It Takes a Village to Breastfeed a Baby

By Redhead of Minimeltdown.

It’s no secret, especially if you’ve ever been pregnant, that people love to offer unsolicited advice to pregnant women. Advice about whether or not to get an epidural or to let our kids watch television, or that we look muuuuch farther along than 32 weeks. So I wasn’t surprised, especially as I neared my due date and I was so big that I looked like I was nearing my due date from about 20 weeks onward, to hear people start asking “Are you going to breastfeed”? (Or rather, “You are going to breastfeed, aren’t you?") And every time someone asked (or admonished) I would smile and give the same response. I’d say solemnly “I’m going to try.”

I’m sure some people found my response odd, thinking I was being noncommittal and flaky. Or maybe they thought I really hadn’t made up my mind yet, but that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. I felt that by saying I would try, give it my very best effort, I was paying homage to the complicated endeavor that breastfeeding is. I knew, from all the books I had read, and the women I had talked with, that breastfeeding was far from easy, so I wanted to be realistic about my own ability to control the situation, because no matter how badly I wanted breastfeeding to work out, I had to accept that it might not.

Thankfully, breastfeeding my baby was a success. In fact, I have fourteen months of used paper breast pads to prove it. And would you believe that those same people who asked me if I was going to breastfeed when I was pregnant, they began asking, about one day after her first birthday, whether or not I had weaned her yet. You can’t win when it comes to unsolicited advice, can you?

But let me tell you why breastfeeding was a success for me. It was a success because I did not do it alone. (Right…you mean you did it with your daughter, duh!). No, I mean, I didn’t allow myself to ever be without help. In the months before I gave birth, I enrolled in a breastfeeding and lactation class at the hospital. I lovingly encouraged (read: FORCED) my husband to accompany me to that class. I needed him to be there so that he would understand when I got frustrated, because I knew I would get frustrated. I needed him to not be the man that mistakenly asked “How hard can it be? You just put the baby up there, right?” That man deserved at least six months of cracked and bleeding nipples as punishment for his stupidity; and if that didn’t teach him, a raging case of mastitis probably would.

I carried the business card of the lactation specialist with me in my stack of important papers. I made sure that whenever someone mentioned a breastfeeding resource, whether it was a book, a local business, a speaker, or a support group, I had them in my hip pocket to be used as necessary. And when it was all said and done, I think I used almost every resource I had access to because that’s how hard breastfeeding is.

When it came time to bring the baby into the world, I felt prepared to face the challenge of breastfeeding her. I was armed with the suggestions of the professionals, but mostly I was armed with my own commitment and determination to make this process work.

I never would have made it without the breastfeeding support group at the hospital where I delivered. The women who run these groups deserve an immediate promotion to HEAD BREAST SAINT. I remember how I struggled to get out the door the first week (and how I had to firmly convince my father in law that he wouldn’t really want to accompany me to the 11:00 appointment that he insisted we all go to as a family!) dragging the Boppy, the stroller, the diaper bag, a snack, a bottle of water, the infant seat. It’s a wonder I didn’t forget the baby. But when I walked in, sat down, took out my breast and began feeding my daughter, it felt liberating to be in a room where everyone understood. No one was staring or judging. They were just chatting and offering support. And pretty soon, I found out that the woman sitting next to me had given birth the same night I did. Except that her pushing lasted about twenty five minutes while mine lasted four hours and she winced in horror when she found out that I was the woman in ROOM THREE! “You’re room three!” she cried and clasped her hand over her mouth in mock terror.

She and I would remain friends during those early weeks, meeting for coffee or a burger, always knowing we’d have a buddy to breastfeed in public with. A few weeks later when I was having some pain in my breast, I would learn to carry on a conversation, completely at ease, while a stranger’s gloved hand probed my nipple to check the baby’s latch. Meanwhile, away from the support group, I slowly began to feel like I was getting the hang of this new skill. I became even more confident about breastfeeding in public (and I’m not at all a modest gal so that was never even a concern) and pretty soon was so bold as to leave home without my Superhero Breastfeeding Cape (my absolute crutch in the early days of getting out of the house).

After a few months, most of the women who attended the support group had to return to work and stopped coming. Even though I would be staying at home and could have kept attending, a wonderful thing happened. I didn’t need the support group anymore. I made way for the new moms, who like I, came looking sleep deprived, haggard and terrified, desperate for the companionship and the wise words of a seasoned lactation specialist who had literally seen and heard it all. Like a toddler who has just ridden a bike without training wheels for the first time, I had figured out that I now had what it took to breastfeed on my own. And that confidence made me want to stand up and shout:

LOOK MOM, I’M BREASTFEEDING!