With the above disclaimer, I think I have eliminated just about my entire readership. Which is a pity because I have been toying with writing about breastfeeding for some time. If you choose to proceed despite my strictures, be warned that this entry contains anatomical details that might make some readers squirm.
As with most things related to motherhood, my reaction to breastfeeding has been complex and layered. The joys of breastfeeding are real. It is magical to feed my baby in such a primitive, age-old way. In this crazy modern world we live in, breastfeeding is my primordial nod to the past, linking me with a rite that goes back millions of years. Breastfeeding is a private communion between my baby and me. And that makes it beautiful.
But it is also laborious. Being my baby’s sole provider of food is a daunting responsibility and for a long time, the mantle of that responsibility lay heavily on my shoulders. I fretted about having enough milk and about whether Sasha was getting enough to eat. That is in the past now, but I maintain that at least for me, breastfeeding is sometimes more of a burden than a joy. As my baby’s food bank, I am the it girl. The buck stops with me. I may be tired or sick or both, but my baby will still be hungry and I will still need to whip up the energy to feed him. In the middle of the night, it is I who get up to feed the baby. Despite my husband’s lifelong and well known insomnia, he now sleeps through the night while I heave myself out of bed to feed the baby. Even with Demian’s commendable intentions as a father, the reality is that there isn’t much he can do in the middle of the night to help me or Sasha. I can never stray too far from my child since his food is contained within me. It is a little as though with breastfeeding, the umbilical cord hasn’t been severed yet.
To complicate things, there is the issue of diet. After nine long months of total or near deprivation from some of my favourite foods and beverages (sushi, alcohol), I've discovered that with breastfeeding, the list of forbidden fruits gets longer. According to one website, www.askdrsears.com, here is the list of foods to cut out if experiencing any problems with breastfeeding:
• Dairy products
• Caffeine – coffee, tea, soda
• Soy products
• Peanuts
• Shellfish
• Chocolate
• Citrus fruits
• Wheat
• Chicken
• Beef
• Eggs
• Nuts
• Corn
• Prenatal vitamins
• Gassy vegetables:
- Broccoli
- Cauliflower
- Cabbage
- Onions
- Green peppers
- Tomatoes
So, that’s cool. I should just subsist on some rice and lettuce and get on with it. Revealingly, there is no suggestion on the web site about what foods are allowed. No recommended recipes. No recognition that for the harried, sleep-deprived new mom, actually adhering to this list is well nigh impossible.
This gets to me. I know, and love, that I am giving my baby the best possible source of nutrition. The advantages of breast milk over formula are manifest and much-touted. I think my milk is especially valuable to Sasha because he was premature and needs all the help he can get. The doctors make me feel like a rock star for being able to breastfeed at all, given that for many mothers, having your baby in the ICU under stressful circumstances is enough to make the milk dry up. So, I feel absolutely wonderful about feeding my baby my milk. Not to mention that it is cheap and convenient, in its way. As my mother says, breast milk is always at the right temperature, is wonderfully portable and comes pre-packaged in an attractive container (her words, not mine). This ancient symbiosis pleases me in a very basic sense.
But when reality hits at say 3 am, I think two things. First I think, Man, formula looks tempting right now. Second I think that it would be nice if more practitioners simply acknowledged that fulltime breastfeeding is draining. Good for the baby, yes. But hard on the mother. Especially at first. I think it takes a community to help a woman to breastfeed. She needs a lot of encouragement. You would think that after millions of years, our breasts would be perfectly suited to a baby’s suckling and it would all fall into place naturally. But this isn’t how it works.
First, there is the issue of engorgement. When my milk came in, I thought my breasts were going to fall off. This is not a turn of phrase. I peered at them anxiously in the hospital room mirror, in constant expectation of a spontaneous explosion of one or both of them. When I jumped up and down, they didn’t move. At all. They just pointed directly outward, rigidly standing at attention.
If that isn’t enough to make you shudder, consider this: when a woman’s nipple is in her baby’s mouth, the baby sucks it back about halfway to its ear. This is what is known as a proper latch. That nipple is being stretched to about four times its normal size when the baby is eating. And that’s if he doesn’t decide to crane his neck and have a look around while staying securely latched to the mother.
Then there is the pain of nipple damage. Cracked nipples are just exactly as painful as they sound. Fortunately, nipple damage decreases over time, as one’s nipples toughen up. Anyone who was seen – and hoped for - her nipples to toughen up as a result of breastfeeding has categorically stopped considering her own breasts in a sexual way.
Luckily, I didn’t suffer too much nipple damage. That’s because, as with most of my experience with pregnancy and motherhood, my introduction to breastfeeding was not typical. Since Sasha was in the neonatal ICU for just under a month when he was born, I started “breastfeeding” an electric pump. This was not exactly what I had envisioned. Trying to strike up a relationship with a cold plastic machine instead of a snugly, cuddly baby was...different.
The pumping schedule imposed by the ICU nurses was punishing: every three hours, every day, until he was out, which turned out to be 26 days later. The milk had to be stored in sterilised bottles that were dutifully trundled to the ICU every day or frozen for later use.
While this wasn’t exactly the baby-mother bonding I had expected, there were advantages to starting this way. Chief among them was that I was overproducing milk, since the demand on my breasts was artificial (it didn’t come from Sasha but from following a rigid schedule with the pump). That meant that I was able to feed Sasha and store some milk too. After a month’s hard work at feeding my baby and storing the extra, I had a whopping litre and a half of milk frozen in my freezer. I thought this was great until I found out, discouragingly, that this would feed Sasha for maybe one day and a half. All that work for a day and a half’s worth of extra milk. It’s no wonder they call this stuff white gold.
These days, Sasha pumps the milk out himself and we have a pretty good thing going. In fact, breastfeeding is sometimes a bit of a power trip. I can take a wailing, screeching Sasha and stick him on the breast and the change is Copernican. Instantly, he stops crying and begins to feed. I am well aware that it is not this way with all babies, and it makes me feel like a goddess every time he does it. At the end of every feed, he always smacks his lips together, as though he’s just scarfed down a bucket of KFC. Finger-lickin’ good.
The only thing that has me slightly vexed is that the milk production of my breasts is asymmetrical. My left breast, affectionately known as Pamela, produces roughly three times as much milk as my right breast, known as crappy breast. I don’t recollect when this started or how, but there it is. Milk simply pours out of Pamela, while crappy breast struggles. Sasha, like the smart kid he is, follows the milk, thus perpetuating the cycle. I have no idea what long term consequences this will have for me and I don’t want to know. But if you ever see me on Barcelona beach and notice an anatomical imbalance in my bikini top, please don’t comment on it.
Acknowledgements: When I wrote that a woman needs a community to help her to breastfeed, I meant it. In my case, my thanks go out to my mother, for washing and sterilising that pump and those bottles day in and day out; to Shanti and my cousin Jenn, for their invaluable, always-reliable advice; to the neonatal nurse Vicky, for being my hands-on teacher; and to Demian, for making me feel like a rock star mom.
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