Some days ago the model Gisele Bündchen shared on her Instagram a photo in which she appears breastfeeding her daughter while working. Dressed in a bathrobe, she nurses her daughter while a team of professionals is putting on makeup, combing and doing manicures. The picture immediately went viral receiving praise but also many criticisms (starting with those who doubt that it can be called work) and numerous media have echoed it.
The model is presented as a off-road mother, able to combine work and parenting in the first person, and is positioned in favor of continuing breastfeeding as long as both want.
Shortly after his first child was born, Gisele declared that all he wanted to be in life was to be a good mother. That although he did not plan to quit his job, he was going to adapt it so that he could take care of his son personally and in the way she thought it was most appropriate.
Since then, we have seen Gisele in numerous photos using an ergonomic backpack with her baby (although we also saw her using it up on a Quad, an occurrence not recommended), we have read it several times in favor of prolonged breastfeeding, declaring a motherhood enthusiast ...
What do we see in this photo? A mother who has decided not to take her daughter to a nursery or leave her with a caregiver. A mom who can be with her daughter and work at the same time. A mom who breastfeeds a baby who walks and has teeth. A mother who does not hide or cover herself to breastfeed but does not show herself, demonstrating that it can be given anywhere without shocking anyone. A mother who takes care of her baby in the first person, despite the fact that she is already over one year old, age for some and more than enough to do without all these cares. Definitely, a mom raising in a different way than what we are used to seeing.
I think it is very grateful that more and more public figures make visible and normalize issues that have so far been invisible or taboo, such as prolonged breastfeeding or colecho or the lack of need to be educated early. When we are used to seeing babies born in very expensive but dangerous high backpacks, babies carried in a luxury car but without using a chair that protects them, celebrities who write books giving advice more than doubtful on parenting ... it is appreciated that one of these celebrities openly proposes another way of doing things and, at least, opens the debate.
Because, although it may seem otherwise, although many families are in the closet, the truth is that there are many ways to raise. Although at the street level the same advice is almost always heard that goes along the same lines as always, there is a less and less silent minority that we see things differently. And if someone gives us their voice so that this society is gradually opening up to other approaches, welcome.
Gisele is lucky. Although the photo clearly shows a composition and pose studied and not spontaneous, it is clear that the life he leads is not that of ordinary mortals. As she says, without the team around her supporting her, helping her to make work and nurturing compatible in her own way, nothing would be possible. She is lucky, above all, because she is free to do what she wants..
I have photos like yours. Or almost. Only instead of wearing a fluffy bathrobe, it may be in tracksuit, even in pajamas, with a shame hair (let's not talk about the nails), with the child sucking in an impossible posture while attending a client over the phone and I try to answer an urgent mail at the same time. Of course my face is not usually the relaxing face that Gisele has in that snapshot, but rather that of a mother who badly sleeps, badly eats and is on the way to losing her head. And that I am also very lucky. For thousands of Spanish mothers, this scene is absolutely unthinkable: have the baby in the office and breastfeed?
The danger of photos like this is to end up internalizing a message so idyllic, so unrealistic. It's similar to believing promotional makeup photos where faces appear without a single pore or a single line of expression. Or clothing ads with models with almost impossible measures or American films and series that show a sweetened family day by day. That although we are all older, based on receiving these messages day after day, sometimes subliminally, they end up getting stuck.
The danger of photo of Gisele Bündchen breastfeeding her daughter while she works It is, in my opinion, to set the bar very high, so high that any other maternity seems insufficient. That the weight of the responsibility of raising a child and attending daily tasks also impose that of a perfect motherhood that no one is really demanding from us.
When I saw the picture, I could not think of mothers who cannot do more. In some friend of mine, in myself, in how such an idyllic image collides face to face with a sometimes harsh reality, of a motherhood that is not rosy.
