Earlier this morning, when I filed my Mother’s Day brunch recommendations for the Houston Press, I started thinking about what a special Mother’s Day this is for our family.

Tomorrow, in Orange, Texas, we’ll be celebrating Mother’s Day with four generations: memaw, who is 90 and is a greatgrandmother many times over now; Mrs. B (my mother-in-law and grandmother to four), and Tracie P, above with our nearly five-month old Georgia P.

Tracie is such a wonderful, sweet, gentle mother to our baby and I’d like to honor her today by talking about a “drinking problem”… No, not the one you’re thinking!

No, the drinking problem I’m referring to is how the pressures of consumerist hegemony and bourgeois society drive mothers away from breast-feeding.

In an op-ed published in today’s New York Times, “Maternity Ward Swag,” author Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong reports the following:

Breast-feeding offers numerous benefits to babies, including protection against childhood obesity, diabetes, some respiratory and ear infections and sudden infant death syndrome. Mothers who breast-feed have lower risks of breast and ovarian cancer. Yet although three out of four mothers in the United States breast-feed their newborns, fewer than half are still doing so by the time their babies are 6 months old.

The support of hospitals is crucial to getting more women to begin breast-feeding and to do it longer. And yet many hospitals hand out free formula samples, which, according to a 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office, tend to reduce breast-feeding rates among the women who receive them…

The infant formula market is big and growing; last month, Nestlé announced that it would buy Pfizer’s infant nutrition division for almost $12 billion. Even as hospitals try to reduce the influence of industry by prohibiting pharmaceutical companies from distributing gifts and free lunches to doctors and medical students, they continue to allow these wealthy and powerful manufacturers to promote their goods in maternity wards.

Some hospitals are beginning to push back. Sixteen percent of birthing hospitals now refuse to hand out free samples. Massachusetts nearly banned the practice in its hospitals at the end of 2005, but at the request of Mitt Romney, then the governor, the state’s Public Health Council reversed the decision.

Tracie and I are very lucky inasmuch as our finances currently allow her to be a stay-at-home mom. One of the biggest factors in our decision that she not go back to work was the issue of how difficult it would be to breast-feed at her job (as a sales rep for a major fine wine distributor here in Texas).

Anyone who’s ever weaned a child knows just how hard it is to breast-feed. Between the hormonal mood swings, fatigue, and the physiologic challenges, it’s probably the most emotionally and physically draining experiences we’ve ever gone through.

Watching and attending to them (as best I could) as Tracie and Georgia found their rhythm, my wife — for the second time — became a super hero to me (the first was labor).

Tracie P, words cannot express just how much I love you and how much deeper our love has grown since the day we conceived Georgia and every day since.

You are the greatest, most generous, and most beautiful mother I could have ever dreamed of and you have given us a beautiful, happy, laughing, smiling little girl… Someday I’ll tell her what a hero you are to me and to her…

I love you, Tracie and Georgia P… I love you so much… Happy Mother’s Day…