"Something I Have Created": Breastfeeding and Motherhood Trauma in Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do.

Abstract

This essay examines the challenge of breastfeeding in Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, specifically how the process of learning to feed, significant in both her own and her mother's traumatic entrances into motherhood, enables Bui to face the "terrifying thought" that, upon giving birth, "FAMILY is now something [she has] created." By situating her narrative in the context of feeding her son, Bui amplifies the associations between the act of providing nourishment and the matrilineal responsibility of satiating a hunger for familial connection. In illustrating this association, Bui depicts the nuanced layers of breastfeeding difficulty and failure, especially for women mothering in the context of generational trauma. Within a biomedical context, Bui's narrative illustrates how breastfeeding difficulties, and their emotional toll, may be reminiscent of diasporic losses of cultural and familial connection, prompting practitioners to consider more broadly the roots of their patients' breastfeeding anxieties.