On breastfeeding
For the last three months, I have been using my boobs to feed my son. It still blows my mind that this is A Thing, and that my enormous son has grown so large and rambunctious because of my boobs.
Breastfeeding is truly a unique experience – and one that I do not take for granted. When asked while pregnant whether or not I planned to breastfeed, my answer was always “I hope to!” because you never know how it’s going to go until you get there, if you choose to try it at all. This isn’t about boob or bottle – because a fed baby is all that matters – but I wanted to reflect a bit and share some of my experiences of breastfeeding so far.
Look on my norks ye mighty and despair
My son had his first feed within a couple of hours of birth. My local hospital has an amazing team dedicated to helping with infant feeding and two very kind young women patiently showed me how to feed him in those hazy early hours (literally – I think it was 4am). The first latch was the most peculiar thing, because it really doesn’t feel like anything else in the world. Suddenly this little creature had clamped down and vacuumed my nipple into his tiny mouth. I’ve never felt so mammalian.
Nowadays lots of hospitals encourage colostrum harvesting (colostrum being the super thick substance that comes out of your breasts before actual breast milk). Colostrum harvesting is about as sexy as it sounds – it’s all about capturing the nutrient rich Gold Top while you can and ensuring your baby is getting as much of it as possible. Which is really helpful if your baby doesn’t want to feed much or struggles to latch in those crucial first couple of days. Learning how to milk my own boob to produce colostrum then carefully hoover it up with a tiny blunt syringe was definitely one of the more surreal experiences immediately after I became a parent.
Tit for tat
Breastfeeding is a learned skill – neither you or your baby has done it before and it takes time to get the hang of – and it can be incredibly daunting to feel that you’re the only one who can provide what your baby needs to live and grow. I was incredibly lucky to have a huge amount of help from our feeding team to get the position and the latch right, and even then there were moments when I felt desperately lonely and scared when trying to feed my baby.
Fortunately, giving birth tends to leave you a bit more laissez faire about boundaries, and there are several midwives at our hospital who have now copped a feel of the ladies in the effort to help me breastfeed.
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
Day three after birth is known for two things – a huge hormone crash that causes most of us to weep a lot and the arrival of ‘proper’ breastmilk. Side note – I managed to draw out my day three weeping until day five, intermittently crying because his umbilical stump had fallen off / he wasn’t safe in the outside world / I missed being pregnant / it was all very overwhelming / I couldn’t get his tiny socks to stay on. But I digress. After three days, my boobs changed completely. And lo, the milk arrived and the game changed completely. Gone were my soft funbags of old, replaced by two huge, firm cantaloupes.
My understanding of breastfeeding is that the baby latches on, does a few sucks, and triggers your boob to squirt or drip milk that the baby then drinks (this is called the let down). What I did not know before I got pregnant was that it doesn’t just come out neatly from one dainty hole. Oh no. The female nipple is more like a shower head. And the water pressure can be HIGH. I was not at all prepared for the full force of my let down. It’s like several tiny sprinklers going off in random directions, soaking him, me, the sofa, the lady three seats across, a man walking his dog in a neighbouring county. Whoa, mama.
Side note – trying to elegantly and publicly feed a squirmy baby on a very full boob is a recipe for disaster if you have breasts like mine. If you must brave it, large muslins are key for absorbency. However, if you’re faced with any blokes taking slightly too much of an interest, your breasts can be easily weaponised and used to squirt nosy parkers square in the face. So at least there’s that.
It was the breast of times, it was the worst of times
Learning to feed once you’ve got proper breastmilk can range from mildly challenging to virtually impossible. Problems ranging from tongue tie to reflux to inverted nipples and many many more can cause huge issues for women and babies who are trying to breastfeed. My early days were plagued with a baby who simply did. not. want. one. boob. and it look a lot of perseverance and patience to get him to happily feed on both sides.
There were tears on both sides and a huge amount of frustration at points but after about six weeks, we were in the swing of things. If you’re in the early days at the moment and you’re finding it tough, remember that it takes about 6 weeks for your milk supply to properly establish and the likelihood is it WILL get easier. Hang in there. You’re not alone and there is help out there.
Pump (for my love)
Pumping milk can be a particularly thankless experience. The first time I did it with an electric pump I was quite horrified by how clinical it feels – it’s very much akin to being a dairy cow. But as time as gone on, I have developed much more of a sense of humour about it and barely bat an eyelid at plonking the pump on my boob (accidentally typed that as ‘pimp’ a moment ago – that would be a VERY different blog post). Before I had a baby, I assumed babies would take both boob and bottle. It hadn’t really occurred to me that my baby might reject a bottle completely.
I have spent hours hooked up to my milking machine, patiently and lovingly expressing milk so that my husband can feed the baby (and I can go out for dinner) only to see the milk get poured down the sink when the baby has firmly refused to drink it from anything other than the source. Thanks, kid.
Simply the breast
We’re now three months in and breastfeeding is so much easier than those early days. It’s not always perfect – for example just yesterday my son resolutely refused to feed during a Dishoom brunch, causing me huge anxiety that he was going to go into meltdown on Regent Street / the tube / the train / the bus and I would have to wrestle him out of the sling and onto a boob. But for the most part, we’ve both got the hang of it now.
Breastfeeding a baby with a cold is a particular delight. Not only do they often struggle to both breathe and feed – leading to lots of on/off and gulping down air for you to painstakingly bring back up – you get to see the streaks of snot going between their nose and your nipple. The truly lucky will find bogies there later, because it turns out mashing one’s face into a boob can have a similar effect to using a tissue. I can’t count the number of times my son has done a wet sneeze onto my nip before immediately resuming feeding. Rest assured a full frontal nipple sneeze was not tolerated by visitors to that region pre-breastfeeding.
The breast of intentions
If the nipple snot situation weren’t enough fun, my son is now learning to use his hands and is moving from batting objects to grasping them. Naturally one of the first things he’s leaned to grab is a whole nipple in one of his tiny claw hands. There is no yelp quite like that of a nursing mother whose sensitive nipples are in the death grip of a baby.
As he gets older and more easily distracted, he’s also learned a new trick of biting down and then twisting his neck violently in order to look at the cat / my husband / the TV / an inanimate picture that’s been on the wall since before he was born. My sister tells me this is known as niplash. I didn’t picture saying loudly ‘WE DO NOT BITE MUMMY!’ until he was at least a year old but there we are. My son thinks this phrase is hilarious. Go figure.
Finally, my son’s current favourite thing to do is feed for a couple of seconds and then catch my eye and give my a huge grin. It’s the cutest thing in the whole world except for the aforementioned mad sprinkler effect which usually means his gorgeous smiles and giggles are met with me going ARRRGH IT’S GOING EVERYWHERE! while laughing, because it’s impossible not to laugh when he is laughing and life is too short to worry about spilled milk.
The breast things in life are free
So where next on our breastfeeding journey? Who knows! I feel so lucky to be able to breastfeed and actually enjoy it. It wasn’t the easiest thing to learn but I’m so glad I had the support around me to help us crack it.
If you’re pregnant and reading this, I would wholeheartedly recommend learning a bit about breastfeeding at this stage – I went to an infant feeding class at our hospital and we did a breastfeeding session through NCT which really helped both my husband and I to get a better understanding of it all. His support and encouragement – and that of my own mum – were invaluable when I was freaked out and feeling daunted in the early days.
And if you’re a new mama and you’re finding it tough, remember there is help out there. Find your local La Leche League or other breastfeeding support in your area. Find a lactation consultant. You’re not alone and it generally does get easier!
