Bad Mommy Magazine

Oh for fuck’s sake:

In the Bay Area, the initiation rate of breast-feeding — how many moms are breast-feeding when they leave the hospital — is 95 percent, according to Nancy Held, a lactation consultant, registered nurse and vice president of Day One Centers, which has locations in Palo Alto and Walnut Creek. “That’s very high,” says Held, who was interviewed by John Sasaki of KTVU for a report on reaction to the Time cover. “Then we have people going back to work and pumping and things drop off.” Held says the thought of anyone breast-feeding for a year makes her happy. Everyone hears stories about women who are still breast-feeding their 5-year-olds, but that is hardly the norm, she says. “I think to be clear, the image was used by Time magazine for shock value,” Held says. “Dr. Sears has been around for 20 years, so there’s nothing new about him. Parents have become much more anxious in the past 10 years, so our job is to support them and give them the confidence that only they can decide what’s right for their baby.”

Emphasis mine. Is there any lazier journalism on earth than a story about reaction to a magazine cover? Seriously? Nobody got shot in your coverage area that day? Not even stabbed? There must have been a purse-snatching SOMEWHERE. Come on.

Look, childless whore here, and I could not be less interested in debating with anyone the Latest Parenting Trend Ruining Our Youth. Attach your child to your boob until the kid is in high school. Go live in a hippie commune and let everybody breastfeed each others’ kids and sleep in one big pile like Labrador puppies. Feed your kid nothing but formula until he’s old enough for KFC and Red Bull. I have opinions about vaccination, because I don’t want to get WHOOPING COUGH IN THE YEAR 2012, but it’s not a public health issue to me if you let your toddler ride the subway or lick every doorknob in existence or watch Cinemax After Dark. If I wanted to parent your kid, I’d have given birth to him.

What does piss me off is media bullshit designed to create “controversy” and pit women against each other. The headline on this article might as well have been PLEASE FIGHT ABOUT THIS AT YOUR BOOK CLUB WITH THAT ONE NEIGHBOR WHO WEARS HEMP HAIR EXTENSIONS, it’s such blatant mommy-trolling.

I may not have child-critters of my own, but I have to imagine that life for those with them isn’t easy right now. The economy’s “recovery” is mostly for people who weren’t in danger of missing meals anyway, people’s tap water is catching on fire, food costs more than it ever has, gas prices are so scary I have to close my eyes when I fill up the tank, everyone’s bosses seem fixed on making their work lives miserable in increasingly tiny and irritating ways, the weather is just weird this year, and that’s before you send the kids to schools that have holes in the roofs and chains on the doors.

Between the commute and the orthodontists’ bills you’re stressed out and freaked out, and what you thought was a college fund now looks more like a week’s worth of book fees. Every time you turn on the news you wonder if the little nipper’s even gonna have safe air to breathe growing up, and though you stopped paying attention to math in third grade, he needs your help with his homework. Meanwhile we have the stupidest Congress on the planet passing laws that say you, with the lady parts, ew, so if you want to have your daughter vaccinated against HPV you have to first listen to some scold on TV call her a whore.

With all of that going on, what we really need to do is have a “controversy” over how, when and where some chick breastfeeds, so that we can all point fingers at each other and say you, other mom, you suck. You suck for working or staying home, you suck for “helicoptering” over your children or letting them run wild, you suck for giving them birth control or keeping it from them, you suck for everything you’re doing and everything you’re not doing, you suck at this all the time.

As if we all — those with children, those without, those working, those staying home, those breastfeeding, those not — don’t already feel like we’re losing and failing. As if we’re not all worried about our lives being okay. As if we’re not all doing the best we can.

A.