Sources of our Becoming
Letters on breastfeeding

Our thoughts are not born in isolation. They are shaped by the stories we hear, the norms we inherit, and the silences we are taught to accept. In the realm of infant feeding, few topics are as emotionally charged and socially complex as breastfeeding. The way we think about it — as natural, as optional, as burdensome, as empowering — is deeply influenced by cultural narratives, medical discourse, marketing strategies, and generational beliefs. Breastfeeding activism challenges us to examine these sources critically. It asks: Who benefits from the way we think about breastfeeding? Whose voices are amplified, and whose are dismissed? By tracing the origins of our thoughts, we begin to reclaim them — and in doing so, we create space for informed, compassionate, and justice-driven conversations about infant nourishment and maternal autonomy. 


These letters are written by An Eerdekens, neonatologist and IBCLC lactation consultant, Melanie Miller, IBCLC lactation consultant, and Inge van Nistelrooij, care ethicist. They are an invitation to the reader: to walk alongside us, to discuss, to reflect, and to deepen. It is a call to plant seeds — seeds that highlight the significance of this ingenious piece of biology within our society. Breastfeeding is not merely about feeding a child; it is about the emergence of relationality, a defining trait of our humanity. It touches upon ecology, philosophy, women’s rights, and human rights. Through this exploration, we hope to shed light on its broader meaning and impact.

We wish the reader an enriching journey through these reflections, and we look forward to your response.



Email: gloedacademy@gmail.com

[continued]

23rd of December 2025 
Letter by Inge

...... we were going to remember honestly and fairly what this time gave us. Perhaps important to know: after our first daughter we had twins. And all the world keeps telling you: ‘I often wished to have twins!’ But parents of twins often gave us a glance of recognition. For most of them, like for us, it is hard to have twins, the first year especially. Ours were healthy but dysmature. One of the twins cried almost incessantly for 20 months; she was so, so unhappy (poor thing). We found a physiotherapist who finally figured out what was wrong, and a therapy that cured her. After 2 years we concluded that the hardest times were over. 

You can imagine that it was hard to pay attention, to cherish the sweet and happy times. To be in the moment.

I found my personal recognition when I read Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. On Becoming a Mother (an oldie, from 2001). Cusk is one of the few authors I know that is extremely honest about her transition, the process of becoming a mother. I laughed out loud while reading, read entire pages aloud to my husband, who laughed in recognition as well. The thing is: there was and always has been an ambivalence in mothering / parenting to us, stronger to me, I think. And it is hard to find others who do not play that down or simplify this complex experience. Very often comments were and are made like: ‘But you wanted this yourself’, or: ‘Be happy that they are both healthy’, or: ‘Time goes by so fast, enjoy it while you can’. All of these comments were true, absolutely. But they simply did not overrule other thoughts that were there too: ‘I wish to leave’, ‘It is so hard to be happy when I have the feeling that I am lost’, or: ‘This night seems to last endlessly’. 

There was connectivity as well asthe wish to be far apart; gratitude as well as grief; the strongest desire ever to never let go as well as the strongest desire ever to spend some time alone. 

And Cusk manages to write about this. Some quotes:

“I read somewhere that it is inappropriate to refer to a mother and her newborn child as two separate beings: they are one, a composite creature best referred to as mother-and-baby or perhaps motherbaby. I find this claim unnerving, even threatening, in spite of the fact that it perfectly describes the profound change in the co-ordinates of my being that I experience in the days and weeks after my daughter’s birth. I feel like a house to which an extension has been added: where once there was a wall, now there is a new room. I feel my heat and light flowing vertiginously into it.” (pp. 93-94)

“The profound change in the co-ordinates of my being.” I remember being totally oriented on the baby’s crib, when the eldest was born, and on both cribs after the twins. Several months after the twins were born, a neighbour with twin daughters of around 10 sometimes came by and offered to take our twins for a walk with the twin-stroller. Of course, she knew how it was, and her daughters were totally mesmerized by our twins. When she went, if only for 15 to 20 minutes, I was completely disoriented and restless. I couldn’t relax. I was jumping from my chair every few seconds, as I had been doing 24/7, and telling myself there was no need didn’t help. My body couldn’t relax, was on the alert, making the movements required for the baby’s, bending, caressing, holding, protecting. Arms and legs were moving autonomously, machinelike, I had nothing to say. 

Cusk describes other will-less bodily experiences:

“Motherbaby is designed to be an entirely sustainable unit. The baby is born installed with the ability to suck. The mother, meanwhile, has received notice during pregnancy of a Change of Use. Her breasts are requisitioned, deprogrammed: work is carried out on glands, on tissues. By the time the baby comes they are like two warheads on red alert. The baby sucks; the machinery springs into action; milk is magically produced. This milk is entirely sufficient to feed the baby for the first six months of her life, until she is able to sit up and eat food. It is designed to give the baby every nutrient she might need. It is sterile and emerges at the correct temperature. It can be given anywhere and at any time. As the baby grows, the mother shrinks. The reserves of fat she accumulated during pregnancy fuel the work of the breasts. Her uterus contracts; hormones circulate and are discharged. Her body is writing the last chapter of the story of childbirth. It has the beauty, the symmetry, of a dance. By its end, motherbaby is ready for life as mother and baby. The paint has dried; the joins no longer show. Ingenious, no?” (p. 94)

“The beauty of a dance.” I know of mothers who had returned to their workplace while still breastfeeding. How ready were they for life as mother and baby? The dance often continued. For the breasts did not work independently: pumping required an affective moment with their baby. So they gave their babysitter or childcare workers a phone call when they prepared to pump. The smallest sound, a cry or a sigh, of their baby was sufficient for their breastfeeding to initiate. Even at a distance, mother and baby dance.

And Cusk also pays attention to the ambivalence so essential to many mothers. For all the wonder, the new world that opens up, there is also another layer, the experience of displacement, of decenteredness: 

“By having a baby I have created a rival consciousness, one towards which my bond of duty is such that it easily gains power over me and holds me in an enfeebling tithe. My daughter quickly comes to replace me as the primary object of my care. I become an undone task, a phone call I can’t seem to make, a bill I don’t get around to paying. My life has the seething atmosphere of an untended garden.” (p. 133)

As a mother as well as a care ethicist I have been fascinated by these experiences of mothering as well as parenting. Of course this is not exclusively the experience of mothers, but also of partners and other parents. Although I must admit that my generation has known an unequal distribution of parenting tasks and responsibilities and mothers also still suffer from the ‘motherhood penalty’ (a lifelong financial setback affecting mothers more than other parents) in most western countries, I also know many couples in which this experience is shared between parents. 

I think this leads us to an expansion of care ethics and of our societal awareness, that to care for newborns and children requires that society takes responsibility for collective care for parents. Care ethicists plea for this, I have pleaded for it throughout my work. But I could not show it better than Leni Zumas has done in her alarming dystopian novel Red Clocks (2018).She shows what several women – a single high-school teacher trying to get pregnant, a frustrated mother of two, a teenager with an unplanned pregnancy, a gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath – go through, living in a world that seems to be not so very distant to the present US. In this dystopian world, abortion is illegal, in-vitro fertilisation is banned, only married couples are allowed to adopt, and new laws grant rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In order to keep people from fleeing to Canada, a pink wall has been built on the country’s border. The book shows an intriguing and horrifying image of the width of the experiences of people with a womb and what living in a country leaving them no room, no agency, no freedom or autonomy would be like. Since the pressure on reproductive rights increases in many countries, it is a matter of care as well as of justice to look at the experiences of those brave enough to become parents, and of non-cis-male, non-heterosexual persons particularly. Zumas’ book is a real page-turner, but I also felt it was a warning: what she described in 2018 has partly become a reality. She depicts what may lie ahead, perhaps just around the corner…

So, to me the sensitivity of artists and writers and their works of creativity is essential in their ability to show us what lies ahead if we continue in line with present developments. Artists also warn us that the choice is ours to make: either we ignore nuances and ambivalences, or we turn to lived experiences and to cultural imaginaries, to learn from different perspectives than our own, to allow for ambivalence and to grow in our ability to empathize and understand.

Dear An and Mel, I have gotten to know you as persons who already embrace ambivalence and foster entanglement, both in your professional and personal lives. Cusk and the protagonists of Zumas’ novel all express the many voices of our internal dialogues and of the internalized voices of others and our society. It is not easy to be motherbaby, nor to develop into mother and baby. Do you recognize this ambivalence, of entanglement yet desire for freedom? Let’s explore further what it means to all parents and to our beginnings.

For now I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, for you and your loved ones!

Warmly,

Inge



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Sources of our Thoughts - Letters on the Golden Hour