Breastfeeding and Culture: Discourses and Representations by Short Anne Marie;

Author:Short, Anne Marie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Demeter Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

III.

The Politics of Breastfeeding and Lactation: The Implications for Identities

9.

My Black Breast Friend

Breastfeeding and My Black Body

DIONNE IRVING

My father always swore that I would end up pregnant at sixteen. He would argue that with my mother’s lax parenting style (a declaration I couldn’t comprehend), and with my own lack of intelligence and grace (a declaration I’d come to believe), this was the fate that awaited me. Teenage motherhood was all I was suited for.

In the war of words lobbed back and forth during my parents’ contentious divorce, my virginity, even at eight years old, was one of the rallying cries. It was a site where the battle began and often ended. My prepubescent body was a kind of trump card, a locus in the war they waged with each other. Even then, on a level that hadn’t quite yet reached language, I knew that there was something in me that they—my parents—needed to tamp down for fear that someone else would take advantage of it.

“Even as a little girl,” my mother says now, eyeing my postbaby body, “you always had a shape.”

That shape needed management. It was to be contained and controlled. So less than a year later, I was outfitted with my first training bra. It was a pretty pink slip of fabric with lacey straps and triangle cups, made to hold my little bumps. They were hardly even breasts, just pockets of extra flesh positioned above my round little girl belly. The bra locked in the front with a clasp that clicked into a perfectly shaped rosebud.

And I hated it.

My mother told me that I was to wear it every single day underneath my regular undershirt, and she felt my back with the intensity of an overeager TSA agent before I left the house each morning for the fourth grade.

And I hated it.

The bra itched and felt tight. I missed the feeling of my bare skin against the soft fleece of my sweatshirt or the light cotton of t-shirts. Instead, there was a band of tightness across my chest, and every once in a while, the little rosebud would snap open and I would have to rush to the bathroom to click the little clasp back into place before anyone caught a glimpse of my breast.

And I hated it.

Somehow I knew what that bra meant. I knew it was insurance against my father’s repeated claim that I was good for nothing but making babies. It was the first step in making sure that I wasn’t just another pregnant black teenager. “Yet,” he’d say. Yet. I’d started to believe that it was inevitable—that I didn’t have a choice in the matter. All black girls got pregnant as teenagers, even if I didn’t realize—exactly—how that worked.

***

2014 was the year I turned thirty-five and the year I first got pregnant. In a study released that year, the Center for Disease Control identified the median age for black, first-time mothers at 24.2 years. For white mothers, it was twenty-seven years. John Santelli,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.