parenting care That Time I Breastfed My Son on the Cover of Time

Four years ago, I was on the cover of Time magazine. My life hasn't been the same since.

I had been photographed for a story not about me, but about Dr. Sears and attachment parenting. So I was as surprised as anyone to see an image of me, standing there with my hand on my hip, my then 3-year-old son on a stool and nursing at my breast.

The headline asked, "Are You Mom Enough?"

Yeah, remember that woman? She was me.

This image—was it my age (I was 26), my hair (I'm a blonde), the age of my son (well beyond the point when most American women stop nursing their kids), my skinny jeans (which one prominent feminist journalist, Slate's Hanna Rosin, kind of fixated on)—sparked a kind of outrage and judgment I still haven't managed to wrap my mind around.

 the time, I was 26, the mother of two sons. A team from Time found me through my blog (I'm Not the Babysitter), where I wrote, among other things, about breastfeeding. I wasn't even the subject of the story my image was promoting. Pickert's story, "The Man Who Remade Motherhood," was about Dr. Sears, an advocate for attachment parenting, which is how my parents raised me and how I wanted to raise my own kids. I was just a mom who could comment on what life as an attachment parent was like.

I had never hid my parenting style. I wrote about how I mothered my sons openly on my blog. Still, I never, ever expected the reaction, the anger, the sarcasm and distortion from perfect strangers, including professional journalists, after that issue of Time came out.

I grew up with friends in the entertainment industry, so I wasn't immune to how news outlets skew stories or even completely fabricate quotes or scenarios to fit into their stories' agenda. But, once I experienced my own controversial, negative story, it was worse than I could have even fathomed.

The most poignant moment for me was when I read Rosin's piece in on Slate's XX blog. If you don't know Rosin, she is a feminist author who turned her Atlantic magazine article, "The End of Men," into a book. I was a fan of hers and thought she brilliantly explained how women have used stereotypical traits to soar in the workplace. She also wrote a piece for the Atlantic called "The Case Against Breastfeeding," where she argued that plenty of studies show the benefits of breastfeeding are overstated. In that piece, she confessed she nursed all three of her kids, so I wonder whether there was some conflict she felt was the reason to come after me with such anger and unreason. Whatever it was, Rosin was responsible for one of the worst pieces about the Time cover that I have ever read. Aside from sexualizing breasts and perpetuating multiple stereotypes about breastfeeding in general, she decided to (in her words) to "cherry pick" lines from a subsequent Q&A that Time did with me to suit her needs for the article. (Hey, at least she was honest about that.

What she wrote made my life, my parenting and my family sound like a freakshow. For example, 28 or 29 weeks into my pregnancy, I developed signs of preeclampsia. In just a couple weeks, it turned into full-blown HELLP Syndrome, which required an emergency C-section. My baby was swept away to the NICU. I didn't get to see him for three days, because I was in a magnesium sulfate-induced sedation and had almost been overdosed on the supposed protective drug. Those moments that I would periodically "come to," I could see I was surrounded by a medical team, doing whatever they could to:

• Bring down my blood pressure, which was not responding to medication and was high enough for me to seize or stroke;
• Reverse brain swelling, which was making my legs and arms spontaneously jerk;
• Minimize spontaneous bleeding, which was happening in my eyes and nose and from every fissure, because my platelets were so low that my blood couldn't clot well.

I had planned to breastfeed my baby, but in the middle of a coma, I didn't give a rat's ass about breastfeeding. My husband hadn't been aware of the benefits of breastmilk, particularly for preemies, and, since I had to focus all my energy on staying alive, it was up to him to focus on the baby.