Didja ever wonder if there existed on this earth people who had cottage cheese for brains? Not just as a matter of droll speculation, but in reality. Case in point: I was watching the Fox News Network one night a couple of months ago and they had this woman on from the La Leche League. That, for those of you who don’t know and don’t feel like following the link, is an organization dedicated to promoting breast feeding. All well and good and PC and stuff; I have no objection to breast-feeding. Of babies.

Apparently, however, some people got the breast-feeding-is-good part of the lesson down, but sort of flubbed the “for babies, as in those too young to know what to do with a spoon besides throw it on the kitchen floor, only” part of the deal. Somewhere in my country’s hinterlands — in my very state of Florida, I do believe — a controversy had arisen over the actions of a mother and her offspring. It seems that she was still breast-feeding her tyke when he was long past a normal age of weaning. The child was, in fact, about five years old. Now, I wasn’t exactly Emily Post at the age of five, but I had long since learned to drink from a cup and eat with a fork and spoon from a dish on the table by that age. I would have been mortified to be offered anything with a nipple on it, and it would never had occurred to me to drink from one when I had made it all the way to the grown-up age of five. But then I’m a girl, and I already knew how to read complete sentences by that age; in fact, that is the age I started real (ie, first grade) school.

But I also know that any boy at the age of five in my home town who was still breast-feeding would have been the loneliest and most beaten-up boy in his peer-group. What was his mother thinking? Then again, I don’t think I really want to know the thoughts of a woman who breast-feeds and sleeps with her five-year old son.

I do want to know what passed for thoughts in the mind of the representative of the La Leche League. The mother apparently was in trouble for her unorthodox childcare methods, and I gathered that the local authorities, or at least her neighbors, were kicking up a fuss along the lines of: that’s not normal; stop that stuff. The La Leche woman kept burbling on about “letting the child decide when to wean” and so forth, all freedom and nature and blah-di-dah.

Hello? What male human being is going to let go of a breast if he doesn’t have to? Letting “the child decide” when to stop a comforting and pleasurable activity? Oh yes, that always works. Here’s how nature works: I had a cat who gave birth to about eight kittens. For months she fed them happily. Then, when they were old enough to eat out of bowls on the floor, she let them know in no uncertain terms that the days of free milk were over, thusly: when one of the kittens would approach her, one blow from her paw would send said kitten across the room. They soon learned that the bar was closed. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a cat, one of god’s natural creatures, who a documentary on PBS assures us is only partly domesticated. If a wild animal knows how to tell junior to go out and hunt up his own meal, why doesn’t a human being?

But of course that isn’t the point is it. No one is interested in the child; he’ll grow up odd and twisted, drinking his coffee out of a baby bottle and tending to his mother’s every need, until the day he chops her up into tiny pieces and cooks her up into a stew, and the neighbors will be so shocked, because he was such a dedicated son. But the cause of Nature will have been preserved — Nature meaning letting everyone do whatever they want, even if whatever they want infringes on someone else’s whatever they want. And as long as that whatever has nothing to do with fostering dignity and self-reliance, not to mention plain common sense.

Written in 2000.