Breastfeeding: Take and Eat; This is My Body

Artwork showing a woman breastfeeding a baby. Image source.

I find myself following Jesus' example as I breastfeed my child. Feeding this baby from my own body; in a sense, saying to him, "Take and eat; this is my body."

For the first few months of his life, he's totally dependent on my breast milk for all of his nutrition. And the results are astonishing- this baby grows so fast! He's growing and thriving and wiggling around everywhere, getting stronger and stronger, and it's all because I am feeding him from my own body.

He needs me.

And I need him too. If I don't feed him or pump for 4 or 5 hours, then my breasts get all hard and painful, and all I can think is I need to get home and feed my baby. I want to feed him so bad. He needs me and I need him.

Breast milk is the only thing that "wants" to be eaten. For other foods, we're taking something whose original purpose was to be a useful part of a plant or animal, and repurposing it as food for ourselves. (Even for something like a fruit that "wants" animals to eat it and spread its seeds, the fruit doesn't "care" about being healthy and nutritious for the animal that eats it.) And so, the normal foods we eat can be difficult to digest, and there is waste. Not so with breast milk- it is optimized for one purpose only: to be the best and most nutritious food for a growing baby. It's extremely easy for babies to digest it and then poop. It's almost impossible for breastfed babies to be constipated. And their poop is very different from formula-fed babies' poop.

Breastfeeding literally says "take and eat, this is my body" in a way that nothing else can.

And during pregnancy I could say "This is my body, broken for you." I certainly felt broken. Nausea, throwing up, heartburn, exhaustion, weird pains as the baby grows bigger and bigger and pushes up all my organs. Pregnancy is about giving up my body for another person. Like what Jesus said, except he was talking about violence and death. In my case, though, it's about creating new life.

How about the "this is my blood, shed for you" part? Well. WELL. Did you know that right after you give birth, you have THE BIGGEST PERIOD OF YOUR LIFE? It's called lochia and can last for several weeks. For the first few days at least, there's so much blood, it's soaking through giant pads. I needed to do that as part of giving life to my baby.

And now I feed him from my own body, like Jesus did.

It's beautiful and it's a special bond between me and my child, but it can also be mundane and annoying. When baby goes through a growth spurt and wants to eat CONSTANTLY. When it's the middle of the night and I just wish he would GO TO SLEEP. When he's crying in his car seat and I'm trying to figure out if I can lean over far enough that he can reach my boob.

Day in and day out, feeding my child from my body.

It's interesting to me that, from a cis man's perspective, language about eating another person's body and shedding blood is about violence and murder and death. Not the case for me. I have a uterus; I use my body to create a new life. I bled for him. I nurse him from my own breasts.

Feeding my baby, every day. In doing this, I proclaim the Lord's life and resurrection until She comes again.

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[Please note that this is a symbol and a metaphor. This is not some kind of command, like "if you have a uterus then you HAVE TO get pregnant and have a baby and breastfeed." That would be quite ridiculous, to take what I've written here and misinterpret it to say I'm trying to tell everyone what to do. That would be as ridiculous as reading a beautiful bit of poetry that says "you knit me together in my mother's womb" and claiming it means no one is allowed to ever have an abortion. Or something silly like that.]