I’m surfing the net while my daughter plays with stickers, and she sees an article I’m looking at about a woman breastfeeding in this month’s Italian ELLE. Here’s the pic, courtesy of Babble:
My daughter’s four, and, at the moment, very interested in female beauty and fashion, so she comes right over to comment on the model’s hair and shirt and lipstick. Then she says,
"What is she doing?"
I say, “She’s nursing her baby.”
Nina says, “Standing up??”
I love that the question isn’t “Can a nursing mother look like a model?” or “Can you be in a magazine while nursing” but just the physical logistics — can you do it standing up? I tell her that, yeah, you can basically do it in any position once you get the hang of it and the baby’s not a newborn.
"Can you do it in a headstand??"
I laugh. Because I’ve spent the better part of the past dozen years trying to get both legs all the way up in a headstand, without success. (Additionally, during that time, I breastfed, and weaned, two children.)
So, the answer is “no” — I personally could not. But, as it happens, I know of a perfect example of this very thing, so I can show her a role model even if I couldn’t be one:
We watch, and she’s barely impressed with the mom’s yoga moves. Apparently it’s a given that moms can maintain an inversion. We are on to the next:
"Can you breastfeed on the moon?"
Nina assumes that if men have been on the moon, women have, too.
That if women have been there, nursing mothers have been there.
Kids today. They think mothers can do anything.