Linking Gay Marriage, Cup Cakes, and Time Magazine’s “Breast Wielding Mama”

The biggest news stories this week are about gay marriage, obesity and banning bake sales, and the Time story titled, “Are you Mom enough?”

Time's Breast-Feeding Cover? Not on this site.

How disturbing is the latest cover of Time magazine with a half-grown kid sucking breast milk while peering slyly at the photographer capturing the image for eternity?

All three stories have a common theme, enough is never enough. No matter what the topic or issue, humans always want to go just a little further, try to get just a bit more, establish lower lows, and lobby for greater freedom with tighter constraints. (I know, that sentence was contradictory – but accurate.)

Massachusetts is banning bake sales because parents can’t be trusted to make food choices for their children yet the Time cover story insists that breast feeding indefinitely is a great food choice.  Do we see any hypocrisy with those competing arguments?

Highlights of Breast-Feeding and Attachment Parenting Problems

• This woman is “Mom enough” to use her son to build her blogging career. Pity the poor child when he’s fourteen, thirty-four, or sixty-four and still attached to Mama.
• Mama Jamie is front and center with this twisted image of parental attachment. Do the editors at Time and the “guru doctor” advancing this stuff really intend to equate parental attachment with physically locking on? Guess adoptive parents can rule out attachment as can mothers who cannot breast feed for other reasons. And guys, I guess this is one more nail in the coffin of the need for fathers.
• Since we’re on the subject of unsettling images of parental “attachment”, where is Dad in the story? Stay-at-home Mama has two kids and I did not find one reference to Dad in more than a dozen articles I pulled up before writing this post. How are children supposed to physically attach to Dad in this scenario?
• Supporters (just using that word in this context makes me cringe) insist that standing your kid on a chair to slurp breast milk for the world to see is a completely natural process. Right and Wrong. Nature intended for one offspring to nurse until the next comes along or until weaned. In situations where there is no food available a woman may nurse a child far longer than intended to keep it alive. If Jamie is “Mom enough” to expose her child to this notoriety why isn’t she mom enough to put proper food on the table? And again, where’s Dad?
• Breast milk loses its nutritive value after a while. By the time a kid is nearly four years old the milk supply is nothing more than a prop. (No pun intended.) And how many times has Mama said, “No breast for you unless you shape up young man!” Don’t send hate mail, I have personally witnessed the threat of withholding “attachment” by more than one mother speaking to an older child.

I had a friend who breast fed her kids until they went to kindergarten. She didn’t potty train them either. She figured once they were embarrassed in school they’d wean and potty train themselves. At least she didn’t ask anyone to watch. Oh yes, and after all that parental attachment Dad finally left. I don’t know what led to that divorce, I’m just still wondering where Mr. Mom Enough is hiding. Everything else is up front and center on the cover of Time.

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