The Breastfeeding Battle: My Struggle to Make It Work
It's not this easy for everyone? DAMN! Credit: Tim & Selena Middleton
Once we got him home, the lack of sleep started to set in. While he was in the hospital, I got up a couple times a night to pump, but these were 20 minute sessions that I could almost complete in my sleep. With the baby, the feedings were much more frequent—sometimes every hour and a half or two hours—and they lasted a lot longer. I was only getting maybe 60 to 90 minutes of sleep at a time. I was a zombie. And on top of that, I was worried that he wasn’t getting enough to eat and wasn’t gaining weight fast enough.
Our first pediatrician’s appointment was two days after our release from the NICU, where we learned he was a whopping 3 ounces above his birth weight, which didn’t seem like enough to me. And his next appointment wasn’t for 6 more weeks! I was obsessed with weighing my son every day, and our unreliable scale led to minor meltdowns on a frequent basis. Luckily, he has gained enough weight in the past two months (though he’s still on the small side, and I’m still obsessed with the weighing).
Because the little guy struggled so much with latching the hospital, the lactation consultant gave me a nipple shield to try. If you’ve ever used one, you know they are wonderful and horrible all at once. They definitely help the baby latch, and they reduce some of the nipple tenderness. But they are easy to lose, have to be washed every time you nurse, often get knocked off by baby’s flailing arms when you are trying to get him situated or burb him, and tend to pool milk that drips everywhere when you remove them. Fun. The consultant reinforced several times that nipple shields are a short-term solution, and that I should wean him from it as soon as good nursing practices were established. Ha! I have tried no less than five times to wean him from it. The first time, I was in so much pain that I cried out loud during the nursing session, because he chomped me with his hard little gums over and over again. The last time I tried ended in a lovely bout of mastitis. (If you’ve never had it, picture your breast being fully engorged, red, hot and tender like the whole thing is bruised, and imagine that you have the flu on top of that.) That was just a couple weeks ago. I’m starting to resign myself to the fact that I will always have to use the cursed nipple shield.
Even with the nipple shield, getting the baby started and keeping him going are still sometimes challenging. He will often writhe and squirm and chew on me before comfortably settling in. This is not happy-cuddly time with baby. It is stressful and frustrating. We’ve only managed to nurse while sitting in a chair or on the couch. Attempts at any positions in bed have been a disaster, and I have no idea how people nurse with the baby in a sling or while walking around. Nursing in public has never even become an issue for me because I can barely find a good position in a chair at home, so I’m not about to try it on a park bench or in a restaurant! So much for convenience.
Each nursing session lasts close to an hour. He nurses from each side for about 20 minutes, and add to that the transition time and the burping time, and the time we have to keep him upright lest he spit it all back up on us. The time it takes him to finish a bottle? Ten minutes max. Now that I’m back at work, I have to pump three or four times a day to express enough milk for the next day’s bottles. I use up my entire lunch hour and then some hanging out by myself in the pumping room. Because I have to nurse right before I go to work and right after, and pump over lunch, I can’t go to any of the exercise classes I used to enjoy. I can’t go with my co-workers to lunch. I can’t run errands during those times either. Feeding the baby controls my entire schedule. I literally spend about 6 hours a day nursing, burping, pumping and storing milk. Oh, and now that he’s with his grandma taking a bottle all day, he seems to want to nurse more through the night. This is apparently called reverse cycling and can be great for the mom because she can enjoy that wonderful bonding even more. What it really does is cut back on my already precious few hours of sleep and make me more groggy while at the office. So nursing is really only free if you don’t value your time and all the other things you could be doing with it.
I can no longer do anything that takes longer than two hours without figuring out a strategy for how I will deal with the breast milk. I either have to be home to feed the baby, or I have to have a bottle of breast milk ready for him and plan to pump to make up for that feeding. Going longer than about five hours without nursing or pumping leads to engorged breasts, possibly leakage, and, if you skip nursing or pumping enough times, reduced milk supply. I look forward to the day when I can consider going to a movie, or on a shopping trip where I can go into more than two stores.
Comments
Woman, give the baby some formula.
Hmm… okay, this post really hit home for a number of reasons. My birth experience was rather like your bfeeding experience: I had lots of pretty ideas, and then life smacked me in the face.
My son also took a while to learn to latch, but I was lucky in that since we brought him home, nursing has been pretty smooth. Even the sore nipples only lasted for another week, and I solved that with positioning. Right now, breastfeeding is, I can say, a pleasure often. But. BUT.
The lactation consultants at the hospital were great, but they did not really give us the tools to keep nursing. I was so close to throwing in the towel a month ago. I was in a much better situation than you — maternity leave, plus an easy time nursing — but I was also weak from labour and c-section, had lost a lot of weight, and nursing and round-the-clock waking was making me crazy and unhealthy. They tell you to nurse on demand, but it becomes so exhausting that pretty much any woman is likely to dream about stopping. My mom, visiting at the time, practically made us buy some formula and water.
And we did. I still haven’t given any of it to the baby, but mainly because we found a better solution — a feed-wake-sleep cycle around 3 hours long, with some flexibility in it. So now, instead of having baby snack all day, sometimes one hour apart, I get good chunks of time to myself. And he’s napping better. And I’m not interpreting every cry as a sign of hunger. For anyone reading this, I found the website http://www.mybabysleepguide.com useful, and, later, the book Babywise.
I now feel I could nurse for months to come, but it’s not because of anything they told me at the hospital. On-demand nursing may be fine for the first days when we’re trying to get the baby above birth weight, but afterwards it becomes a real pain in the butt, and not necessarily great for the kid either. There has to be a better way. I’m still a bit frustrated at the fact that I can’t have two drinks in a row, or that when I leave the house I don’t know if my baby will take a bottle or spend hours howling.
Oh yeah, the other thing I learned giving birth? Nobody has the right to judge your labour. And I’d extend that to say: nobody has the right to judge how you nurse or feed your child. They don’t know your situation.
I, too, had trouble with breastfeeding when my son was born. I felt like I was a terrible mother when he lost over a pound during the first week because I wasn’t producing enough milk. I felt like a failure when the pediatrician told us to supplement with formula. No one ever seems to talk about how breastfeeding isn’t always easy and comfortable, so I congratulate you on sharing your story! I persevered through pumping, taking fenugreek (and smelling like maple syrup constantly), supplementing with formula and ended up breastfeeding for almost a year. It was tough, but it did get easier as time went on. And, my son is just fine!
Thank you so much for sharing your story.
I love what Atisheh wrote:
“nobody has the right to judge how you nurse or feed your child. They don’t know your situation.”
That is absolutely true! The recent swing of the pendulum back to exclusively breast feeding, albeit a healthy swing, makes supplementing seem so evil! I was fortunate to have my maternity leave go right into my summer break (being a teacher), so through all of the pain, blocked ducts, and sore nipples, we finally got into a groove. This was only possible with the help of the free breast feeding clinic by the hospital. Praise the Lord for those faithful ladies! But there were lots of crying-during-feeding times, and times when I remembered why it was worth all of that.
Then I had to go back to work. I, too, spent every free moment of my lunch looking like a crazy cyborg, hooked up to my pump, some days just crying from loneliness. Other days, it was a nice reprieve from the crazy that was my workplace! I wasn’t working out anymore, and hardly went out either. A few months into all of this, I just wasn’t able to pump as much as my son needed during the day. I didn’t have an option, so we had to supplement formula, but I decided that any amount of breast milk was better than none, so I continued to nurse and pump until he was one.
There is NO shame in wanting to exclusively nurse your baby, but for today’s working mother/ mother having a difficult time producing enough milk/ mother who has absolute horror stories to share about the breast feeding experience, there is also NO shame in resting, taking time to exercise, leave the house, or letting daddy have a time with the kiddo by giving your baby a bottle of formula.
I know a ton of very healthy, happy kids that were exclusively bottle fed, too.
Marilyn B, I love what you wrote too! I completely agree — a totally positive movement can become a bit tyrannical at times. (The movement for “natural” childbirth is much the same way.) We forget that mothers who couldn’t breastfeed exclusively have gotten help throughout history too, either from wet nurses or from supplements (though those were, historically, not particularly good).
I knew being a mom would be exhausting, but I thought people just meant that was because of the interrupted sleep and business. But it’s also the most arduous physical thing I’ve ever done, starting with a four-day labour and continuing through nursing… it’s all I can do to eat enough nutrients not to fall apart. Add the psychological strain onto that — why should we feel guilty for our naps, our exercise, an hour spent wandering aimlessly around a mall or bookstore, the break we get when someone else feeds the baby, enjoying our work, etc. etc.?
And yeah — my husband was exclusively formula fed, and he has the constitution of an ox. I think we can all agree that breast is best, but there are a lot of factors that go into making a happy, healthy child, and I’d argue that mom’s well being, physical and mental, is one of the most important.
First of all, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on breastfeeding as long as you have!!! Good for you!!! You have been through some terrible aspects of the whole process. Nobody tells you how hard it is going to be, I believe, because no one would do it if they knew the truth.
But your son will get all the nutrition and antibodies and everything else good from you even if you drop one feeding a night and let your husband give him formula. And 4 straight hours of sleep will feel like a vacation in HI to you! But you need to decide what is best for YOUR family. Nobody but you and your husband can do that, and nobody else should. You can listen to everybodys advice and then go ahead, without any guilt, and do what works best for you. That being said, in my experience, I found that the baby wasn’t really big enough to nurse laying down until probably 4-5 months. So if that isn’t working for you but you want to nurse that way I would suggest trying again in a few weeks.
My son is now 19 months old and I’ve only weaned him about a month ago. He would still be nursing once or twice a day if he could, but I couldn’t handle it anymore and it was starting to cause me to resent him and be repulsed by the whole experience. So I decided it was better to stop.
In the beginning, I had clogged ducts, major engorgement and cracked nipples. And I never LOVED breastfeeding. I wanted to do it for a year, he didn’t want to give it up, so I compromised at 18 months. There was once or twice when I wasn’t exhausted, it didn’t hurt and he wasn’t wiggling like an eel that I was able to take a deep breath and think “this is what mothers love about breastfeeding”. I’m glad I did it for as long as I did but I’m also thankful that it’s over.
Also, in my opinion, the biggest hurdle for any mom, is the judgement from everybody else. I lost one of my best friends over an arguement that started about co-sleeping. It was working for us at the time but she couldn’t stop lecturing me about how I was suppose to parent until I blew up at her told her to stop. She was furious that I presumed to know better what my family needed since she had so much more experience then me. Unless a child is doing something that would truely hurt them; running into traffic, putting their finger into an electrical outlet, etc. we as mom’s just need to mind our own business. If breastfeeding/bottle feeding, co-sleeping/crying it out, etc is working for your family, good for you! Great job doing what works for you.
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