Breast Friends
"Let's nurse each other's babies," she said. Eek! I thought.
by Jennifer Baumgardner
January 22, 2007
When my son was a few months old and my dear, dear friend Anastasia was at the
end of her pregnancy, she turned to me one day and said, "I have a request."
"Anything," I said. After all, she had come over two or three times a week
since my baby was born to help me as I finished a book. She'd done everything from
returning phone calls to burping the baby to vacuuming. When she tipped over in the course of
trying to rock my son, Skuli, she bonked her head rather than drop him, prompting me to
wonder if it was fair to relegate administrative tasks and baby-care to a woman who was nine months pregnant.
"I want us to nurse each other's babies," Anastasia said.
"Okay," I said, immediately.
"They'll be milk-siblings," she said excitedly.
"Yeah," I said. "Wow."
What I didn't do was yell, "OMIGOD! THAT IS SO BIZARRE THAT YOU WANT
TO DO THAT!" But that was my first internal reaction. Second internal reaction:
how am I going to get out of this when I already said okay?
The issue for me seemed clear. It was one of health. You can't let other
babies drink your milk. Skuli certainly couldn't drink her milk. I practiced
how I would explain that to her. Anastasia, my milk is specially formulated with
antibodies perfectly designed just for Skuli . . . But then the whole history
of wet nurses popped into my head — obviously babies can and do drink other
mothers' milk.
On the web, both the Centers for Disease Control and La Leche League discourage "cross-nursing" — both
citing the possibility that either mother might have serious communicable
diseases. (Many diseases, including According to La Leche League, I shouldn't even be giving my own child my tainted milk, let alone another woman's.HIV, hepatitis and syphilis, can be transmitted
by human breast milk.) But neither of us have any of those diseases. So I called
my father, who is a doctor and not a hippie, to see if there were any medical
reasons not to let a healthy friend nurse your baby. "None that I can think
of," he said matter-of-factly.
Oh. At that point, I had to face facts about my own relationship to health-consciousness:
I didn't alter my diet or quit drinking based on being a nursing mom, and
I was no poster-child for hale living, existing as I do on coffee, seltzer and
candied cashews. According to La Leche League, I shouldn't even be giving
my own child my tainted milk, let alone another woman's.
So, maybe the problem was more an issue of being normal, decent parents. What
if we did cross-nurse and people found out? What if our children found out?! I felt
deep shame at the thought of telling anyone we had done it. Surely we would be
identified as gross and perverted, the parenting equivalent of wife-swappers.
Anastasia was sort of the Angelina Jolie type in my friend group, so she could
possibly pull this off, but I was more Gwyneth — superficially serene,
but essentially uptight. Why did Anastasia want to do this? She asked and I was
so flabbergasted, I agreed. After all, she had vacuumed my apartment.
©2007 Jennifer Baumgardner and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Jennifer Baumgardner is a Brooklyn-based magazine writer and author. She is the co-author of Manifesta and Grassroots, and the author of Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics.
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