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Epilogue As I said earlier, I am a mother, a white middle-class mother. Having the cool, detached eye of a researcher has helped me only marginally, if at all, to stay calm and clear-headed when it comes to child-rearing advice. I worry, and I worry over each alternative. Every decision about feeding or sleep seems to carry the weight of my son’s future happiness and well-being. And no matter which way I go, I always wonder, anxiously, if it was the “right” choice. As a graduate student whose partner worked full-time hours for part-time pay adjuncting, we were very squeezed financially when my son was born. Nonetheless, I wanted to stay home for the first year or so with my son. We together were living on $20,000 per year in New York City, which is not much, I assure you, but is still a lot by many, many people’s standards. For help, I decided to look into social services. We were three people—one adult was teaching four classes a semester at a local university and the other adult was staying home to take care of the third (tiny) person. At our income level, there was only one service available to us and for which we qualified: Women, Infants, Children (WIC). After going through numerous forms and bringing them duplicates of everything down to my great-grandmother’s cat’s birth certificate, they finally gave me my official WIC card. The only step left was the training. Training? Yes, I had to sign up for a breastfeeding training to begin to get my checks. As I said in chapter 3, there is a cultural imperative to breastfeed right now; furthermore, for WIC it makes financial sense. When women breastfeed, WIC does not supply them with formula and thus saves a great deal of money. A very young woman, who had probably never held a baby much less breastfed one, led the training. To begin, she passed out a plethora of pamphlets and informational sheets covered with images of white women sporting wedding rings and breastfeeding babies. The pamphlets were about how to breastfeed, why to breastfeed, the benefits of breastfeeding, and, after all that encouragement, how we should be sure to stop breastfeeding at one year. Next, the trainer made our group of six pregnant women spilling out of our metal folding chairs—four African American women, one Latina with her mother, and myself—watch a short video on happy smiling white women with their happy white babies, breastfeeding . Then she went around the circle and made us say whether we were going to breastfeed. Everyone said no except for me. I felt like I was letting the other women down, buckling to the WIC program’s pressure. But the truth was that I was going to breastfeed, or at any rate, try. Next, each of us had to practice holding and “breastfeeding” a life-size white baby doll. It was a bit humiliating, but at least we did not have to take our shirts off. At the end of all this, we received our WIC stamp of approval—checks. The checks meant I would be given food assistance in the form of very particular food options. As the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers. Well, at WIC, they take that saying quite literally. The food “options” were not necessarily nutritious, just particular. I could get so many of a certain brand of eggs (white only), so many ounces of two different kinds of bright orange American cheese, lots and lots of cow’s milk (it had to be full-fat, and there was too much for anyone except maybe bovine babies), and cereal (only a certain brand, and within that brand, only the ones that were 99.9 percent sugar). As you know, I did breastfeed my son. And I breastfed, and I breastfed. And here I am, still breastfeeding. My son is four years old, and even now, very attached to breastfeeding. Having read most available child-rearing literature for my study, I was angered at the bigotry of all of it, and even so, I was swayed by the attachment-parenting movement. I decided to do child-led weaning. I must admit, it sometimes seems as if my son is never going to stop breastfeeding . But then, I look back and see that he is nursing much less than six months ago, and even less than six...

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