I love U2. As evidence of this, I submit to you an image of my daughter’s third birthday cake. (In my own defense, it was her choice to have a “Vertigo” cake not mine, but I’m sure the repetitive playing of that particular CD in our car stereo had some influence on her.) The lyrics of their songs have been applicable to many of my own experiences providing me strength, encouragement, or an important lesson just when I needed it most.
On their recent album, No Line on the Horizon, the song “Moment of Surrender” has particular resonance with me and, during a particularly challenging period as a stay-at-home-mom, the lyrics brought into focus one of the challenges I had been struggling with: balance and surrender.
“My body’s now a begging bowl
That’s begging to get back, begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control” (elyrics.net)
It occurred to me that this view of surrender is equally applicable to mothering, and yes, breastfeeding.
Breastfeeding is a biologically normal activity. It is a biological expectation for both mom and baby and it is, for this reason, that when breastfeeding doesn’t work out, we feel a sense of loss and grief. But breastfeeding is also largely influenced by society, and when biology and society are at odds it creates a sense of imbalance in our lives and experience. I believe it is this imbalance—this yearning for balance and release—that creates such discord with regards to breastfeeding.
If breastfeeding were a simple choice—an option women have as mothers—there would never be such emotional responses to it. No, breastfeeding is biologically expected and, as mothers, we have a desire—as hidden as it may sometimes seem—to return to that natural rhythm, the “unconsciousness”, that is biologically ordained.
Mothering is not only something we learn to do by watching those around us in our society, it is innate in our nature as women and, when we give birth to our children, we have biological processes at play providing us with responses to our new position as mothers. Societal attitudes and pressures influence us at times and draw us away from our biological selves, and this is something that is impossible to remove entirely. But as impossible as it might be, I argue that what we do need to do is regain our balance and return our breastfeeding experiences, even if just a bit, to the side of biology and the innate rhythm that we carry within us.
So returning back to the analogy of the begging bowl and “The Moment of Surrender”, what can we learn about breastfeeding and mothering?
To start, I would suggest we can learn that breastfeeding is something that is part of the mothering experience in the biological sense. We are mammals and breastfeeding is inherent in that. By recognizing breastfeeding not as a choice we make, but an expression of what and who we are, we can begin to understand our connection to breastfeeding—and our responses to not breastfeeding. This is the “return to the rhythm of [our] soul” and the “rhythm of [our] unconsciousness”.
When it comes to breastfeeding, it would be helpful to view our bodies as begging bowls: enough in themselves and capable of providing everything needed. A begging bowl is a Buddhist monk’s one possession. It symbolizes the need to find a balance between “extreme austerity and complete attachment to life” (viewonbuddhism.org), perhaps similar to the balance needed between our biology and society. The bowl symbolizes this “surrender of worry about worldly living and also of concerns for tomorrow” (vanishingtattoo.com). The begging bowl in the Buddhist tradition then is a symbol of ultimate surrender, submission, and selflessness.
Women have been led to believe that our bodies are not enough and that intervention and medical support are necessary to birth our children; this belief extends to breastfeeding as well. Big business with their advertising campaigns want us to believe that a plethora of “things” are needed to breastfeed successfully and among those “things” are products to reduce the pain or discomfort, make breastfeeding more convenient, or assist you in working it into your life; all things that view breastfeeding as a negative and something to be overcome or put up with.
But when we block out those messages, and trust our bodies to be enough—using the symbol of a begging bowl to identify the surrender of worry that we are not enough—we realize the simplicity that can come to the relationship. No longer worrying about what might happen, we can surrender to the moment and trust the experience.
And finally, I humbly offer that breastfeeding—and mothering—is about surrender. Surrender has such negative connotations in our modern society, but surrender can often be a place of ease and actually return power instead of taking it from you. When we accept a truth and surrender to it, the struggle is gone. With breastfeeding, the struggle often comes from the pull between biology and society.
As mothers we have been gifted with an amazing, innate instinct—we all talk about it—and yet we often ignore it in favour of what society dictates as acceptable or correct. For example, you may be told by your doctor that picking up your baby when they cry will only teach them to manipulate you and limit their ability to self-sooth, but your mothering instinct is screaming at you to pick up your baby. Or your instinct might be to nurse your baby to sleep, but the parenting book you just read states that by doing so your baby will never learn to fall asleep on their own.
Surrendering to your instinct, to the unconscious knowledge that we all carry with us, to the biological nature of your being, is not weakness. It is a way of regaining power and balance and returning to the ”rhythm of your soul”.
Breastfeeding is then not a battle and struggle to be conquered or overcome but the rhythm of our biological selves and learning to surrender to it can give us great power and allow us to balance those societal messages that do not always support our mothering efforts.
My daughter may still love “Vertigo” but I hope as she grows up I can convince her to also love “Moment of Surrender” and to teach her the lessons about motherhood and breastfeeding that I have learned from such an unlikely source as U2.
Stephanie Casemore is a mother, teacher, and writer living in eastern Ontario, Canada. She experienced breastfeeding first as a challenge, exclusively pumping for a year for her first child, and then as a healing experience, nursing her second child for three years. She continues to seek that fine balance between biology and society and is desperately searching for her own begging bowl.
Stephanie shares her experiences and perspective in her books: Breastfeeding, Take Two: Successful Breastfeeding the Second Time Around and Exclusively Pumping Breast Milk: A Guide to Providing Expressed Breast Milk for Your Baby.
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