a whole day of not seeing them, for others it is the continuation of something that began at the beginning of everything and that is why they have not even considered leaving it and others continue because they enjoy and have never felt the need to put an expiration date upon breastfeeding.
Most explain that they often have to deal with comments of the type "but he is older" or "but with the age he is, he no longer needs it", but they continue to defend their breastfeeding because they trust them, their children, so that be they who decide when to leave it, which will be precisely the moment when they no longer need it. Or do we give everything we eat to our children because they need it? But of course, breastfeeding is not just food, it is much more, it is a beautiful moment of relationship between mother and child. When does a child stop needing her mother? Never. If anything, the child will find a different way of relating to her, but in reality it is not necessary to force her, if the mother enjoys breastfeeding. That moment will come, even if she didn't want it.
The Honest Body Project
The photo collection is part of an even bigger project, the photographer's work Natalie McCain, called "The Honest Body Project", in which there are other galleries of pregnant women, of particular cases related to motherhood, in order to show, in general, a lot of different realities and experiences of women, which can distract a lot of ours and help us to open our minds a little to the difference.
It is a project that McCain started a month ago and that grows week by week, in what I predict will be a great web portal dedicated to the changes, experiences and various options of women who are mothers. Without going any further, yesterday he published the photos and the story of a woman, mother of a 1-year-old boy, who 10 years ago was also of a girl who gave up for adoption. That is, his son has a sister who lives with his adoptive family, and on the page we can read this story, among others.
I leave you with the rest of the images in the collection and remind you that if you want to read the testimonies you have them (in English) on the original page:
