When I was pregnant, people would often ask whether I was planning on breastfeeding. I would always give the same answer, “I’m going to give it a go but if it doesn’t work for me, I won’t beat myself up about it”…famous last words!
When my daughter was born and I was on the recovery ward, a midwife came in and offered to help me get my baby to latch on to feed. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but later when I did, I realised there was just that immediate assumption that I would be breastfeeding.
“Breast is best” is the phrase you hear a lot of when pregnant and a new Mum. Yes, there are so many benefits to breastfeeding for your little one, but there are also so many factors that can make breastfeeding difficult for some mum’s, or even the baby! That wording, “breast is best” makes many women, including myself, feel under pressure to succeed in breastfeeding.
The difficulties I faced around breastfeeding is something I struggle with hugely.
Our first night at home was awful. I had forty five minutes sleep that night. My daughter constantly fed, I would then lie her back down and five minutes later she was up again. She was so emotional and at times beside herself, we couldn’t console her. All I could do was keep feeding her. It was the next morning, that we had a visit from a midwife. We were readmitted back to hospital due to her having lost 13% of her weight. She was 8lb 6oz when she was born, she was now 7lb 2oz. I was heartbroken. I now knew why she was constantly feeding and inconsolable. I obviously hadn’t been doing it right. She was so hungry and all that time I thought she was feeding, she hadn’t actually been getting any milk. This is one of my major PTSD triggers. Even now, nearly two years later, if my daughter is really emotional and it is hard to calm her down, I am hit with these memories and my body and mind will struggle for a few days.
When back at the hospital further tests were done on her. She was severely dehydrated. I couldn’t cope, and still struggle to, with the thought that she was that hungry and poorly and me, her Mum couldn’t meet her needs.
We were put on a ‘feeding plan’, this made me feel even more of a failure. I couldn’t help but think everyone would think I wasn’t capable of looking after my baby. Would she be taken from me if I couldn’t complete the feeding plan!?
What followed was an exhausting two nights of breastfeeding, expressing milk and bottle feeding. We had to wake her regularly throughout the night to try and get more milk into her.
Three days later she had put some of her weight back on and we were discharged. Although we were back home we had to take her for a check up every other day for an extra week to ensure she was progressing well. It was at one of these appointments that a midwife asked how I was doing. I got emotional and mentioned how guilty I felt that this had happened. She explained to me that babies born by caesarean are prone to losing more weight in the first few days. Also blood loss during the surgery is a major contributing factor to weight loss in babies. I lost 1.5 litres of blood, my body needed time to recover. It physically couldn’t produce the milk needed to regularly feed a newborn straight away. The midwife was shocked that none of this had been explained to me. Not one midwife, doctor or paediatrician had told me this until then.
I continued to try and breastfeed but the anxiety was too much. She had trouble latching on properly which was toe-curlingly painful. The times she did latch on properly I still couldn’t relax, how did I know for sure that she was getting enough milk!? I started to think about bottle feeding but the sense of failure was strong. I was so lucky to have a lovely Health Visitor who supported me through this.
It’s taken me a long time but I’ve come to accept that it’s ok that breastfeeding didn’t work for us. I think instead of ‘breast is best’ it’s ‘fed is best’. As much as I wanted to succeed at breastfeeding I had to make a decision that was right for both my daughter’s and my own well-being. I now know that making that decision, was my success.