The Twinkies

Just snapshots, nothing fancy, but I wanted something happy up before the weekend began.

I can check what sites referred people here. That’s how I find out about the crazy searches that land people on this site. Today I had a lesson on why I shouldn’t follow those links.

I’ve asked that this Facebook group be removed for harassment so by the time you read this it may be gone which would be nice.

One of my former students, a boy afflicted with a major case of entitled brattiness, made a Facebook group linking to my post on one year of nursing twins. General student comments included things like “With her choice of proffession I find this disturbing,” “i am still really immature and think that is gross…,” “go figure the one teachers boobs i don’t want to see i see,” “I believe she did this in hope to appear in Playboy’s Milk of the Month page” and so on. The charming founder asked “Who does this? and Why?”

Well, since you asked…

I think it’s pretty obvious WHO does it. I do. As far as why, well being able to breastfeed my children remains one my proudest accomplishments. It wasn’t easy, it took a lot of work, a lot of struggle and a lot of determination. It hurt. I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I had to pump milk to maintain my supply when my son wouldn’t latch which made me feel like a cow. I did (and do) it because I believe very strongly that human milk provides them with the best possible nutrition. Children who are breast fed have high IQs, lower rates of asthma, a decreased risk of diabetes, lower SIDS rates. I could go on. Formula is wonderful for women who can’t breastfeed for whatever reason but breast milk is indisputably best.

Breastfeeding rates, especially for twins, are also very low. Many women simply assume it isn’t doable. Doctors are uneducated about breastfeeding management and rarely supportive. The knowledge base that other nursing twin mothers shared was invaluable when I was struggling. I’ve taken photos and made videos of my children breastfeeding so I can remember this time when it is over. I post them to let other women know that it is possible to nurse twins. I write about my experiences to contribute to the collected wisdom out there in cyber space so that other struggling mothers have that much more to draw upon.

It’s just too bad that a former student thinks it’s fun to try to use them to publicly humiliate me. And it makes me sad that students I used my spare time to tutor, students for whom I designed individual curriculums, students who went to a school founded on principles of faith and religious values would play along.

UPDATE: The group is down and the slew of Facebook referrals has slowed to a trickle. I also reported the ringleader for online harassment to the Dean of Students at Emerson, the institution that he attends, though now that Facebook has taken the offending group down I doubt they can do anything.

I’d like to say something snippy like “you can read the results of a Catholic education focused on faith, respect and character in some of the more colorful comments” but I know those kids are the aberration, not the norm.

A recent comment on the old post Breastfeeding Twins Tips was unimpressed with the advice to get a copy of Mothering Multiples and the EZ-2-Nurse Twins pillow. The guy noted that women all over the world throughout all of history have been nursing without books or special pillows so why throw in the extra expense.

It’s a fair question. Of course, most women now buy parenting and breastfeeding books so it doesn’t seem that odd to me to recommend one over another. And, to the best of my knowledge, Mothering Multiples is the only book on the market that covers twin-specific issues in detail. And there are twin-specific issues as well as issues that are just common nursing problems. I, at least, had no one I could ask. My mother didn’t nurse and certainly no one around me had any idea what to do with a kid who wouldn’t latch. My breastfeeding class stuck to “breastfeeding is SO NATURAL and all you have to do is put the baby to the breast and everything else will just work” script. I hate that script because it made me feel like a total failure when it wasn’t easy and it didn’t just work. Karen Gromada’s book helped me over several humps and without it I might have quit trying. Having someone, anyone, say “twins are harder to nurse than one baby and do the best you can each day and if you have to supplement so be it” kept me closer to sane than the message I was getting from the natural parenting community which was closer to “if you supplement you suck and are poisoning your baby with that toxic waste formula crap.”

I also recommend that pregnant women (and, indeed, everyone literate in English) read Having Faith which articulates better than any other book I have read the utter exhaustion that follows birth and the misery - I am failing as a mother, the author writes - when breastfeeding doesn’t come easily. Her book reassured me that my feelings were normal, that early problems were common and that ordinary women could manage to overcome them and go on to a multi-year nursing relationship. She also lays out the medical benefits of breastmilk and the environmental contaminants that threaten it in lyrical prose. It really is a fabulous book.

But now, oh gentle readers, I ask you what are YOUR tips for successfully nursing twins? If you nursed multiples what worked for you? What did not? And, because I am a pain, I am asking that you leave those tips not HERE on this post, which would be convenient, bit on the original twin tips post in order to keep it all together in one place.

1. Hey, look! You did get stretch marks!
2. I guess it’s really hard to lose all the baby weight.
3. I’ll babysit the kids this weekend so you can have a few hours off.
4. I’d like to quit my job and stay home doing nothing all day. That sounds great.
5. All my friends at work say their kids were sleeping through the night by now.
6. I went out to Bricco (insert your local nice restaurant here) with work for lunch and expensed it. *

Any more?

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* Brian has not said all of these but he has said this one and not only does Bricco serve much nicer food than what I eat for lunch they also refused to seat me because of the double stroller when I went there with my mother-in-law. So I really hate them.

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