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Jamie Lynne Grumet, America’s most famous Lululemon Madonna, admits that breastfeeding her nearly 4-year-old son, Aram, on the cover of this week’s Time was meant to “cause a stir.” In her appearance this morning on the Today show, she said, “Yes, we knew exactly what we were going to get into. Our family was one of the better ones to handle because my mom is a personal breastfeeding…” And here she couldn’t finish her sentence due to cute little Arom’s on-air fuss.No matter. We get the point. Grumet, breastfed by her own mother until she was six, was prepared to challenge the rest of us to look at the “real” face (and body) of attachment parenting. If that’s true, though, why is Grumet’s other child, an older child she also continues to breastfeed, not in the cover photo? Or on the Today interview?
As Grumet shares on her Twitter bio and blog, I Am Not The Babysitter, she has another son. Samuel, 5, is adopted from Ethiopia. Grumet tells Time’sKate Pickert that Samuel continues to nurse “maybe once a month.”
Here’s part of her June 2011 breastfeeding story with Samuel, who she brought home in November 2010 (which includes a photo of the two boys breastfeeding together):
Being able to breastfeed Samuel for almost a year was a beautiful experience.I wish I could say it was my idea. Truthfully, I thought he was too old to latch on to a new person for the first time. I was wrong. Samuel had been curiously watching me breastfeed his brother (Aram, 2.5 years at the time.) He didn’t speak English, but in his curiosity he was able to convey that he was also interested.He seemed to timid ask outright. You could tell his fear of rejection when he showed the initial interest. When I asked him if he would also like to breastfeed he smiled and jumped right on my lap. Our first experience breastfeeding you could tell his was an old pro. It was clear it was something he missed dearly. Something from home I was able to give him….It helped Aram understand Samuel’s role in the family and he was completely equal.
Like attachment parenting — Grumet describes her personal life as “being with my child constantly”– adoptive breastfeeding has morphed its way onto the parenting scene. Grumet is both a stanch advocate of — and obviously takes a great deal of pleasure in — attachment parenting and adoptive breastfeeding both. So it’s a little curious as to the whereabouts of Samuel. Maybe he was sick, or perhaps too fussy to sit still for the cameras. (No comment yet fromTime’s Director of Photography Kira Pollack, who managed the shoot, or Grumet.)
It appears that the new Poster Mom of attached parenting has pulled off a neat rhetorical trick and gone public detached from a child she nurses and homeschools. Indeed, Time cover photographer Martin Schoeller makes a particular point of explaining that, “It was important to show that there’s no stereotypical look for a mom…breast-feeding her child or children.” Of the four mothers at the Time photo shoot, including Grumet, one did sit with two children suckling simultaneously and one with her brood of four.
“To me, the whole point of a magazine cover is to get your attention,” Ric Stengel told my colleague Jeff Bercovici yesterday. If Time was looking to hit every hot button of parenting, it missed one: race.
