This was originally written for Professor Amy Brown who was compiling one of her books. I don’t think it’s been used in print and I’ve re-discovered it on my hard drive so I thought I’d share here.
When I got pregnant with my first child I went into research-mode and looked for THE best way to do every single aspect of pregnancy and baby-care. (Unfortunately, I was also a smug first-time mom to be and didn’t hold back in telling everyone why my way was going to be THE best way and questioning why on earth wasn’t everyone doing the same as me. God I cringe so hard. Sorry, everybody I came into contact with then!)
A huge part of this was, of course, how I was going to feed my baby. Breast is best hun, so despite having no clue whatsoever of what breastfeeding entailed I decided that was that and I was going to breastfeed my son. I wasn’t breastfed myself – a fact I knew only because my mom took great delight in telling everybody that I never cried as a baby and just stood in my cot waiting for a bottle. We’ll just skip past that little attachment issue in waiting there…In fact, to the best of my knowledge I only ever saw one person breastfeeding during my childhood; a friend of my mom’s giving her newborn twins milk. Now I look back and know how much hard work that would have been and I’m slightly in awe!
Of course, smugness goes before a fall. Literally, in my case. I fell down the stairs on my due date and damaged my coccyx which set the scene for a really traumatic-feeling end to my pregnancy, and my labour couldn’t have deviated further from my birth plan if it had tried. It traumatised me so much it nearly stopped any future children from being considered, and it definitely impacted on my ability to bond with my son in those early days. Frankly, I wanted nothing more than to hide in bed until all the pain went away. So having a baby who didn’t immediately latch on and do something “natural” was more than I had the ability to cope with at that point. I just didn’t have the stamina or desire to add fighting to feed my baby into the mix – and it really did feel like a fight. He wouldn’t latch, every position hurt, my nipples hurt, my coccyx hurt, my stitches hurt, I was too anaemic to sit upright. In my drug, hormone and tiredness addled state I thought expressing would be the best option in the short-term. So that’s what I started to do. My very first time at the pump produced about 10mls of colostrum which would have been great except it was red, so of course I thought I was poisoning my baby with infected milk. It really wasn’t easy this parenting lark.
I carried on pumping, putting baby to the breast as often as I felt I could which in hindsight is nowhere nearly enough to have done anything particularly useful. And I carried on pumping. And I carried on thinking that we’d crack breastfeeding soon. And I carried on pumping. And I started to think that perhaps one of us just couldn’t do it. And I carried on pumping. And I stopped putting him to the breast. And I carried on pumping. And I carried on pumping.
Thankfully I responded well to the pump. I could nearly always keep up with his demand, despite him taking so much milk each day. He was diagnosed with reflux and drank milk to soothe the pain, invariably vomiting it across the room in an exorcist-style propulsion of milk and mucous. When your hard-pumped milk was so rapidly discarded there really was a point in crying over spilt milk.
I don’t know how I kept up the regime of expressing for 5 months. One of the overriding memories I have of those early months with him is frantically rocking his bouncer to stop him crying while I urged my boobs to be faster at filling those bloody bottles. It was intense. Having gone through the newborn period with two subsequent children I’m filled with regret at how much I missed with the pump-feed-wash-sterilise routine. Even more regret that I was never told things that would have eased the intensity of exclusive pumping – like the fact you don’t need to sterilise breast pump paraphernalia! (note: current NHS guidelines have been revised to say that now it is recommended to sterilise breastmilk equipment).
My husband was as supportive as he could have possibly been and made it as easy as he could possibly have made it (apart from that one fatal misunderstanding where he binned an entire freezer drawer full of milk stash – that one still smarts!) but he didn’t ‘get’ it. It would have been really nice to be able to talk to people who had been there. People who had breastfed, people who had expressed, people who I didn’t mind being vulnerable in front of. But there was nobody. None of my friends had yet had children and my family weren’t breastfeeders. Even the most well-intentioned support doesn’t quite hit the spot when it’s from somebody with no experience of the issue.
Years have passed and more babies have happened. After success feeding my second-born I trained as a breastfeeding peer supporter and have been volunteering at community support groups for several years. She was breastfed until the hallowed WHO guidance of 2 years, self-weaning shortly after her birthday. My third-born is showing no signs of stopping, we’ll address weaning if and when it becomes a problem. A small, irrational part of me probably thinks longer-term breastfeeding makes amends for the fiasco that was my son’s first months. The bigger, more rational part of me knows that’s bobbins and I did the best I could have done, which is all any of us can do, really, isn’t it?
