It’s well-understood that early parenthood can bring some overwhelming challenges with it and it seems totally up to chance as to whether those issues will show up during pregnancy, the actual birthing process, or in a new baby’s early life.
But even with that in mind, it remains true that many people don’t realize how painful and full of complications the act of nursing a baby can be.
RELATED STORIES
But even if everything goes smoothly in that department, there’s always the matter of how other people will treat this important part of keeping many babies fed and healthy. Some will think they can dictate when and where someone else’s baby will get hungry, while others will read something perverse into a natural part of life.
And as an incident that famous singer-songwriter Michelle Branch recently experienced illustrates, that hazard of life with other people can spring up no matter who you are.
On February 4, Branch and her husband Patrick Carney welcomed little Willie Jacquet Carney into the world.
Willie is the couple’s second child together, the first being their three-year-old son Rhys.
While announcing Willie’s birth on Instagram , Branch said, “She’s named after Patrick’s grandmother Willie Madge and has my mother’s maiden name/my middle name. We’re so in love.”
In the past, Branch has been open about how vulnerable it can feel to breastfeed, which was recently not helped by an encounter she had while watching Rhys play at a local playground.
As she tweeted out On March 15, “She said I wasn’t ‘being modest.’ I am in shock that this kind of judgement was coming from a fellow mom!”
In a reply to a different tweet, she said that she was too taken aback by the woman’s comment to say anything back.
And as she mentioned in a follow-up tweet, this comment came despite measures she had already taken not to make a spectacle of herself.
In her words , “I had a nursing tank top on and was seated away from others. It’s not like I walked into the crowd and whipped my [expletive] out.”
And considering that the mom was carrying her own young infant while judging her, Branch would have expected her to be a little more understanding.
As she put it, “Being a mom is hard enough. Can we not judge one another for how we feed our babies?”
I guess it just shows that we never know who in our lives will be incapable of minding their own business.
