Moms Alive!

In this month’s interview, “When Your Best Isn’t the Breast,” clinical counselor and lactation consultant Cynthia Good Mojab discusses the tendency of our culture to not allow enough time for true grievance. She’s talking about this specifically in relationship to mourning the loss of an expected breastfeeding experience after cancer diagnosis, but I couldn’t help but think about all the other losses we endure, whether a way of mothering that we had held dear but can no longer sustain, a sense of faith in the infallibility of our physical beings, or the very parts of our bodies that had once provided nurturance to others. More…

He had a different smell.

It was a strange thing to notice—nobody else did—yet it stood out to me then as the elephant in the room. I had just returned home from the hospital after having endured the X-rays, CT scans and needle biopsy that would soon lead me to my cancer diagnosis. During my unexpected absence, my son had drunk formula for the first time. And now there was this smell.

No longer was there the breast-milk scent that we both had shared in those early days, that sweetness that had saturated every bit of our beings. It was replaced now with something different, alien, foreign. The smell of manufacturers and tin cans. Of processing and cows. Of separation.

I thought of a baby bird that I had found as a child in my backyard. I had begged my mother to let me hold it. “You must never touch the baby birds,” she said. “If they take on your scent, their mothers may no longer recognize them.”

While I, of course, was not going to reject my child, I finally understood this harsh fact of nature. How primal a smell could be. How it could signify oneness or alienation. More…

Losing a valued breastfeeding relationship can be one of the many tragic fallouts of a cancer diagnosis, but it is also, unfortunately, one of the least socially recognized and supported. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Cynthia Good Mojab, a clinical counselor and an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, about the process of grief that women must move through when they are suddenly and unexpectedly unable to breastfeed their child.

If this is a topic of concern to you, please note that in the upcoming months I will be posting the second part of this interview, which will focus on the practical information mothers with cancer should know about their breastfeeding options. More…