Animal

My friend said it best: "At some point, babies make excellent dogs." Little A is at that stage now. Interested and enthusiastic all the time, panting, crawling up your legs, ready to roll in some poop that's lying on the floor in a diaper that didn't quite make it into the garbage can (ahem).

In many ways, this is similar to how I feel about being a mother of a baby. The first year is all about hormones and instincts, the limbic reaction, the things we have not learned to do, yet ... do. For all the talk of motherhood as an elevated state of existence, for me the first few years of having children have been the opposite of that. I have never felt more like an animal than I did after having my babies.

I really wonder if this is the true root of all the hoopla that routinely erupts in the U.S. over breastfeeding in public. Prudery alone doesn't explain the level of ick that some people profess over this issue. Could the "public decency" protests mostly be about hating the evidence breastfeeding provides that people are animals, as opposed to most-favored higher beings of a different class?

Hmmm. Next time someone gives me the stink eye at the park when I nurse Little A, I should ask them.