Just put a breast in that kid's mouth.

You just never know where the conversation is going with a person from a very different culture living with you. For those of you who aren’t regular readers, and those who haven’t been paying attention, we have a wonderful young lady from western Africa living with us for the last two years. Natacha has become a real part of this family - so today, since she had the day off, she decided to tag along with Ron and I to a doctor appointment and some errands. On the way, we stopped off for breakfast.

The booths were full and the joint was jumping, at Pegs Glorified Ham ‘n Eggs in downtown Reno. It’s a very popular place for locals - especially the suited attorney set. You expect a place like this to be pretty noisy, but today it was over the top. I couldn’t figure out which program or volume setting to use on my hearing aid to overcome the screaming from a small baby in a booth a couple places away from us.

I asked Natacha, “in Africa, what do Mom’s do to quiet their babies in a public place like this?” The Mom in question this morning was struggling mightly to sooth the little one quiet but he - it has to be a boy, right? - wasn’t having any of it.

“Well, they would just start to nurse the baby. No, children don’t make noise like that in Africa. They can’t with a breast in their mouth.”

This didn’t surprise me. Natacha won’t drink my skim milk at our house since she says it tastes like her Mothers’ breast milk. The first time I heard this, it caught me pretty unawares. I mean, how would you remember that? I know I wouldn’t. I came from the bottle is more modern generation of the 1950’s. My mother would have rather died than breast feed. Besides, she had a full time job at a daily newspaper.

Like most children where she came from, Natacha breast fed until she was seven or eight years old. I guess you would remember what it tasted like at that age.

Natacha had gone up to Truckee the other day to visit a Swedish girlfriend who has just had a baby. As they were out wandering around town, having coffee and such, it became necessary to comfor the baby and so they hunted around to try and find a private place to breast feed the child. The Swedish lady bemoaned the fact that Americans are so hopelessly parochial about the mere sight of a womans breast engaged in something so normal and natural as to find it titillating - so to speak. They finally had to abandon the search and settle for a darkend corner table and use the napkin over Moms’ delicate activity with baby.

What udder nonsense. I can’t help it. I had to do that.

Will Americans ever grow up and mature past the stage of being silly, embarrassed or offended by natural, normal and beautiful? Can this culture ever move past acting like a bunch of teenage boys?

What really scares me about this whole issue is this - if we can’t get past the trauma of breastfeeding in public, just how will we manage to grapple with the much larger issues that confront our society?

So, believe it or not, the conversation sequed to general attitudes about breasts here and in Africa.

I’ll just bet you didn’t know that having perky tits isn’t a good thing over there. Only self-involved, self-indulgent, selfish prostitutes have those. Whoa!

Real women are willing to let the girls do just what they will after child bearing and breast feeding.

Since I lost one of my girls several years ago, I only have half as much to worry about now.

Whew, that’s a relief. You take the silver lining anywhere you can get it, I always say.

maven