Breast is Best…except when it isn’t

claire smith - 28 Nov 16

If you’d have asked me before, I would have said without hesitation breast feeding is the most natural thing in the world. Woman have breasts, breasts feed babies. Mother Nature providing a way for babies to feed no matter where you are, great.

Until the time came. Maybe it’s because I’d had them to myself for 40 years. Maybe it’s because their prime purpose Before Child was not remotely maternal. All I know is that when the time came to actually breast feed I freaked. It did not feel at all ‘natural’. It felt anything but.

Firstly was the issue of actually getting any milk out of them. As well as feeling incompetent that I couldn’t pick up my baby easily due to the c section, I was now feeling totally inadequate in the feeding department. You would think that someone with natural DD breasts could pump out the milk free flowing. But no. On day one, there was the nurse, squeezing my nipple with a plastic syringe thing ready to extract what she called the ‘golden nectar’ otherwise known as colostrum straight into the baby’s mouth in order that he got as much ‘goodness’ as possible.

Then the milk was supposed to kick in. Except it didn’t. And if you ever harbour any thoughts that the baby just magically latches on much like you see the piglets do in farms, then you are wrong. For some god unknown reason Mother Nature forgot to tell babies how to immediately find the nipple and suck properly as soon as they arrive.

Or at least she did in my case. I can remember being in an NCT class and the teacher saying if you just lay the baby across the breast he will snuffle round naturally until he finds the nipple and can then be gently coaxed on. Right. Didn’t happen.

When we got home, I was then informed by the visiting midwife that in all her time she had never seen someone not be able to produce milk in the way I was so I should give up and go straight to bottle. Cue more tears and feelings of total guilt.

Luckily that’s where BF came in. As previously mentioned, when she saw me hunched over the manual breast pump manically pumping she immediately had an electric one ordered. She also told me to massage my breasts, especially in a warm shower to help ‘get it all going’. If I typed that sentence under any other circumstance I’m sure it would be rather exciting but with one boob hard and lumpy from blocked milk ducts and on the verge of mastitis it was anything but.

The massaging and the electric pump started to work. My milk did start flowing. However it was still not enough. So on the advice of the next midwife we started combining the breast milk with formula milk. Because that’s exactly what you need when you are out of your brain with no sleep and are then making a chart detailing how many ml of breast milk and how much formula has gone into which bottle and how many days old it all is.

It also seemed that no sooner had I fed the baby the bottle, got him to sleep, sat with each breast in a pump for half an hour each side, that the baby would be awake again and the whole thing would start again, with me not having left the sofa. I felt like a trapped milking cow.

At the back of my mind I kept telling myself that breast is best, it is what nature intended, if I did not keep this up I was failing my baby. And I still feel those sentiments to be true. But after six weeks of it I had had enough.

And the funny thing was as soon as we switched to just formula it was like a load had been lifted. I was much happier, the baby was absolutely fine and things did not seem quite so desperate as they were before.

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claire smith

first time motherhood at 40 years of age, even brought him home on my birthday (what timing :) been figuring it out ever since...

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