Oh, the Booby Irony!

Arm=Not a Booby

On Breasts. I've become much more aware (along with the rest of my friends, family and Davis general public) of mine due to the fact that they have become my childs' food source. The fact that I am producing the same substance that I used to get from things that go "moo" seems awfully strange to me. As a woman you carry these things around for 20 odd years or so before you truly understand why on earth they are necessary. And then you very quickly come to understand why bottles are such popular devices. Before baby you wonder why so many women feed their children formula from day one. You think breastfeeding must be the most natural act of nature there is. Well here's a fun fact...IT IS SO NOT! And if you don't believe me look at the online posts from breastfeeding mothers. They beg and plead desperately for answers to relieve their breastfeeding woes. Their diction is that of a tortured creature begging for a timeline of relief to come. Many other moms reply with the number of weeks it took for breastfeeding to feel less like an indian burn blister of intense pain through 10 feedings a day. So you think to yourself - I can get through maybe 4 weeks of this, and you feel pity for the women who have gone 12 weeks in agony. Then you get to the 12 week mark and start to notice the maximum sentences given out on the online posts and start to whimper at the 16 weekers. And that's when I started my obsessive pondering of the word boob. I was conflicted from the very start of the first day that "boob" popped into my head. Interesting, very interesting, that boob is a term that describes both a breast and a lazy moronic person (and technically a bird with blue feet). At first I was insulted that the term is used for both because breasts work really hard to do what they do and on top of that they are eerily smart. Say your baby starts sleeping through the night - well your boobs learn to not produce milk at night. That's right, they learn! But then again I thought to myself, I kind of hate them because they are painful torture devices, so maybe in protest I'll just let them get lumped in with the brainless dum-dums of the world. However, I felt guilty for hating on my boobies and had to go looking for answers. And look I did but couldn't find a connection betwixt the two different boobs. That's when I came to understand that breasts and bozos are both boobs from different word origins. The World Online Dictionary defines "booby" as an ignorant or foolish person and that this term apparently arose from either the Spanish "bobo" that means stupid person or the Latin"balbus" that means stammering. Whereas linguists think the breast kind of booby originated from the German word "bubbi" which means teat. But then again, I wouldn't be surprised if the breast booby actually did originate from the stupid booby. I could just picture a woman barely getting through a torturous breastfeeding session yelling "I hate this boob!" And looking back you wouldn't know if she was just calling her breast a booby or calling her breast a booby. And therefore, I decided that it is ok to sometimes think my breasts are bobos when I can barely get my baby to choke down enough milk to sustain her through a nap. And at other times it is ok to think of my breasts fondly as bubbis while my little baby is dreamily, happily nursing herself into dreamland.