So much has been written regarding the breastfeeding battle, but at the risk of bringing coals to Newcastle (or, I don’t know, bringing parenting magazines to your OB’s office?) I want to describe my own experience briefly here.
While I was pregnant: I talked to my mother (nursed me for three months exclusively, two more partially after going back to work) and my sister (nursed her kids to some extent for about a year and a half each), signed up for and attended a useless course at our hospital (two-thirds of which we spent watching a DVD about the benefits of breastfeeding…talk about preaching to the choir!), and generally committed myself to the act of nursing my baby.
In the hospital: Will was born with the help of vacuum assistance, and something about his post-birth appearance prevented him from being brought immediately to my side. When he was brought to me a few minutes later, they let us take pictures and kiss him and then whisked him off to the nursery to clean him up and give him a shot or two. I didn’t feel weird about letting him go; I was mostly proud and amazed at what had just happened.
Maybe half an hour passed and they brought Will back in; an awesome nurse we’d met before named Mary tried to position him for nursing, but he kept bucking away after only a second.
“I think he’s congested still,” Mary told us then. “Let me take him to get his bath–they usually cry enough to break through the congestion, and he’ll be able to nurse better afterward.” I felt vaguely sad that Will and I weren’t going to start his first day of life off with a blissful breastfeeding session, but I wasn’t particularly anxious. I just assumed that that was how things were done.
While Dave accompanied William to get his cry on, I was moved into the recovery room. If this were a movie, the ill-boding M. Night Shyamalan music would make its debut here. Dave and William came back to me and we were told nothing about trying to feed him again. Hours later, a new nurse ambled in with a bored expression on her face.
“Have you fed him yet?” she asked me.
“Um…no. I mean, Mary tried to do it before, but she said he was congested, so he went to get a bath and get the mucous out…?”
“Well, let’s try it again,” she said, as if the silliness of new mothers and their ignorance about feeding newborns was just the dullest issue she could possibly think of at that moment, but yes, saint that she was, she would try to help us.
First she propped maybe fourteen (OK, but at least six) pillows under and over various parts of my body. (I was sitting in the mechanical bed with rails–why the rails?–that reminded me of that commercial my parents always make fun of where the old guy calls up to “get information” about adjustable beds and the woman on the other end with her ’80s bob says, “Cer-tain-ly, Sir!”)
Then she started saying things like, “You remember the football hold?” and “Maybe this is the best position for the baby,” although she mostly just busied herself arranging me and the baby, doing things like a) stuffing Will’s head into my breast “to make him latch on properly,” ignoring or at least accepting his muffled screams of panic, b) grabbing my boob and jamming it down my baby’s unwilling mouth, causing both of us to cry, and c) snatching Will away from one position before either of us could even remotely get used to it and trying another one.
A note on hindsight: Those who know me can attest that I am no shrinking violet; in retrospect, I’m almost surprised at the extent to which I allowed random nurses and strange lactation consultants (I’m getting there) make decisions for me. I’m almost surprised, and then I remember with vivid clarity the thoughts that consumed me in that recovery room: I don’t know what’s right. This feels wrong, but so does that. What if something’s wrong and they don’t realize it? I wanted someone to take care of me and the baby, with equal parts compassion and authority.
Instead, every one of the eight or nine (yes, eight or nine) nurses and lactation consultants who popped into our room over the next forty hours–always announcing themselves with a quick knock and an immediate entrance with no time for us to say, “Please come back later, thanks”–had her own opinion and was completely convinced that it was the only thing to do, that it must be done.
“You should be pumping instead,” said one.
“Finger-feeding’s the only way to supplement,” swore another.
“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” said the nurse who came into our room at three in the morning and thrust Will’s head at my aching breast. Both my son and I were hysterically crying, Dave was looking on helplessly, and yet she calmly walked away from us, adding over her shoulder, “Everything looks good to me.”
Yes, I felt like a failure, and yes, I was filled with doubt that these people were doing the right thing for me and my new family. But I was at my utmost vulnerable, and I didn’t know there was another option. In those hazy first hours as a mother, it seemed that my tiny room in that big hospital contained the entire world. In a way, it did.
We went home and I instantly felt more relaxed. “I can do this, now that I’m away from all that pressure,” I said to Dave. “Plus I’m reading online that your milk often doesn’t come in until the fourth or fifth day–that babies gain weight at the end of gestation so they can afford to lose some in the first few days.”
And then the home nurse came to visit. She told us that she had never seen finger-feeding work, that instead we should give Will formula through the tubes when they were taped to my breast, so he’d learn how to suck while he got the nutrition he needed. He was three days old, and while I’m sure he was hungry, he still weighed almost eight pounds, more than most babies weigh at birth. But this home nurse was a lactation consultant, she was “on our side,” and I figured I could trust her.
An hour after she left, we went to our first pediatrician’s appointment. There, our NP told us that Will had lost too much weight (he had gone from 8-6 to 7-12) and that the home nurse’s suggestion to feed him formula from my breast (thus giving new meaning to the term “Boob tube”!!) was outdated and misguided. Then she asked me to show her how I was breastfeeding. This nurse was the tenth or so person to recommend the football hold as if it were the magic milk-producing bullet, and then she judged watched my sad attempt to get Will latched on.
“Well,” the NP said, ”while we want to support you in breastfeeding, it’s clear that it’s not working out right now. You need to feed him formula. I think I have a sample somewhere, I’ll get it for you.” She left the room and I stared at Dave, too confused even to recognize how defeated I felt at that moment.
When she returned with a can of Similac powder and we were readying ourselves to leave, she cheerily reminded us that “you can keep trying him on the breast in between pumping.” Oh, I can? Thank you so much for your permission! Now, should I try the football hold, or…?
The end of part one in this breastfeeding saga is that I burst into frantic tears on the ride home from our pediatrician’s office. My dad happened to call in the middle of this crisis, and when he said to me, “So the worst thing that’s going to happen is that you’re going to feed the baby formula?” my former feisty self started to claw her way back.
That old feisty self scolded the new, impressionable one: there were so many things that could have gone wrong but didn’t. I had (have) a fully healthy baby. I didn’t suffer from Postpartum Depression…I suffered from Breastfeeding Depression, and it was at least in part a self-imposed syndrome. Whatever the choice was, I needed to MAKE ONE so that we all could move on.
I’ll talk about my choice and its consequences in another post, but I do want to include some links here; these are the breastfeeding posts that saved my soul on a daily basis for the first six weeks of William’s life. I wish there were a way to thank these women without seeming supremely creepy; if you’re struggling with any aspect of feeding your baby, these are the posts to read:
babytalk
Mini Boden romper from bodenusa.com
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