Breastfeeding

I was not prepared for how much I would enjoy breastfeeding. Leaving aside the health benefits of breastfeeding (or the health risks of not breastfeeding, depending on how you'd rather phrase it), it is about far more than food: it makes her sleepy, soothes her, comforts her and distracts her when she is bored. It is the lazy mother's best parenting tool.

From the first time that my daughter ejected the nipple from her lips with an audible "pop" and collapsed onto my bosom, nipple pressed against her cheek, wrapping her tiny arms around my breast and falling peacefully and beautifully asleep, I was utterly sold.

But, oh sweet Jesus, is breastfeeding ever a bind. Neither Gaius or I believed that parenting tasks should be doled out according to the vagaries of gender, and he passionately rejects the restrictive notion that a father's job should revolve around "breadwinning". We were emphatically committed to sharing the duties of parenting. But this is something that we cannot share. It does not matter how much of a feminist you are, how committed you are to equal parenting, how dismissive you are of gender roles: if one of you is breastfeeding, your sex will result in you being utterly tied to that child in a way that no one else can share. You can fight the patriarchy, but you cannot fight biology: biology is not concerned with equal rights.

Yes, I could express milk so someone else can give it to her in a bottle, but expressing milk takes longer than actually feeding her; then you've got to wash and sterilise the pump and the bottles, and then you've really got to pump when you would have fed her anyway to make sure your body keeps producing the right amount of milk. And yes, we could give her the occasional bottle of formula milk, but not only is there a good chance that she will refuse it (it just doesn't taste as nice), but that really would be putting my desire for freedom above her health, as it could endanger her virgin gut. The path of least resistance in this case is just to go with the flow and end up, as in our case, with one parent staying at home with the baby, and the other going out to work. Oh how are the mighty rejecters-of-traditional-gender-roles fallen.

For the first few months of her life, it felt like she was on elastic - I'd pass her over to someone else, but it was usually only a matter of minutes before she would ping back to my nipple once more.

I have cried because I couldn't get a moment to myself. I have fantasised about a measly four hours of uninterupted sleep. And from a polyamorous point of view, I have resigned myself to not being able to leave my baby for more than a few hours at a time, day or night, for a long time yet. This does not make my relationship with Jemmy easy.

Gaius, on the other hand, is able to be far more flexible. He can sleep with his other lovers in our spare room. He can go out on dates in his evenings. He has even spent one or two nights away from us! Amazing! All of this is rare, and completely with my blessing, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn't intensely jealous - not for the time he spends with other women, but for the time he spends without Small.

We had a New Year's Eve party this year. At about 2am, I left the drinking and the laughter of some of our dearest friends downstairs, and crawled into bed next to my daughter. I pulled her close and helped her to latch on. I nestled my nose into her warm hair and wrapped my arm around her, listening to her grateful swallows. And then, when she had finished and fallen into a deep, satiated sleep, I didn't immediately return to the party; I stayed to feel her warm face pressed against my skin, to listen to her soft breathing and smell her warm, milky breath. Jealous as I am of my husband's freedom, I know he would swap with me in a heartbeat.

We don't say it often, but we both know that biology has given me the better deal.

P.S. If you or someone you know is struggling with breastfeeding, please encourage them to get help. Don't rely on support and advice that isn't working. Good places to start are the NCT and La Leche League. Breastfeeding can be hard, but it is so, so worth it.

Body confidence and the lesser-known benefits of monogamy

I've written before about how I liked what pregnancy did to my body. That's really only part of the story: I liked it until the ninth month, and then I was too big to do much, and I got stretch marks.

I thought maybe that I had escaped, but then, only a few weeks away from my due date, they grew like a climbing vine up to my bellybutton. I didn't care that I had put on weight in pregnancy - weight can be lost - but stretch marks are permanent. I was upset, but I pulled myself together and decided that as long as they stayed below my bellybutton, I'd be okay with them.

Of course, they spread above my bellybutton. At 41 weeks pregnant, I had an angry red crack of lighting spreading up from my knickers.

Where polyamory comes into this is with potential new partners, or even current occasional lovers. If Gaius and I were monogamous, I wouldn't need to worry about what anyone else thought of me naked: his would be the only opinion that mattered. And as far as he is concerned, the fact that I carried and birthed his daughter can only make me more beautiful. If our relationship was sexually exclusive, I wouldn't have had any of these wobbles.

And even if Gaius, Jemmy and I were poly-fidelitous, my body troubles would be gone. Jemmy has an exceptionally catholic taste in women (physically, at least) and even if that weren't true, he has always made me feel beautiful for more than just my body. So it wasn't his admiration waning that troubled me either.

The reason for my (rather uncharacteristic) worries was that my two current partners are not "it" for me. New lovers are an unknown quantity. Will they be secretly turned off by my soft, wrinkled belly? Disappointed by my sagging breasts? These are fears that just wouldn't bother me if I were monogamous.

A few days before I actually gave birth, I am ashamed to admit, I obsessed a little bit about all this. After my friend Lori blogged about body confidence, I mentioned that I was dealing with it, and she and another friend were so sweet to me, that I cried. I am pretty sure now that I was actually in early labour at the time, which might explain my emotional knife-edge, but still. Their kind words were very reassuring.

What they told me was something I was trying to convince myself of at the time: our bodies change, but we shouldn't see changes as losing attractiveness, but as the mark of the things we have survived and achieved. They talked about the beauty of laughter-lines, and the story that scars can tell. They were, of course, right. Two months after Small was born, I looked down at my soft, wrinkled belly with its network of scars, thought "fuck it", and bought a bikini.

I still think that there is a chance that new lovers might find my body less appealing than they would have done before the baby. And while that is not ideal, it is okay. Between my lined belly and my lower, softer breasts, I have completely nourished two people for well over a year. My daughter is happy, healthy and thriving because of my body, and these changes will be a permanent reminder of this. I look down at my belly, with its network of scars and think "there was a baby in there", and that is miraculous and wonderful to me. If people can't see that when they look at me, then fuck 'em. I know that my body is amazing.