What would you think if you saw this picture without knowing its history? Surely most people would say that it is a beautiful image of a woman breastfeeding her children, perhaps twins, resting between games, about to let go to keep running and jumping. And it would not happen anecdotal photo. One more image of a woman breastfeeding her children.
However, that is not the story, because children are not brothers, if not, alone tit mates, Or what is the same: one is her son and the other is her friend's son, who has been in your care for a year while her mother works. Care to the point of even being breastfed.
Now the image is much more controversial, right? Well, come on, let's get to know the story in depth and so we start with the debate, which although I think it is impossible not to give an opinion, it seems to me that it will be constructive because of the fact of putting yourself in the shoes of both mothers, of which breastfeed a child who It is not yours, and the other, whose son is breastfed by another woman.
Who is the woman in the photo?
His name is Jessica Anne Colletti, resides in Pennsylvania, and a few days ago he shared the image on his Facebook as a personal way to celebrate World Breastfeeding Week. The following text accompanied the image:
Happy World Breastfeeding Week! My son, on the right, is 16 months old and my friend's son is 18 months old. I take care of her son while she works and I've been feeding both of them for a year now! It is so much love between these brothers of milk, it is a special bond between all of us.
As told in the Daily Mail, Jessíca's friend is Charlie Interrant, a woman, a single mother, who started working when her son Mateo was very young. Until then he had been breastfeeding, and to be able to go to work he chose to express milk and combine it with some artificial milk. A babysitter was taking care of him for a while, but it didn't go very well. The milk was getting complicated and the baby rejected the bottles given by the girl who took care of him, so he was not just drinking milk other than his mother's:
As we read in the Huffington Post, the first day the baby gave Jessica the idea was not, at all, that she fed him. However, he took her in his arms and crossed his mind an idea that might solve the problems he had with the bottle: "What do you think if I breastfeed?". Maybe if it had been a thoughtful solution, something she had thought about and tried to explain tactfully to the mother, she said "well, I have to think about it," but it was like that, like who says "Look what just happened to me! Why not?" and Charlie responded with yes excited.
Jessica's son was already three months old, so she felt that she was doing her friend and the little boy a favor if she also breastfed Mateo, who was then five months old.
Since then nothing has changed. He takes care of his son and Charlie's son and breastfeeds both of them, whenever they want, as if they were two brothers who live and play together and go to find some peace and calm in her chest. In fact, he calls them "milk brothers", as a sign of how well they both get along.
Milk brothers?
This term is very old. So much so that today it is rare to meet people who say they are "sisters of milk" (sure there are many, but it was long ago was much more common). When saying brothers of milk it is spoken of two people who do not have relation of kinship but that share a thing: a woman who breastfeeds both. At that time, time has passed, the milk brothers were, normally, those who shared nurse, also called "milk mistress."
And what is a wet nurse? Well, a woman who was breastfeeding babies whose mothers couldn't or didn't want to breastfeed. They were dedicated to that, to feed those babies, and they were a very valuable resource until the 19th century.
Jessica is, in a way, Mateo's nurse. And although she is delighted, her friend too, and the children, it seems, also, the story has raised the controversial logic that can be associated with an act that many would not do to see it strange, disused and probably unnecessary.
Strange because you breastfeed a baby that is not yours and because, seen from the mother's point of view, a woman, a friend, breastfeed your baby. For her it was not a problem, but surely many women are not able to conceive even the scene in their imagination.
In disuse, from what we have commented. Today, if you do not want or cannot breastfeed, children receive formula milk, as Mateo did. Wasn't it going well? No, it's true, but sooner or later I would have started eating. I was in fact five months old, so they could have started giving him food, advancing a little the complementary feeding.
And unnecessary for the same. Let's say he was breastfeeding until six or seven months, while he started eating. Why continue until the 18 months you have now if it is not your child? His mother, Charlie, stopped breastfeeding him, he says, at 9 months. Wouldn't it have been more logical to leave both at the same time?
And now I say mine: what if we think of Mateo?
I write it (as before) and it has a certain logic. But then I go into an "Open-minded" moment (with an open mind), with inspirational music in the background, one of those in which you abstract a little from the world and think about the full of absurd norms and strange limits of behavior that we mark ourselves every day for that of "it is what everyone does, it will not be me who crosses that line" and I say and why not?
And there I stay. I have no more arguments: and why not? What will the child think of all that? Well, nothing. Do not think about anything. If anything, if I were able to explain it, I would surely say that he is very happy with the situation, because in a way he has two mothers, a biological mother and a mother of milk. He is fortunate to be able to stay at the home of a woman who cares for him with such affection, so much that he is able to treat him as if he were his own son. And then, when he returns home with his mother, receive all the love a mother can give her son after several hours without seeing him.
I am sure that these two children will always have a super close relationship, of trust, affection, of games, of growing together, of great moments, as will the relationship of the child with Jessica.
What do you think?
