Our story this week comes from Clare. She shares about her two different experiences with breastfeeding and how she found the encouragement needed to keep on breastfeeding her second child.
Before having children, I remember once seeing a woman nonchalantly breastfeeding a baby in a shopping center while she browsed the aisles. This image has always stuck with me as an example of how easy and effortless breastfeeding CAN be. I later came to realize that it rarely ever is, at least not at the beginning.
I have two boys who are two and a half, and three months. With my first baby, Ronnie, I had quite a quick delivery and was in shock for a few minutes after he was born. When I came to and tried to breastfeed, he struggled to latch on and I ended up hand expressing colostrum into his mouth for the first day. We were discharged from hospital after 24 hours expecting a midwife visit the next day. Unfortunately, due to a mix up the midwife didn’t come until day three, by which time Ronnie still hadn’t managed a good latch. During that visit the midwife managed to help him latch on and he had a really good feed in the side-lying position. I felt hopeful that this would work. However after she left I couldn’t replicate the latch, and by the next midwife visit on day four Ronnie was quite jaundiced, dry skinned and had lost more than 10% of his birth weight. The midwife was unable to help him latch-on this time, so my husband ran to the shop and bought some ready-to-feed bottles of formula which he guzzled down hungrily. I had to go back to hospital because my blood pressure was extremely high. On the way there we phoned my sister-in-law and asked her to buy a sterilizer, pump and bottles. I learned how to use them in hospital and was discharged again later that day on some medication for my blood pressure.
Various people tried to help me with the breastfeeding after that, but it seemed like Ronnie loved the bottle and nothing else! We discovered he had a slight tongue tie but the procedure to cut it made no difference to his feeding. For the first few weeks and months I would often try and breastfeed without success. Once in a while he seemed to latch-on correctly, but most of the time he would scream and cry and thrash around at the nipple. An extremely unpleasant experience for both of us! I expressed milk about six to eight times a day and topped up anything else he needed with formula until four months when we switched to all formula.
I remember lots of times feeling really disappointed that the breastfeeding hadn’t worked out. Although I could see the benefits of bottle feeding, I found regularly expressing milk was time consuming and inconvenient, and I felt like a failure. I beat myself up with thoughts that if we lived in times before formula and pumps he would have starved to death (the concept of a wet nurse didn’t console me)! The rational part of my brain knew it was perfectly fine not to breastfeed, but I couldn’t help feeling guilty and ashamed. I sought a lot of help and received endless suggestions for new ways to help him latch. I felt like I couldn’t give up, but deep down I wished someone would just tell me definitively, ‘it’s not working, it’s not your fault, and nothing you do now will help him breastfeed’. On reflection, I know it was unreasonable to expect someone else to tell me this. The decision had to come from me. The last straw was a lactation consultant who recommended some tongue exercises for Ronnie. I just knew that trying to get a baby to exercise his tongue was something I could not find time or motivation to do. Looking back I do not regret the time I spent expressing milk for Ronnie but I do regret all the time I spent feeling upset and guilty about not breastfeeding. Time that would have been better spent enjoying my baby!
Following my experience with Ronnie, I made a pact with myself that if my second baby found it difficult to breastfeed, I would straight away give formula. I knew that balancing a toddler and baby alongside regular expressing was not going to work for me.
After a really smooth (dare I say, relaxed!) birth, I had skin to skin contact with my second boy, Frank, straight away and the midwife helped him latch on very quickly. It immediately felt like it was working but I didn’t want to get my hopes up too much as I knew things can change quickly in the first few days. In the hospital I kept asking midwives to check his latch and they kept telling me it looked fine. We went home after 24 hours, and when the milk came in on days two and three, things got a lot more difficult. I was very engorged and suddenly it felt harder for him to latch on, as well as painful. The pain got worse and worse, and my nipples were extremely sore and cracked. At that point we called the community midwife in despair and she agreed to see me on the same day to give advice. All the midwives I came across this time gave both practical advice and emotional support, and were much more pragmatic than advisors I’d come across with Ronnie. They made it clear to me that I should not feel obligated to continue to breastfeed if I didn’t want to. I knew that Frank was getting enough milk from breastfeeding because of his weight, but one midwife said ‘it has to work for both of you, not just him.’ I felt so grateful to her for taking my well-being into account and not just pushing a pro-breastfeeding agenda.
The support I received helped me to keep going, alongside lots of pain killers and nipple cream. There were some very difficult days where the pain was almost too much to bear and I would dread every feed. After two weeks, even though I’d told myself I didn’t want to express milk this time, I felt that giving some bottles of expressed milk would give me a rest and help my nipples to heal while maintaining my milk supply. So I started giving him about 50% bottles and 50% breast. I felt at an advantage having sought so much advice with my first baby because I knew lots of different methods and positions to try, and eventually the pain started to decrease. Finally, one Saturday after I’d had a nap, I woke up to see the cracks had started to heal. This gave me encouragement to continue. After six weeks I could say my nipples had fully healed and it was no longer painful to feed. I was so pleased I persisted because I now love breastfeeding and the opportunities it gives me to cuddle and bond with Frank. I still can’t multitask as smoothly as the woman I saw in the shopping center, but I can just about breastfeed while eating chocolate and watching Netflix, which is good enough for me!
What do you think about Clare’s story? We love how she ! Thanks for sharing Clare!
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