We all know that one mom who is perfectly nice, but just a little bit, um, odd.
Her kids are named Oak and Amethyst and she eats 4.9 fresh pineapples a day (including the skin) and she washes her laundry in the river using baking soda and saliva and she only wears vegan shoes and brushes her teeth with the ashes at Burning Man and once told you that you could cure your UTI with ‘good vibes.’
Maybe you had this mom. Maybe you ARE this mom.
This isn’t meant to “call out” that kind of mom by any means—being environmentally conscious is a thousand times better than neglecting your kids.
However, sometimes people go so far over the line that even the hippies among us are like “okay, that’s weird.”
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Meet Carlee Benear: yogi, naturalist, and mother of two.
Benear is a Houston, Texas native who brands herself on social media as an “artist and a researcher of life.”
With over 75,000 followers on Instagram, she’s garnered a massive yoga-enthusiast following and even received corporate sponsorships from the health food company Hello Fresh.
Surprisingly, practicing yoga poses in a box isn’t the oddest thing one can find on Benear’s profile.
A few of her photos have broken through the yogi bubble and gone viral, though not for entirely great reasons.
It’s obvious that Benear’s naturalist philosophies also inform her parenting.
She’s has found an “interesting” way to combine her yoga practice with what she refers to as “listening to her child’s needs.”
Benear shares photos of her breastfeeding her toddler while she holds yoga poses.
Rather than directly addressing the contents of each image, Benear captions them with different lessons for her parent followers.
“All of us experienced moments in childhood where we felt like our parents weren’t listening to us.”
“Like they didn’t understand what we were going through, or didn’t have time for us,” she writes. “It happens to everyone at least a few times. But did you know that ongoing failure to meet a child’s emotional needs causes a lifetime of struggle?”
“A child must be able to express what he or she wants.”
She’s stated on her profile that the healing properties of breast milk warrant breastfeeding children for two to three more years than average, though these claims are rather difficult to prove scientifically.
Naturally, the people of the internet REALLY can’t handle any of this.
Though oddly, more people seemingly had issues with the age at which Benear’s daughter was being breastfed than the way she was being breastfed.
“That’s disgusting,” one person writes.
“That child is too old to be breastfeeding still. She probably thinks her milk is vegan organic too.”
To be fair, yeah, it’s a little odd. The people who are genuinely asking why this mom practices breastfeeding yoga are pretty valid.
However, a few sexist folks also decided to give their two cents.
“Someone meet me at the gas station to gouge my eyes out so I’ll never lay eyes on that [you think I’m going to type the awful name he used? Think again],” one man wrote. “She took a really hot thing like breastfeeding and turned it into something ugly with so-called art.”
Can we just pause for a minute to talk about how this guy thinks that breastfeeding is solely for the sexual pleasure of men?
I mean, I may be a so-called nasty-woman, but I was under the impression that breastfeeding was for, like, feeding?
There’s just too much to unpack here. Yoga is good; breastfeeding toddlers is neither here nor there; doing both together is weird; women’s bodies aren’t allowed to be used for anything other than sexual pleasure apparently. See how much we learned today?
h/t: Instagram | @carleebyoga
