Breastfeeding is a piece of cake

Or so I thought …

Wrong.

With my first baby, the thought that I wouldn’t be able to feed never entered my mind. I don’t know why, I guess I didn’t want to overcomplicate nature with classes, books or buying a tin of formula ‘just in case’ etc. In fact, the thought of taking a breastfeeding class before you’ve even had a baby seemed ridiculous – you’re born with boobs, they have a job to do, you shove one in your newborn’s mouth and they drink right?  And it looks like this, all dreamy and lovey dovey, staring into each other’s eyes.

Breastfeeding photo by Aurimas Mikalauskas

I had it all planned out, I would feed baby for 12 months, and when I returned to work, just pop down to daycare and feed her on my lunch break – easy right? And you know what? Dumb luck for me – it totally was easy. Baby came out, found her way into the boob and 18 months later I had to go and get myself a nasty case of meningitis, where I enjoyed three luxurious nights drugged up in hospital just to wean my ravenous milk piggy. Note: I do not recommend a painful brain disease as a method of weaning your toddler.  As much as I was done feeding and I wanted her to stop, the abruptness of it all, knowing that she’d nursed her last nurse without any fanfare to mark this momentous occasion in our partnership left me kind of sad.

In any case, at some point I chucked out a whole unused tube of nipple cream and wondered what all the fuss was about.  All these people who give up feeding because of pain or latching problems etc must just be soft.

Wrong.

When I found out I was expecting baby number two, I was very much looking forward to the incredible bonding that breastfeeding offers. The dark snuggly midnight feeds where you catch a shadowy glimpse of a cheeky smile when they see what’s coming for their face. The one-on-one time where the world fades away as you study those ears wiggling as they swallow, and the milk dribbling from the corner of their mouth when they are finished and fall back milk-drunk in your arms. The sense of pride that you are singlehandedly continuing to grow your human that you already grew for the past 9 months. For a tiny person’s ouchies, bumps and bruises, a breast feed is like a cuddle on steroids.

Baby no 2 – come at me – I got this

Wrong.

The caesarian arrival of no 2 did not help kickstart our breastfeeding relationship. It was over an hour before I got to ask permission to feed my little girl. For the first few days she struggled, falling asleep at, or falling off the boob. I just thought she was a chilled little bub and at 4.15kg, she was a big baby, so I wasn’t too concerned about her weight. I’d been a world champion breastfeeder not that long ago, so I figured I didn’t really need the advice of the hospital nurses who kept coming in every five minutes to check her latch. I never thought I’d hear the words, “you just feed her on that side while I hand express some from your other nipple.”

Wrong

So to avoid them wanting me to syringe feed her, I started to lie and say I’d just fed her and she had fed fine. Little did I know that this terrible feeder would continue on in this fashion once we got home and I’d soon be begging for help.

By the second or third night at home I was crying in pain with the worst bleeding and squashed nipples you’ve seen. My husband made me go out and buy some nipple shields, which did make things less painful for me but she still wasn’t feeding any better. She had milk dribbling out of her mouth, was clicking, sucking in and swallowing air like nobody’s business, letting go or often just screaming at the sight of a nipple. Some awesome comfort I was to my very unhappy little colicky human. This was not what I had in mind when I imagined breastfeeding. It was traumatic for both of us.

“Put her on the bottle”, I hear you say… You and every other ‘expert’ commentator who would weigh in when they’d hear of our struggle. If only it was so simple. A bottle was almost as disastrous as breastfeeding – except at least it gave my poor boobs a break. Again, she’d be on and off the bottle take forever, dribble, gag, splutter, turn her head away and suck in air ending up with out of control wind pain / colic. In the middle of the night, between screams, my husband would comment that it sounded like she was drowning in milk. Not to mention the additional stress and strain that expressing and washing all those bottles and pump puts on an already time poor mum (I wasn’t ready to try formula yet).

I gave in and made an appointment with a lactation consultant at around 1 month old. Her brilliant suggestion to “swap sides”, was not exactly what I’d paid $100 to hear. And I felt like that was the end of the road, like I’d exhausted my last course of action. But one thing she commented on was Edie would curl her top lip inwards, and she encouraged me to flip it up. Of course, I couldn’t. She physically could not flange out her top lip, therefore could not create a seal. Nothing more was said at the time – completely remiss, because if diagnosed correctly as an upper lip tie at this stage, this could have saved months of heartache.

Where does this road lead? Well this is an ongoing battle in which we have made some progress. Given the next tangent in this story is in itself a novel, I’ve cut this post into two parts to keep on topic – my point here is that breastfeeding is NOT always a piece of cake, and no two babies are the same. If you see a mum out there preparing formula for her tiny baby, please don’t judge her, you don’t know the journey they’ve been on, breastfeeding can be bloody hard.  To read more about our own journey to deal with what ended up being an upper lip tie and its partner in crime, a posterior tongue tie, stay tuned, the second part of this blog post is on its way.

Photography: Aurimas Mikalauskas @Flicker