I'm your baby and I'll cry if I want to. Exchange your experiences with infants who wail in the Mothers Who Think section of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Bring in 'da noise, bring in 'da rat killers
By Jill Wolfson
After preaching respect for animals to my kids, how could I finesse my death wish for the rats in our walls?
(03/15/99)

Kiddie pants or kiddie porn?
By Deborah A. Lott
Nothing comes between kids and their Calvins -- except charges of pedophilia
(03/12/99)

Lost in the supermarket
By Sallie Tisdale
A trip to the store leads to appalling moments in the world of too much and nothing good enough
(03/11/99)

Why I didn't report my rape
By Jenn Shreve
I believe Juanita Broaddrick because I know why women keep silent
(03/10/99)

Small massacres
By Patrick Chamoiseau
A child in Martinique reaches into the dark corners of imagination with the miraculous force of fire
(03/09/99)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

BABY ON BOARD | PAGE 1, 2
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Stretched emotionally and physically as never before, I found myself leaning on bosses, friends and sources, and occasionally overestimating their tolerance. The first time this happened was on Joe's very first trip, when he was just 4 months old. I had to fly to Buenos Aires on the spur of the moment for a break in a story I'd been covering for months: the unsolved 1994 terrorist bombing of the city's Jewish community center. Investigators had raided a major military barracks, pursuing evidence of possible armed forces involvement. No one knew how the soldiers would react.

I left early on a Sunday morning with Joe, his sitter and my friend Nina, who was then working for National Public Radio. Since Nina and I both had to file that day, we rushed straight to the home of a local Jewish activist who had agreed to an interview. The moment we arrived, with everyone eager to get started, Joe started crying to be fed.

I hadn't had time to pump before we left, so there was nothing to do but latch him on, under the table and through a modest slit in my dress. I began taking notes, only to look up and see our source by all appearances about to faint. And while he soon recovered, Nina later told me she couldn't work with me again because of "all those snuffling sounds" on her tape.

In fact, Nina and I remained friends, and the activist still returns my calls. I got much more organized after that and can proudly say I've never had to nurse in front of presidents or ministers. But that afternoon did make me realize I'd come to a crossroads. For the first time in my professional life, I simply couldn't compete on equal terms with men. I was, in a word, handicapped. Being a woman had never done that. Giving birth didn't have to do it. Only breast-feeding did it -- and I came to realize that in order to be the kind of mother I passionately wanted to be, it would probably continue to do it.

Before I started traveling with Joe, I prided myself on having never, ever missed a deadline. Once, after I'd broken my leg in Managua, Nicaragua, chasing after a source -- actually, chasing after then-President Violeta Chamorro -- a photographer carried me to my upstairs office to file, after which I promptly anesthetized myself with half a bottle of Flor de Caña. With Joe around, however, a few deadlines have slipped past me.

Before Joe, I also prided myself on seeking out dangerous assignments. I snuck into rebel-controlled underground bunkers in Eritrea during the war with Ethiopia, slept in a contra guerrilla camp on the Honduran border, flew in small planes to tiny villages in the Amazon. Since Joe, however, I've turned down some trips. I have a lower level of acceptable risk for him than for myself. Even some of my colleagues have let slip signs of disapproval. A close woman friend, who weaned one of her babies at 3 months to cover a story, suggested the Herald had "coddled" me by paying for the sitter.

All of this has seriously concerned me, and not only because I'm my family's main breadwinner. More profoundly, reporting and writing have always been much more than a job for me. Long before I reached my teens, they became my way of framing situations, maintaining perspective, exerting what control I could on a random world. If I lost control of reporting, would I lose control altogether? The fear is still with me, but time has softened it. And nursing Joe, despite its price, is something I'll never regret -- the most serious, demanding and fulfilling commitment I've made. Had I not assigned myself that concrete goal, I suspect I might have talked myself out of a lot of the hard work and emotional risks that babies bring. Yet making that promise meant Joe was my constant companion for his first year of his life, as I crowded extra moments of mothering into downtime in taxis and hotel lobbies.

And he was exceptional company.

Throughout my life, as much as I love my husband, there has never been anyone whose physical presence I so craved, whose need for me was as urgent as hunger, who could so easily make me put aside background reading on an airplane to sing 34 rounds of "Itsy Bitsy Spider." I've had some great traveling companions but never anyone for whom absolutely everything is new and mostly terrific, who finds ecstasy in watching the floor numbers light up on an elevator. Joe, to my relief, avoided the traumas I'd imagined, while constructing a uniquely rich pretoddler perspective. He has been talked to more, and in more languages, than most babies he meets. He gazed at the Andes before he knew quite how to find his toes. He first recognized purple on a hyacinth macaw. And he has never called his sitter "Mommy."

For myself, I'm gradually feeling more confident. When I read last November that neuroscientists at two Virginia universities had found that pregnant or nursing mice doubled their production of brain cells with key roles in learning and memory, it actually seemed to make sense. While motherhood is still distracting, it has also forced me very quickly to learn a tremendous number of new things about myself and those around me. Simply going through labor erased my former panic about asking questions at press conferences. Dealing with tantrums has proved an invaluable aid in understanding editors. And managing to tolerate stopping everything, time after time, to respond to a baby's hunger has taught me more about compassion than I might otherwise ever have learned.

I weaned Joe in December 1996, when the Herald sent me to Peru to cover the hostage crisis at the Japanese Embassy in Lima. It was a reasonable time to do so, and I couldn't see taking him to a city under threat of terrorist bombs. Plus by then I was guiltily anticipating the pleasure of a few nights of unbroken sleep, bomb threats or no. But in 1998, I got pregnant, on purpose, with Joe's brother, Joshua. Once I knew he was on his way, I fought hard to stay in my bureau one more year. I was convinced that as difficult as it had been to schlep a baby around South America, it would be harder to try to breast-feed while holding down a conventional job. Born last September, Joshua has already been to Chile twice, and once, last month, to Uruguay, although my current employer, Knight Ridder Newspapers, which took over the Herald's Rio bureau about a year ago, declined to contribute to the sitter's air fare.

My job ends in September, after which we'll come back to the United States. While I'm enormously grateful for the chance I've had to invest in my babies' health, I'm still not quite sure how to think of it: Have I been coddled or courageous? Opportunistic or self-sacrificing? What I know most clearly is: I'm sad that so few working women and their babies share our good fortune. My opportunity came less from enlightened policy than exotic serendipity, which strikes me as terribly wrong.

Here in Brazil, a "developing country," the government backs up its avowed commitment to breast-feeding with law: Working women get four-month maternity leaves with full pay. In the United States, where our federal government's pie-in-the-sky goal for 2000 is to have 50 percent of mothers breast-feeding at 6 months, working women only recently won the right to six weeks disability leave when pregnant. Their employers, who aren't required to pay them during such leaves, can pat themselves on the backs for the number of women they hire. Just hiring women is easy, however, if everyone agrees they'll be expected to act like men. And that way we all conspire to deprive ourselves of great parts of our humanity.
SALON | March 16, 1999

Katherine Ellison's last article for Salon was "The city of lost children."

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R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S

Got Milk? A nursing mother finds that pumping breast milk for one's baby is anything but a natural act.
By Jacqueline Frost
Sept. 26, 1997