In Defense of NOT Breastfeeding

I read the name tag hanging at an angle on her bright red cardigan. CAROLYN is really sweet. While I sign for my package she makes bizarre faces at my nine month old daughter Freda, complemented by some form of baby talk. Sometimes I enjoy this sort of thing. Life can be lonely, and babies seem to bring people's guards down. There are times though, when I find these encounters rather grating, like today. So I throw a little body language out, and give no response to Carolyn's behaviour in the hopes she'll drop it and let us be on our way. But she's not one of those people, and all my hints seem to fly fast through her gushing.

"I see you've got yourself a great baby carrier."

She smiles approvingly at my choice of slings as the little one starts to squirm and make noise. I nod, begin to turn, and then she drops it, the age old question, as if this brief and meaningless encounter has justified such prying.

"Are you breastfeeding?"

I am more than a bit touchy in this territory, I'll admit, as I've just come off a period of "mother guilt", having weaned my daughter at only five months. The question comes up again and again, followed by disapproving looks and awkward silence awaiting my explanation. I'm fed up, so I decide to lie to Carolyn, and I lay it on really thick with a wide confident grin.

"Yes, of course."

Carolyn has obviously breastfed all her children, and sees immediately that I, like her, intend to create a species of planet saving subhumans through the gift of breast milk.

"I could tell she was breastfed right away," she muses. "Breastfed babies are always more communicative and bright, they're just more advanced than formula fed babies."

I look again at Carolyn's flimsy name tag, and find myself beyond irritated, but frightened that there are people like her all around us, judging predestined futures for children everywhere. She is a menace to freedom.

I fight the urge to tell Carolyn that my daughter was bottle fed from day one and I'm just amazed that, in spite of such misfortune, she's already starting to string together simple sentences.

Once in the car I explain to Freda that ladies like that one are to be avoided at all costs. They seem really nice, but hidden beneath their sticky sweet little goos and gaws, are some outrageously aggressive, self validating opinions.

The Blue Room

I watched Krzystof Kieslowski’s Trois Coleur’s: Bleue last night for maybe the tenth time. There are so many aspects of this film that never lose their dramatic effect for me. It is the streets of Paris illuminated by shades of blue, Juliette Binoche’s flawless performance and exquisite face framing bob. Most of all I am struck, as always, by the blue room.

Julie, played by Binoche, returns home after surviving an accident that has killed her husband and five year old daughter. The gardener is out trimming the hedges, green against the grey sky and stone house. She approaches softly, seemingly emotionless.

“Have you done as I asked? Have you cleared out the blue room?”

The original contents of this room are never revealed by Kieslowski. The gardner has followed orders and Julie finds it empty, only cobalt colored walls and a chandelier of small azure crystals hanging in the centre. She leaves her home, her life, and takes only a string of chandelier beads with her.

I have always seen the house as the architectural metaphor for Julie prior to the accident. The blue room is her soul and the beads are her soul illuminated by fate. They are all she can bear, in her sorrow, to hold onto and are symbolic of her will to live in the face of devastation.

Everyone has their own blue room. A space, with its own individual characteristics, that haunts their life and never lets them go. In his song, “Tonight Will be Fine”, Leonard Cohen describes his room.

I choose the rooms that I live in with care.
The windows are small and the walls are bare.
There is only one breath, there is only one care,
And I wait every night for your step on the stair.

This is perhaps reflective of Buddhist beliefs; the bare walls and small windows, a single breath awaiting the sound of God.

Ever since I saw Trois Couleurs: Bleue, I have painted a room in every house I have ever lived in, for a long period of time anyways, a different shade of blue. Cerulean, azure, and cobalt create distinct backgrounds for specific events. I string them together with the continuity of a root shade so to remind myself that some things stay the same. When I meet people I'm sometimes curious if their walls are bare, or blue, or if they've ever even bothered to think about it.