My mother, she never breastfed me. She told me she liked me as a friend.

What a childhood I had. My mother never breast-fed me. She said she liked me as a friend.

I was an ugly kid. My mother breast-fed me through a straw.

You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.

The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.

A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.

Arakawa: After I gave birth, I felt even more of a connection to cows, because my breasts started making milk. My breasts got bigger and my nipples swelled up, and every time my daughter went to suckle them, it reminded me of how I used to squeeze the cows' udders on the farm to get the milk out. [chuckle] It was like my own daughter was milking me.

Not everyone’s gender identity matches the reproductive organs they were born with therefore you have been reclassified as a birthing person rather than a mother. Now are you ready to try chest feeding?

I had some left wing fella ask me this, he started asking me my views on most things. I'm liberal in many senses, like when it comes to (probably not when I was younger) when it comes to gay people's rights I fight for a gay man's rights – so on all of these issues, as I've grown up, I said,... when people say that I'm far right, well what makes me right wing? Am I right wing just because I don't like Islam? Does that make me right wing just because I don't like a fascist ideology? If I didn't like scientology, does that make me right wing? No, it's an ideology. So I said like, "most of my views, they're very liberal – many of them would be left-wing".

You cannot place a mother breastfeeding her baby on an equal footing with men. You cannot make women work in the same jobs as men do, as in communist regimes. You cannot give them a shovel and tell them to do their work. This is against their delicate nature.

I think I can truly put up all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence; I was brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes.

Children become what their mothers feed them with

my mothering was circumscribed in two ways: as a revolutionary involved in trying to make the world a better place for all children, and as a feminist who demanded from my partner equal involvement in household tasks, and wanted to imbue my children with those values as well–my son as well as my daughters.

Not really. My parents were liberal.