Luck & Planning: Have your support in place to create a no-fail environment

The author of this post blogs at One Tired Ema.

Unlike many women born in 1975, I was breastfed. “For 14 months,” my mom had said on many occasions. “You loved nursing.” I was colicky for my first three months on Earth, and nursing while my mother rocked in a rocking chair was the only thing that would soothe me.

But more than the idea of being able to placate a squalling newborn, what made me sit up and take notice was when my mom said, “Nursing was the best thing I ever did for you and your brother.” Really? That sounded so…preposterous. From my perspective she’s done many great things for us, from looking out for our education to supporting us in scores of afterschool activities; paying for camp, trips abroad, and birthday parties; going to every back-to-school night; laughing at our jokes, admiring our artwork, musical performances, and written compositions. So to call the pinnacle of her parenting as the 14 months she nursed me and the 9 months she nursed and pumped for my brother seemed out of proportion to what she had invested in us since.

But it certainly sounded worth doing, and when I was pregnant with my first baby, back in 2003, it was at the forefront of my mothering plans.

When I was pregnant, I did what geeky, overwrought parents-to-be do. I read an incredible amount of books. Books about pregnancy. Books about giving birth. Books about how the medical establishment was attempting to screw over American women vis a vis giving birth. Books about breastfeeding. Books about parenting. Some of these books were useful. Some were eye-opening. Some made me so crazy that my husband drove me to the library to watch me return them because he was not going to witness that puddle of hormonal goo grow bigger before his very eyes.

I amassed a pile of books about breastfeeding that ranged from the classic (The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding) to the pithy-and-practical (So That’s What They’re For!). I knew about colostrum. I knew what to do for mastitis. I knew how many times to expect my newborn to eat in a day. I knew how to decrease my chance of getting thrush. I knew about nipple confusion. I knew about poop. But most importantly: I understood that nursing was a skill set, requiring instruction, and not all magical goodness from the word “Go.”

I planned to toss the free frmula samples I received from my purchases at Motherhood Maternity and my visits to my OBs office. My husband demurred. “You never know,” he said, shrugging.

I agreed to keep them only if we could shove them into a corner of a closet. “I don’t want to remember they’re here,” I muttered darkly. What I wanted to do, really, was set myself up for success by not having a plan B. I had done so much reading and planning that I didn’t have any plan Bs. And while it didn’t work for my labor and birth, it did for my breastfeeding.

Having heard scores of women’s stories at La Leche League meetings, at the park, and on the internet, I now know that I was lucky. My baby was born at full-term-plus and at a good weight. She was healthy. Neither of us had any of the myriad small physical issues that can interfere with breastfeeding: tongue tie, inverted nipples, jaundice, cracked and bleeding nipples.

But before I can dismiss it all as first-timer’s luck, I give the credit to what I had intuited from my many months’ worth of research: Nursing is a skill set. And as good as the books were, I had real-live people in my corner, ready to teach me and support me from the time I was halfway through my pregnancy, but especially in the first two weeks after my daughter’s birth.

There was my doula (also a La Leche League Leader and breastfeeding educator), who taught me that the birth experience can and will influence the early breastfeeding experience. It was she who wheeled my daughter’s bassinet next to my bed in the recovery room, lifted her out and said, “Ok, time to nurse!” When I protested that I couldn’t feel my legs—the spinal from my C-section had left me paralyzed and shaking—she held my daughter to my breast and showed me how to properly latch her, then stayed through the next nursing. She stayed in touch over the phone, rushing to my defense when the hospital pediatrician wanted to give my daughter formula for (we thought) an unsubstantiated reason.

There was my friend who acted as another birth support person and, more vitally, elected to stay with me during the first night of my daughter’s life. She had nursed four of her own children and knew a lot about How Newborn Babies Are. She slept on the extra bed in my double room, cheerfully positioning us various ways (lying down, cradle, football hold) every two and a half hours through the night and most of the next day.

Help from my mom—who was with us from day eight through day 16—as as well as regular visits from my mother-in-law, who lived locally, allowed me to follow the advice of another friend, who told me that my only “assignment” for the first six weeks of my baby’s life was to park my ass in my recliner and nurse my baby and let everything else go. That was really excellent advice.

And there was my husband, who never once suggested that I do anything besides nurse my daughter. From the time she was about a month old, he happily gave her a bottle of expressed milk on Thursday evenings so I could cook for Shabbat uninterrupted, but he never worried, never indicated impatience or resentment or questioned my breastfeeding odyssey (independently of my own musings on it)—and it became a four-year adventure with her and, after a 26-month stint of tandem nursing, continues with my son.

Breastfeeding can be easy and natural, after the learning curve, after mom and baby have grown to know each other, after a month or two or three. The book learning was great, but it never would have been enough. I needed my support people; I had them, and I succeeded.