Until recently, nursing Siena in public had not been a problem for me. I wasn’t blatant about nursing, but I didn’t try to hide it either. Now I realized that lately, however, there had been a growing reticence in me towards nursing in public. It was this very day that I came across the book Mothering Your Nursing Toddler.

The opening reads, "When I first saw a walking child nurse, I was horrified—horrified at the kind of sacrifices the mother must be making for her child, horrified at the obscenity of it, and horrified at the lack of good parental management that had let this thing go on so long. As I got to know that mother and child better, though, my view changed. I did not see her making any unneeded sacrifices; she seemed to enjoy nursing. Nor was there lack of parental management when it was called for; both parents were actively teaching their son how to care for himself, and how to show respect for the rights and property of others. As time went on I saw that their nursing was not some weird perversion either; nursing was clearly a warm and tender part of their life together, one of many ways these two people loved and enjoyed each other."

The easier life can be…

Such a response to seeing a nursling who is more than a tiny infant is a standard reaction in the Western world at this time. Prior to my nursing Siena, I had seen few nursing mothers at all! We have developed a general distrust of nature, natural processes, and natural timings. This manifests in our attempts to control every aspect of our children’s development. Forcing them to move and grow in ways we determine rather than nature leads, will likely result in unmet needs, needs they will not "grow out of," but rather leave a wound within that may never be healed. Surely, the more we can give ourselves to the basic needs of the young—almost all of which can be satisfied by nursing in the early years—the easier life can be.

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