Boobs and betrayal

I follow a lot of parenting pages and blogs.  Most of them are natural parenting type pages, and nearly all of them espouse breastfeeding, which I am all for.  I breastfed my first child for a few months, but I didn’t have any support, i.e. someone to show me what to do, how to do it, the pitfalls and how to avoid them, etc., so we only made it for two months, and then I pumped for another month.  Some of the bloggers I follow get a little bitchy about BFing, though.  It’s clear to me that breast is best—it provides the best of the best nutritionally and bumps up immunity.  It has lasting benefits.  But I also think if a woman can’t or even just doesn’t want to breastfeed, we should all shut the eff up.  As long as the baby is being fed, we should back off.  Still, if I have another baby I’ll (probably) definitely give it another whirl.

                I added the qualifier after reading Florence Williams’ book Breasts:  A Natural and Unnatural History.  Williams, who received her MFA through the illustrious MFA program at the University of Montana, breastfed her children.  “I was happily nursing my second child, blithely backstroking through that magic bubble known as the mother-infant pair-bond, when I stumbled upon a news report…I read that scientists were finding industrial chemicals in the tissues of land and marine mammals as well as in human breast milk.”  Being a journalist mama, she wrote about it, sending off her breast milk to Germany to be tested for flame-retardants, which hang out and build up in our fat, and have been shown to cause all kinds of problems in lab animals.  Her breast milk tested positive, higher than she expected, and 10 to 100 times higher than women in Europe.  Williams’ milk also tested positive for a jet fuel ingredient, among other chemicals and exposures that come from electronics, furniture, and food.  And that got her wondering about the ecosystem that is the human breast.  “What toxic load had I already bequeathed my children by nursing them?  What did it mean to their health, and to mine? Was it still okay to breast feed?  How did these chemicals interfere with our bodies?  Could we ever make our milk pure again?”  Breasts store fat, so they also store fat-loving chemicals.  They’re permeable, reflective of everything we eat, drink, touch.

                The book made me a little uncomfortable, which I take as a good sign.  Williams is a chatty writer, so she makes the scientific stuff understandable.   In parts it was a bit much for me, but not so much that I didn’t want to keep reading every second.  I particularly love the way she started the book off.  She took care to mention a theory of breast evolution—basically, it goes like this:  Men like big breasts, and find them useful.  Big-chested women were chosen for mating, the big boob gene got passed down, and well, there you have it, that’s why most men prefer a large dairy section.  Large breasts are a better indicator of age, the theory goes, so our ancestor males knew that once the boobs started sagging, either with age or after pregnancies, the males would look elsewhere for a mate.

                And then, to my delight, she pretty much pshaws that whole theory, pointing to glaring holes:  Frances Mascia-Lees, an anthropologist Williams spoke with, thinks the last fifty years of study about breasts and attraction has been a bunch of bull.  If men had so much to do with breast evolution, if they prefer women with large and firm breasts, why would our boobs be at their largest and firmest while pregnant and breast feeding?  Why is there so much breast size variation, and why are smaller-boobed women just as good at nursing and parenting in general?  “Just suppose for a moment, gentlemen of the academy, that breasts evolved because she needed them, not because her club-wielding cave man did.”  Ha!  I love it. 

                But that was all in the first few pages.  Now.  Basically, we know nothing about breasts.  What causes breast cancer, what REALLY causes it?  Young breast feeding mothers get less of it, older breast-feeders like me, a little higher.  The only thing that has been actually, without a doubt proven to cause breast cancer is radiation.  And the most commonly recommended screening tool?  Radiation, in the form of mammography.  Williams goes into a lot of things that I’m not going to do justice to, but I found this review that touches beautifully on some of the science.  What this book did for me, though, was make me more aware that I need to be more aware.  It’s exhausting, all the steps we have to take to get away from plastic, for example.  Carcinogens are found on the back of shiny receipt paper, for crap’s sake.  It’s incredibly depressing, but we’re on a need-to-know basis.  And it turns out we really do need to know. 

 

Cross-posted at Bark.

Dozens of reasons to love Pam Houston



Pam and me!  At my house! 

Pam Houston visited EWU last year for a reading and a craft talk.  I got to do the introduction at the reading, have dinner with her, and then she came to a party at my house and we got to chat about literature, my cats, and kids. I was a big fan before that, though, which was why I jumped at the chance to host.  I first read Houston’s only work marketed as creative nonfiction, A Little Bit More About Me, a book of personal essays, and I took to her right away, as they say, because she has a voice that you just don’t forget. 

                Houston says her fiction and nonfiction alike is around eighty percent autobiographical, and being drawn to nonfiction and still sort of unsure about where the boundaries lie, for me personally, between fiction and nonfiction, I loved listening to her read some sections of her newest novel, Contents May Have Shifted, with the narrator named Pam, who is a writing instructor and world traveler, an animal lover and an athlete, as is Houston in for reals life. 

                The novel is structured in 12s.  Each section is titled with a flight number, and then followed by a dozen tiny travel essays.  Wow, has she traveled.  Tibet, Spain, Mexico, Scotland, Newfoundland, Iceland, France, New Zealand, Tunisia, Laos, Argentina, Turkey.  And that’s only a dozen of the places she writes about.  Houston doesn’t give us any concrete indicators of chronology, but if you read carefully you definitely see a narrative unfolding.  It’s not a new story, certainly (Sam Ligon was known to say there are only two stories anyway—was it sex and death, Sam?), but Houston chronicles relationships and her own vulnerability.  The relationships with men change and sometimes end, but her friends stay and accumulate, and the relationships with beloved animals also provide a subnarrative.  There is camaraderie and heartbreak, love and loss. 

                What sets Houston apart from a lot of other folks writing about these same things is, first of all, is that her narrator doesn’t just rattle off flights and trips and terrific emotional struggles.  She lays them out carefully, reflecting on each one, sometimes drawing from an earlier story, reminding us of the movement.  And there is a great momentum in this novel, as the narrator flies around the globe looking for a reason to live and a reason to love herself.  During a few close calls in air travel, the narrator never comes off as frightened, but being left to contemplate herself seems to terrify her.  (If you think this novel’s a simple “Why can’t I find love” story, you’re way off.  Consider the original ideas for a title:  Suicide Note and 144 Good Reasons Not To Kill Yourself).  And there’s a soft but definite turn in the novel about two-thirds of the way through, in which Pam the character seems to begin a process of understanding, after the plane she is in is struck by lightning, which takes out an engine. 

Where on the continuum I fall, when this kind of thing happens—between Oh please not how that things are finally looking up and Well this sucks but it will sure solve a great many problems—has become my mental health measuring stick in this era of exponentially increased sky traffic, airline bankruptcy and accumulating mental fatigue.  This, I understand, is not at all the same as being suicidal.

                Aside from the writer at the desk, which us NFers might talk about too much but which nevertheless is critical to creative nonfiction, I find inspiration in Houston’s writing because holy crap, does she care about her sentences.  After not reading her work for a year, I forgot how her writing echoes, how it hits you.

He tells me we’ve been put on earth to crack each other open, and then to stick around long enough to watch the thing that, having been cracked open, suddenly shines.  He says he knows there is only a thin wall between himself and all that shining, but sometimes he forgets how thin the wall is, because somebody came along when he wasn’t looking, and painted the damn thing black.   

That’s a pretty good description of good writing, too, I think.  Cracking ourselves open and looking for the thing that shines.