How I Lost Breastfeeding and Got it Back

Someone I know once said to me that becoming a mother for the first time was “a bit of a shock to the system”. At the time I thought it had to be one of the most extreme understatements I had ever heard.

Perhaps one of the strangest aspects of having a live human being come out of your body is its need to stay attached. Not simply to be held but to clamp on to tender nipples and suck like a piranha.

While the last thing I’d want to do is sound negative about the nursing relationship, a relationship that my daughter and I gained so much from, I think it’s a shame that so many women are still going into it with widely perpetuated false expectations. The biggest of these, and I beg to differ with many creators of instructional videos here, is that it doesn’t hurt starting out if you are doing it correctly. If you believe this, then you are likely to believe you are not doing it correctly in the beginning, when in fact you may very well be doing it just fine.

In my experience, succeeding and carrying on for any length of time means walking through the fire. One friend of mine was told by a midwife to ‘grit her teeth until she came down off the ceiling’. If your nipples are bloodied and even oozing, it is generally advisable to stick it out if you want to carry on nursing. Women with breast infections, of course, need to be treated but even then there’s no real break. Nipple shields sound like an answer but they are not. I know of a case where nipple shields led to the baby not stimulating the nipples properly, resulting in the child not gaining weight: it was probably not an isolated scenario.

Aside from the hardcore ‘just rub breast milk on the region’ advice, there are some ways to soothe some initial pain. Safe ointments and cooled pieces of rubber can be placed over the nipple and areola when not feeding. Yet the fact is that the cracking, bleeding and wincing are all too common terrain that we walk over: or that every nursing mother I know has walked over. The heat from coals burning our proverbial feet forges us – in nursing as well as in the rest of life.

My story with nursing begins with some bruises nearly all of us go through at first birth. I’d been torn badly in delivery. My husband had to leave the US to return to England when our daughter was four days old. I was staying at my parents’ house in New Jersey, trying to face the nights alone. One morning at around 5 AM when my daughter was two-and-a-half weeks old, I felt I couldn’t cope with her seemingly endless demand. I gave her some formula I’d received while in the hospital. She drank it straight down. I was euphoric. This meant I didn’t really have to feed her. She seemed to love the formula. There was another, better way, which meant I could concentrate on our relationship instead of being a vending machine that was kicked continually by its one tyrannical customer.

My mother was at first thrilled to see my spirits lift and thought a combination of nursing and formula would help restore my tentative sanity. It soon became apparent that I was very reluctant to put my baby on the breast at all. I wanted an electric pump. I wanted that bottle there between me and the baby. I wanted to see what she got every time. The skin to skin situation was alien, alarming, draining. Even when my breasts were bulging and leaking, the only way I wanted to empty them was with a pump: an activity that I could do at my discretion and within my control.

What I envisioned to cope turned out to be complex and problematic. My daughter was screaming on and off, but mostly on, throughout the nights. I couldn’t tell whether she was taking formula as comfort or out of hunger. She seemed absolutely inconsolable. I was getting away from nursing, and anxious about everything I got or failed to get from the pump.

One friend realised what was happening and told me I wasn’t just using formula as a ‘supplement’ – that I wasn’t keeping nursing in the lead. She said that I had to put my baby back on the breast or I would lose my milk supply and it’s nearly impossible to get it back once it’s lost. It horrified me. I was certain I couldn’t succeed, but I felt that I couldn’t afford to fail either. I wanted to run away from the nursing relationship and yet I was also grieving it – I wanted to hang on to my supply.

I despised the nursing pillows around me. Every time I looked at them they said ‘failure’. Nursing was something other women could do. I couldn’t comprehend my baby’s unfathomable needs – or needing her in return. Then a strange thing happened.

My baby was five-and-a-half weeks old. I took her to her pediatric checkup. Outside in the waiting area was a woman with a toddler daughter. The woman saw me struggling with my distressed newborn and we discussed nursing. She explained that her daughter had been premature and that they’d had a lot of trouble with the feeding. In addition, the woman had to go back to work full time when her baby was tiny. It wasn’t easy, but they kept at it, nursing when they could, pumping breast milk when they couldn’t until the little girl was eleven months old. This struck me as an astonishing accomplishment.

I could see that this mother wasn’t especially privileged or well-educated. She was simply another devoted mother doing whatever she could for her baby. I saw her in a different light than I could have previously. I knew that for all my education, ‘articulate’ speech and my years of travel, she had both stayed put and yet travelled somewhere that I was afraid to go. And this woman was just one of many struggling parents I’d been surrounded by for years, without ever dreaming the half of what they were giving.

Inside the paediatrician’s office was a poster – the kind that either makes a woman feel proud that she is feeding or awful that she is not. It listed all the things that nursing helps prevent: a myriad of diseases. I looked at it in a state of intense guilt and exhaustion. I just wasn’t someone who could breastfeed; it was so unfair that no one understood. But then the last item on the poster’s long list surprised me: ‘loneliness’. Breastfeeding helps prevent loneliness. Loneliness was what I could comprehend. I was so alone. Maybe my baby was too?

I spoke with the paediatrician. He said any breast milk was better than none. He looked surprisingly meek and human for a doctor. His wife had gone through the challenges of nursing and he knew that the early days of establishing it could be very hard. He seemed to think I might recover my supply and arranged for me to speak with the lactation consultant after the checkup was over.

Nursing was, in my mind, the epitome of motherhood and that was part of why I was convinced I couldn’t do it. My life had been predicated for the most part on finding ways to be free and now I was suddenly trying to figure out how to be helplessly tethered. Succeeding at this was beyond me. My mother was with me, appearing calm for my sake. She had breastfed me around the clock for seven months because I’d been very tiny, yet had been dissuaded by her doctor from nursing my younger brother. That was the late ’60s when they knew so much less. It was one of my mother’s deepest regrets.

Now she waited with me for the lactation consultant, Maria. I’d met Maria once before and had spoken to her on the phone. She breezed in and I remembered what she’d said previously; that she had nursed three of her own children and bottle-fed one and that nursing was actually the easier choice once you got the hang of it.

Maria saw that I was wasted by exhaustion. She explained that I could get breastfeeding back but didn’t want me to beat myself up about the whole thing. She expressed her belief that if a baby was being adequately fed and fully loved, that that was hardly abuse. “But if it’s what you really want, put her on every hour and a half to two hours”, she said. “The milk supply will rebound. In the first six weeks, we have milk enough for two babies. It’s just a matter of getting it all moving again.”

I was afraid to believe her. I could hardly pump anything at all sometimes. “But the pump isn’t very effective”, she reminded me. “Put her on”, she said again, “If it’s what you really want.”

Therein began an incredibly frustrating week, with my mother coaxing me on every step of the way. The alternating discouragement and hope were like high seas. At first, my baby didn’t seem particularly interested in or contented with my milk. She would often be hungry again very shortly after I nursed and so I’d give her formula. This was the pattern, breast and then formula. Even in the middle of the night, I’d start heating the formula before putting her on the breast. Then one night she just fell right back asleep after being nursed. I couldn’t believe it. I ran around the house celebrating by myself, heating up plain old milk in the micro, so I could build up my own strength.

I’d been frantically writing all her feeds, the side she was on, the number of minutes, how much of it was breast, how many ounces was the formula. I kept pumping extra and freezing it whenever I could, convinced that my luck couldn’t last. I still didn’t trust my body. Yet to my astonishment, my daughter was seeming more and more content. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but it coincided with increased nursing. The formula seemed to make her gassier than my milk did. I was careful to steer away from the usual culprits that go into a mother’s milk and upset the baby. The best thing was that her diapers were no longer filled with copious dark goo that stank. Her poos were now minimal and light brown and usually smelled something like butter.

I don’t say any of the joys of bonding with a baby are lost on a mother who chooses the bottle as a primary means of feeding her baby. Just that it was magical to wake in the night and cherish lifting my baby, folding her into my arms, tucking her into the breast that had been conditioned to receive her and that she was practised in emptying. To give her what she needed so simply, right from my own body, was now not only painless, it was miraculous. It all seemed so simple at those moments, yet had come so hard. If it hadn’t been for all the help, most of all from my mother, I never would have got it back.

As I became a community volunteer who supported breastfeeding, I saw the spectrum of challenges that mothers go through. There’s one baby’s reflux, another’s determination to hang off the nipple, a mother’s mastitis, illness at birth, fiscal and cultural considerations and much more. But I’ll never forget a woman telling me once that she was taking a dietary supplement that had all the nutritional value of breast milk! I thought, first, you don’t need breast milk at your age. Second, there are well over 100 ingredients that have been identified in breast milk that formula companies could not replicate, and certainly, have not succeeded in making efficiently digestible. Even the iron in formula is a different animal digestion-wise than iron in breast milk.

There are surely cons as well as pros to breastfeeding, but we should not kid ourselves what they are. The initial pressures of nursing a baby can be petrifying, regardless of the degree to which you’ve ‘educated’ yourself beforehand. Some women just seem to spurt milk galore, while others have a supply that expresses more judiciously. Breasts and babies seem to have their individual style and we have to work with what we’ve got if we will carry on with the art of breastfeeding in real life. Yet we are on the whole better equipped to succeed at nursing than we believe. The time we nurse, and whether we nurse, is up to us in our unique physical and psychological circumstances. Perhaps breastfeeding isn’t for everyone but with a better understanding of how to support breastfeeding mothers in all their challenges, it could be the answer for a lot more of us.

Such a fantastic article about the trials and tribulations of feeding her demanding newborn and how Jennifer overcame breastfeeding through sheer hard work. Do you have a story related to breastfeeding, pumping and/or bottle feeding?