At NOLA Baby Café in New Orleans East, families get breastfeeding advice
26th August 2024 · 0 Comments
By Arielle Robinson
Contributing Writers
(Veritenews.org) — Bree Anderson sat in a circle of mothers, sharing about how she dealt with the death of one newborn child while raising another newborn.
She gave birth to twins prematurely at Touro Infirmary in 2022 – one boy, A’sir, and one girl, A’sani. They both went into the neonatal intensive care unit because they both only weighed a pound. A’sir pulled through after 148 days there. A’sani died only a few days after birth.
“The joy of welcoming life was intertwined with the sorrow of losing my twin daughter after a mere eight days,” Anderson said.
Anderson developed postpartum depression after her experience, which led to her becoming more aware of organizations and support groups for mothers and their babies.
She talked about these experiences at the NOLA Baby Café last week at the East New Orleans Regional Library. The cafe is a space where new mothers can bring their infants and toddlers to socialize with other children and play with toys while they learn about breastfeeding and other aspects of early parenting. It is put on by maternal health and parental education advocates twice a week – on Tuesdays in Tremé and Wednesday in New Orleans East – to fill what they see as a lack of support for new parents in New Orleans.
“There weren’t a lot of parenting classes that were culturally sensitive [and] also free,” said Melanie Richardson, co-founder and executive director of the parental education nonprofit TrainingGrounds, in an interview with Verite News. She founded the nonprofit in 2016 to fulfill that purpose.
The same year, Meshawn Siddiq, a maternal health advocate, founded a local affiliate of Baby Café to provide breastfeeding and peer support for new mothers from underserved communities. In 2019, Richardson and Siddiq teamed up and began offering these services to mothers at the Sojourner Truth Neighborhood Center.
They expanded to New Orleans East in 2019 after several families began coming to the cafes in Tremé from the East, but had difficulty getting there because of a lack of transportation. Richardson also said that there is a lack of child care resources available to families in New Orleans East, which she called a “child care desert.”
“It just made perfect sense,” Richardson said. “Instead of having families have to find transportation to get to the Tremé location, why not open one up in New Orleans East that would be accessible for the large number of families with young children?”
Destigmatizing breastfeeding
Siddiq said there is a stigma that breastfeeding hurts. She said in some Black communities, it’s also associated with being poor and with wet nursing, the practice during chattel slavery when Black women were forced to nurse their masters’ children.
She and Richardson said they want to counter these stigmas through their work at the cafe.
“How it impacts us now as Black people is that we have three to four generations of individuals that have not breastfed,” Siddiq said. “So culturally, we don’t even know what that looks like, and so we have to make it more of the norm.”
Sabia McCoy-Torres brought her 8-month-old daughter to the NOLA Baby Café the same day as Anderson. She normally attends the one in Tremé, closer to where she lives, but wanted to see what the New Orleans East location was like. Before she heard of NOLA Baby Café, McCoy-Torres was looking for a space to connect with other Black mothers.
She said she enjoys the advice she has received and seen other women receive from lactation consultants and would like for more people to have access to these types of consultants.
“If there were a way for people to be able to easily access lactation consultants, that would be great,” McCoy-Torres said. “When I think about mothers who didn’t and who don’t have access to that, that would make a big difference.”
It feels bright
Anderson, a New Orleans East resident, said that she loves that her son can come and play with other children while she engages with other moms and learns from them.
But it’s meant more than that to her – she said it also helped her through her postpartum depression.
“[It helps] pull me out of my dark place when I’m feeling the postpartum and the depression kick in,” Anderson said. “When I come here it feels bright, like the colors are bright, he’s in a better space, the mood changes because I’m talking to other people that care.”
Anderson said that her son has a lot of the same toys at home that are present at the center but gets to socialize more with children his age at the cafe.
“This is a really great resource I have out here,” Anderson said. “And I’m looking forward to it growing as more people learn about the center. I’m excited that it’s here.”
This article originally published in the August 26, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
