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Breasts as Functional Hardware
Of all the ways I see breasts portrayed, "functional working equipment" is not usually one of the ways.
I'm 4'10" tall and I have 38D breasts. I am currently breastfeeding one of my 14 month old twins on demand, pumping 4X/day (>1000ml) for the other twin (who is tube fed) and nursing their 3 year old sister once a day. I have mega-super-functional breasts, and I genuinely like them! I'm *proud* of them. I *like* my breasts. I like their shape, their size (to an extent - I'd be just as happy if they were smaller), the blue veins visible under almost every square centimeter of their surface, even the difference in their sizes. I like my 3 year old calling them 'nursies' and my younger daughter's delighted laugh just before she latches on. Oh yes, and I like my husband's enjoyment of them, during the rare moments we actually get together when all 3 kids are sleeping! (Though I don't see my breasts as sexual most of the time: I feel like a competition-level cyclist might feel about her legs - sure, they probably look good in nylons and high heels, but she hardly thinks about them that way!)
I've gotten to the point recently where I catch myself measuring women up as 'breastfeeding' or 'non-breastfeeding' (or - looking at a young woman with obviously-augmented cleavage, "I bet she's never breastfed."). I can no longer remember what it was like to have breasts that didn't need tending, and didn't have little people demanding access to my chest at any time day or night. I won't know what to do with all my spare time when, in a few months, I wean back from the breast pump and no longer have to hook myself up many times a day.
People get so weird about breasts that *work*, like it's some icky sexual secret. You're nursing a kid over a year old? Yuck. You're nursing a three year old kid with a full set of teeth and a full vocabulary? Double yuck. You use a breast pump? Ye gods, that's too much personal information, don't mention it to me. Never mind that for the last 14 months of my life I have sat down with the "moo machine" anywhere between 4-8 times a day on top of everything else I'm doing, with sheer teeth-gritting determination that I *will* do it, and will *not* take the easier way out simply because it's easier - never mind that if anything it's uncomfortable and sometimes painful, not to mention mind-numbingly boring the 2000th time I sit down and hook up - no, it involves breasts, and therefore it must be sexual. Bah. If only it were! I'd enjoy it more!
I dumped several hundred ounces of frozen milk, stored since January, down the sink recently. A week before that, I dumped a couple hundred ounces frozen since November. I've dumped probably ten gallons since this ordeal began, and there's a couple gallons left in the freezer yet. I sent >1000 ounces to the mother's milk bank in Denver, and would have sent this other lot too, if it had met their stringent standards. Now what was it about breasts again? They're sexy? I've lost that somewhere, in all this functionality.
I think perhaps I have been so adamant about nursing (and pumping) this long in the face of so many obstacles - repeated bouts of thrush, recurrent mastitis, an abscess that required lancing, because my pregnancies were awful and my births were worse. If my uterus couldn't do pregnancy right, at least my breasts could do their job! And they have, beyond anyone's expectations and beyond my own hopes (and needs). I want a gold medal when I finally wean my one daughter over to PediaSure (or better yet, get her to eat by mouth!). I've earned it. Actually I want two gold medals, one for each breast. But then of course I couldn't show them to people. You know how it goes.
by A. Beegle