When your breasts aren’t best.

Melissa Hamblett - 4 Aug 16

Foreword

This blog post has been sat in the notes section of my phone for a few weeks now. It’s possibly the most honest thing I’ve ever written down. But as it’s #WorldBreastfeedingWeek this week, it felt the right time to be brave and share it.

It’s usually in the middle of the night it happens.

I push that big green light on the perfect prep machine, and the water streams into the bottle, mirroring the tears down my cheek.

“You haven’t failed” I tell myself, “it was the best decision for him.” Of course; I don’t believe it for a second.

People often refer to their breastfeeding “journey.” But my journey would be more accurately described as a breastfeeding trip to the corner shop. And my lack of a boob-road trip upsets me daily.

Max was delivered after a traumatic emergency c-section. The amount of drugs pumping through my system meant that his first latch is a vague memory. It’s something that I now wish I could remember vividly. I’m still not entirely sure if what I remember really happened. It’s like I was watching the whole thing happen to someone else, for all I know, I could have made it up.

The three nights I spent in hospital still don’t make any sense in my head either. I wasn’t sure if I was asleep or awake half the time. Midwives would ask me when I had last fed him, but I had no concept of time. I just didn’t have the answers for them.

Max would try to feed for 40 mins on each side. It was agony for the first few minutes, as expected – but the whole time he kept falling off my boob. Constantly trying to re-latch him would get him frustrated and leave him screaming – waking all the other babies in the ward. Yes; he was THAT baby. I’m sorry.

My section meant that lifting him into position was difficult enough, let alone having to do it every 5 minutes. We would just sit inside those 4 curtained walls and cry together. Me, feeling helpless.

I tried to hand-express colostrum into a syringe. 20 minutes got me 5ml. It wasn’t even a mouth full. Because of my Induction and section my milk took a really long time to come in, and in the mean time my poor baby was starving because he couldn’t latch for long enough. He just screamed.

I was told he didn’t have tongue tie. They said his latch was perfect. So why wasn’t it working?!

I’d read all the breastfeeding chapters in my books, I’d devoured YouTube videos on how to latch. I knew about the different holds – but it didn’t seem to make a difference. But, never one to shy away from a challenge I kept trying. My god, I kept trying.

After 2 nights back at home with solid screaming, bleeding nipples and a frustrated baby – I vaguely remembered that the midwives in hospital had taken him away from me for a few hours because I was so upset in the night. At the time I was just grateful of the recovery time. In hindsight I realised they probably gave my starving baby some formula. That’s when the idea came into my head that perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad thing…

I contacted my local Breastfeeding network, asking for some help or a home visit because I was struggling. They responded with a pdf from unicef on “how to latch your baby”

That was it. THAT was my support network? I was devastated, but didn’t have the energy to fight. I just wanted the crying to stop, and for my baby to be fed.

That night my husband went to Tesco at 4am and bought formula. We all slept. For the first time. Halle-bloody-lujah!!

The next day a midwife watched me latch to try and help get us back on track.

“It’s him. Not you.”

I’m sorry?! It’s not my fault?! It was like a golden ticket to the ‘Cow and Gate’ factory.

“The way he uses his tongue means he’s pushing your nipple back out of his mouth constantly.

“He’ll get the hang of it eventually, but it’ll take a lot of practice, in the mean time he’ll not be getting enough milk until he gets it right. It’ll be painful for you, and he’ll be really hungry and therefore he’ll just keep screaming.”

So we started expressing and combi feeding.

I bought a manual pump and spent hours giving myself RSI, then feeding, then more pumping. (Expressing mums deserve awards. It’s bloody hard work.)

You essentially do everything twice. Washing bottles, sterilising, pumping, washing pump, feeding baby, sterilising pump, etc, etc.

It left little time to recover from major surgery or sleep. Gradually the formula feeds crept up, I developed mastitis and the pumping stopped.

During the first week of breastfeeding, Max lost 8% of his body weight, the second week with added formula, he put on a whole pound.

The evidence was there in black and white. Formula was working for us, it was better for Max. He was now thriving. So why did I feel so guilty?

I beat myself up daily about it. That not only did my body fail to do its job and birth him naturally, but I also “gave up” on trying to feed him.

Of course my rational brain knows I tried bloody hard and actually a lack of support was a huge contributing factor. But vary rarely in my life have I failed at something I put my mind to, And this failure hit me hard.

As time has gone on and we’ve started weaning, I feel less upset about what happened. Breastfeeding is but a blip in the timeline of life. Yet it’s a blip I didn’t see through.

I notice certain triggers that upset me. One of which was people asking “are you feeding him yourself” – as if to suggest that it’s not me getting up in the night and feeding him – because I use a bottle. (I now realise that’s not what they meant. But I was distraught and thought everyone was my judge.)

The second trigger is the online ‘BF nazis.’ Of course they’re completely right in their belief that breast is best. But I just want to scream at them that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I tried. I REALLY tried.

Would I like a do-over? Of course. I’d try harder to reply to the breastfeeding network and demand that they came and helped me.

I’d have bought an electric pump. I would have tried nipple shields (I had no clue what they were until after we stopped.) And if, after all that we still had to press the green button every night on that perfect prep machine. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so guilty?

But at the time, I simply didn’t have the energy. Oh, and hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Melissa Hamblett

Mum to Max, Wife, Journalist, DJ, Crazy Cat Lady, Mermaid Enthusiast and Make-Up Junkie. More of my ramblings here: https://maximummel.wordpress.com/

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