Elena 
When I was a little girl, my mother always told me how sorry she was that she had never been able to breastfeed me and my sister. The story went along the lines of she brought me home and all I did was cry. So when they took me into the nearest little town to visit the baby doctor, he said I was starving to death and put me on formula right away. And that was it. I was a bottle baby until I learned to eat regular food. I don’t know exactly what happened with my sister but I suspect my mother figured that even though she had been endowed with ample breasts, they just weren’t good for feeding babies, and so my sister got a bottle almost immediately. I heard about this a lot while I was growing up and I made up my mind that I was going to breastfeed. Part of this, in a way I guess, was to avenge my mother. To sort of make up for what she wasn’t able to do. But appealing to my logical nature it only made sense that women had breasts for the purposes of feeding their young – so it should work!
And it did work, but it took some effort on my part. I didn’t grow up around a lot of women who were having babies and nursing them. So really until I had friends my own age with nurslings, I had not seen a lot of nursing moms and babes. As it turns out the hospital wasn’t the best way to get started on a nursing relationship. My horrible labor and C-section (totally unnecessary in retrospect) got us off to a rocky start. Nurses giving my baby bottles of sugar water didn’t help either. It was the simplest thing that got me on the right track – another mom who had nursed her babies. There was an elderly nurse on the floor while I was there and although she was only working part- time or maybe even just volunteering, she came down to help me nurse my baby when it got out I was having trouble. Every time I put the baby to the breast I sought her out to help me. When I got home I was still having latching issues and I called the La Leche leage. A concerned mother came to my home and had me throw out the nipple guards and showed my baby how to nurse. Between those two ladies and my own determination, we got it. Boy did we get it!. My oldest son nursed until he was three years old!
And during that time it dawned on me that there was probably nothing wrong with my mother or her breasts. I was crying because I wanted to nurse. I wanted to nurse because that’s what babies do and nursing would have given my mom more milk. The clinic where I was born apparently told her to only nurse me every four hours. Their advice led to her failure.
Each of my other children I have nursed without too much effort. I became REALLY engorged after the homebirth of my third son. That kid was almost 11 pounds and it was as if my body was saying, “Whoa we’ve got a big order to fill, we better triple our production efforts!!” But once that got worked out, there were no problems.
My daughter was an emergency (cord prolapse) C-section and transferred home birth. Because of her low APGARs she was kept in a special nursery. I had absolutely no help crawling out of bed and wheeling myself down there several times a night to make sure her breastfeeding got started on the right foot. I felt that the medical staff was out to punish me for my attempted homebirth. They might have. They might have also been short staffed. I just remember being in agony as I wheeled past the station and everyone standing around to watch me make pitiful progress towards the nursery. But I did it. And I did it because I wanted my little girl, the precious girl child I had waited for all of my life, to have what her brothers had had. And she did. She nursed until one day she was running by me with her little 2-year-old self, playing with her brothers and I called out, “Izzy, want to nurse?” She stomped her foot, sighed and said, “Aw right.” She nursed for maybe two seconds and then wriggled away to play. I laughed and figured we were probably done and we were.
My last daughter was also a C-section, but I played by the rules and had a scheduled C. I was a good patient. I got lots of help. The worst thing about nursing her was she was a very vigorous nurser. My husband said she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose and she probably could have. She nearly destroyed my right nipple. It was so sore I winced to put her on it. But having some experience now, I devised a plan. I would pump on that side and only nurse her on the left side. Then I would feed her the milk I had pumped. I called a lactation consultant to run that by them and they thought it was a good idea. They also suggested I put Neosporin with pain relief on that nipple to help it heal. It worked great and a couple of days later she was nursing on both sides like a champ. I did give her a tiny bit of formula that first week because she was really only getting one breast, but after that it was all mom’s milk.
After all of my children, after the first few weeks, nursing was such a joy, so easy, effortless, a miracle! I really grieved for moms who for one reason or another COULDN’T nurse, whether it be for important medicine they needed to take, or other problems that made it difficult to lactate. And I admire women like Cecily, who have babies with latching issues, but who are pumping faithfully to make sure their little ones have the best nutrition money can’t buy.
So with that background and conviction it broke my heart yesterday to read a blogger who came out and said she has absolutely decided not to breastfeed her first child. She doesn’t want the hassle, she’s made her decision. End of story. I know better than to challenge her on that. She knows breast is best, but it doesn’t apparently figure into what she and her husband have determined is “best for their family.” And the truth is, everything will probably turn out okay. The baby will get fed. The mom will be happy (although I could never be happy as a slave to bottles and the nearest convenience store for bottles of formula). 18 years from now it won’t matter.
And yet, in my heart I know what she is willingly throwing away. I know what she is missing. It makes me sad to know that. I can’t read that blog any more. It makes me sad that she will never know it. And as I nursed Rosie today, I talked to Izzy about how when she was a little baby, she was in a nursery far far from me. But I came to see her every couple of nhours no matter what, so that I could nurse her just like this. And I stroked her hair and I put her feet in my mouth and I touched her belly and her pretty face, and even though she was just a new little baby, she smiled contentedly and then fell asleep with pretty fresh white milk dripping happily from the corners of her little mouth.
Related Tags: breastfeeding, nursing, lactation, babies
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