Mothers

From Erin:

I’ve known that my mother breastfed me my whole life. At least, I don’t remember not knowing. But this information – like the natural, un-medicated births that brought my brother and me into the world - was a fact, neither celebrated nor elaborated upon. My grandmother, on the other hand, nursed none of her children; she later claimed that her milk was ‘no good’. She gave birth four times under the influence of twilight sleep; she neither experienced nor remember any of these births, even that of her stillborn child. Did her mother’s experience shape my mother’s choices? Did my mother’s inspire mine? It’s strange to say this, but I don’t know where these strands connect. We had a turbulent relationship, my mother and I, filled with that mixture of bewildered hurt and anger that many mothers and daughters experience. I strove to be her opposite, as woman and future-mother – warm, loving, nurturing, understanding, compassionate. I judged her mothering harshly, in terms of the love and acceptance I could not feel.

When I was in my 20s, I discovered a picture of my mother nursing me. There’s something in the expression of her face in that photo – the sweetness of her smile, the peace of the moment, us looking at each other so deeply connected. It filled me with a kind of longing – a longing to remember, I suppose, when we were that close.

When I found the photo, I was many years – just shy of a decade – from a baby of mine own. Even before I got pregnant I knew I wanted to breastfeed. My mother – true to style – never provided concrete information about the process; mostly when asked she would just laugh and say, “I just hooked you up and you ate!” So she didn’t teach me to breastfeed (she who had never herself been taught, but learned by instinct). But she gave me a profound gift nevertheless – confidence. Despite the growing strength of the pro-breastfeeding movement, everything I heard about it while pregnant was negative – he wouldn’t latch! It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do! It was terrible! It hurt! I hated it! It’s too hard! She wouldn’t latch! I didn’t have enough milk! In spite of my own commitment, the negativity rattled me. But every time I got shaken, I thought of my mother’s casual offhandedness. It was natural. You just hook them up, and they eat. While I know of course this isn’t everyone’s experience (anyone’s?), it was important for me to know this was possible, that breastfeeding was, in fact, natural and instinctual and that I could do it. What greater gift can a mother give her daughter?

It turns out my mother loved nursing her babies. I had no idea, until I started to nurse my son. We spend a lot of time together, and she loves to watch me nurse. “It’s the best thing ever,” I sometimes say to her. “I know,” she says back, quietly. We repeat this conversation, mantra-like, every month or two. I look over my baby’s damp curls and we smile at each other. Understanding, confident, loving.

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!

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.