So before I was a lactation consultant I was a nurse. For a long-ass time. I am very familiar with every nook and cranny of the human body. If there's an orifice for it, I can guarantee I've stuck something in it, possibly a part of my own body. As much fun as that sounds, decrease the amusement factor by about 2000% and that's how much fun it really is for me and the recipient of whatever I'm wielding at the time. It was a step in the right direction when I became a postpartum nurse but there was still drippy vag to contend with. Now I stay exclusively above the waist and it is nirvana. Breasts are without a doubt a better thing to look at all day than saggy old man balls.
All that aside, that's not what drew me to my current profession. When I had my first child I was still in high school. I wanted to breastfeed because even way back in the 90's there was a fair amount of evidence that it was better for babies. But I knew it would only be a couple of months because back in the day they didn't have things like breast pumps and daycare in high schools. Of course being the ill informed young folk that I was, I assumed it was an all or nothing proposition. I breastfed for about 8 weeks then quit, cold turkey. It was just about the worst experience of my life. I was miserable, engorged, and in pain. And my son was pissed. He did not want to wait for any damn bottle to be made. We were a pretty pathetic sight. So after that I decided I was never going to forcibly wean another child. Fast forward a bunch of years and 4 more kids and I have way more experience with breastfeeding than the average Jane. I allowed the rest of them to self wean and that happened anywhere between 13 months and 4 years 9 months. The nearly 5 year one was my youngest daughter. I call her the Hateful Wenchlette but it's out of love, I promise. She's too much like me for me to do anything but love her. Stubborn as all get out and she has to be in charge at all times. By the time she was 4 I decided to just let her go on breastfeeding forever just to see if I really might be nursing a college student one day. But my experiment proved that they all really do wean eventually, even the most stubborn little Wenchlette.
With all that breastfeeding, I became a little more of an advocate every day. Now I guess I'm a full blown Lactivist. I considered it my civic duty to breastfeed in public. My proudest achievement was breastfeeding on the Jumbotron at a hockey game. (Those camera guys must have super boob radar. They will show a boob no matter what might be attached to it.) The more I learned the more angry I got that so many of the benefits of breastfeeding were not public knowledge. Health care professionals treated it like it was a benign choice. Breast or bottle was no different than Coke or Pepsi to most people. I started to understand why when I learned more about formula companies and advertising and the tactics they've been employing for nearly a century TO MAKE MONEY WITH NO CONCERN FOR OUR CHILDREN!!!!
When the opportunity presented itself to turn my passion for sharing this knowledge into a career, I jumped on the chance. I have the best job on the planet aside from the guy who does the quality control testing at a brewery. I spend all day chatting about babies and breasts and hopefully instilling a little bit of my passion into the next generation of mothers. There is nothing better than hand expressing colostrum for a mother who is convinced that she doesn't have any milk for her child. The amazement in her face when she realizes she will be able to continue to nourish her child with her own body is priceless. I can't imagine ever getting tired of it. Remind me that I said that later when I'm bitching, OK.
