Feeding. Breast or otherwise.

I had so many lovely comments and messages about my chapter in the book, so many of which focussed on breastfeeding. I’ve thought about it a lot in the seven years since I had our eldest so I stuck it all down here as I think there’s so many people who were in the same boat as I was.

Assuming your baby is healthy and well, you go off home, exhausted, emotional and with one mission: to keep your baby healthy and well. I don’t think there’s a parent in the land who doesn’t want the best for their baby, and what we’re told is breast is best. And it is. Until it’s not. I’m 7 years out from the first time I breastfed and even though so much is foggy from that newborn period, I still viscerally remember that unique feeling of hyper exhaustion combined with an avalanche of hormones. Then somehow being expected to function enough to look after this tiny precious little potato looking baby you’ve just spent the last nine months growing.

I was so desperate to not be pregnant anymore I hadn’t even really thought about the reality of looking after a baby, and it was overwhelming. With my first I talked the talk of ‘fed is best’ but deep down I think I just assumed I’d be able to feed her, because why wouldn’t I? Honestly until it happened I didn’t have strong feelings either way about it. I said I would try, and if it didn’t work then she could have a bottle. Rational. Reasonable. Sensible. But that was before she was born, when at 9 months pregnant I thought I was the most tired and hormonal I could be. I hadn’t factored in the whole new levels of exhausted hormonal mania you reach after you’ve given birth.

I’d done the almost obligatory NCT classes, I’d bought all the books and I’d attended the breastfeeding workshop at the hospital with the midwife who in all seriousness couldn’t find my blood pressure or pulse during labour. And I know I definitely had a pulse.

I just couldn’t breastfeed. It just didn’t work. She couldn’t latch, and I wasn’t producing enough milk. We’d just end up doing the worlds most pathetically weepy wrestle every time I tried to feed her.

When you’re trying to breastfeed it’s really hard to describe the feeling of having something both terrifyingly fragile and also at the same time impossibly strong and trying to physically attach them to yourself when you’re so bone deep tired and physically depleted by pregnancy and labour. No one likes to feel like they’re failing at something, and you’ve literally spent the last 9 months thinking about the perfect little baby you’re going to have and how it’s your job to give them everything they need and then then after all of that to realise you’re not able to do it was soul destroying. It sounds melodramatic but you’re also outrageously hormonal and I don’t know about anyone else but I was pretty incapable of rational thought by that point.

I didn’t have a lack of support. If anything I had too much support. There’s a really fine line between support and pressure, and suddenly everyones well intentioned suggestions and tips and health visitors armed with booklets and invitations to ‘nursing cafes’ start to feel overwhelming. I appreciate that the aim is to empower women in their breastfeeding journey, but when breastfeeding just isn’t working, all that support turns into pressure that feels like it’s mounting and mounting. The expectation that eventually with the right support you’ll be able to do it. If you just keep going. Try a little harder. Learn something new. Talk to someone else. The self imposed implication then for me, was not only could I not do it to begin with, but now, even with all this help, I still couldn’t do it? Failure! Shame! Laziness!

At a time when I should have been ecstatic with what my body had managed to do, I was fixated on the thought that if I could just learn what they were teaching me, if I persevered just past the point that I was physically capable of, for just a bit longer that I’d be able to feed my child. And the mad thing was, I could feed my child! We can all feed our children! There’s a myriad of other options to feed your child if breastfeeding doesn’t work. Nobody’s failing here, you’re just feeding your child another way. A way that doesn’t drive maternal mental health to the brink.

You go into labour as a rational intelligent person who has made lots of good (and bad) decisions for the other 99.9% of your life, and then the soul shatteringly exhausting experience of labour and hormones hits you like a truck, which if you weren’t so bloody exhausted all the time, you might actually be able to get a handle on. But you never do get a handle on it, for what feels like weeks and weeks because you never really get a chance to physically recover or get a bit of headspace because you are immediately responsible for this tiny, precious, living, breathing screaming potato. IF you could get some physical rest and mental distance, the rational part of your brain would be able to reason the scenario out: If it’s not working then try something else. Instead it feels like you’re strapped onto a rollercoaser that won’t stop and the loops keep getting bigger, and youre so knackered and emotional that you can’t be rational or kind to yourself about what you’ve just achieved or the pressure you’re under. That insane self imposed pressure was what led to me expressing and then bottle feeding breast milk to our eldest for the first 4 months of her life.

The second time I fell pregnant I started talking to myself right from the beginning about not falling into the same futile guilt spiral of doom again, I would try to breastfeed but it it didn’t work then I would call it early and switch to bottle feeding. I gave myself an almost daily pep talk about not being guilted into expressing all hours of the day and night again, just switch to formula and enjoy the newborn stage without the extra layers of madness. Sods law, when our youngest was born, she just latched, I was now one of those smug gits that could just do it. 2015 me could have punched 2017 me in the face. 

I felt vindicated for a little while, that it wasn’t me that had failed first time around, it wasn’t that I didn’t work hard enough, or gave up too easily, because look I’d done it this time! And then I realised I was falling into the same futile spiral as before, why did it matter so much? Why was I still placing so much importance on it? I’d obviously been carrying around that weight for the past two years, harbouring residual guilt at failing my baby, which is ridiculous. She was happy and healthy and fed, and conversely would have actually been much happier and more fed if I’d “given up” earlier. Instead I doggedly ploughed on expressing so I could tell myself (and everyone else) she was exclusively on breastmilk. Even though I was effectively doubling my workload, I still felt I was failing. And that’s from someone so committed to this madness that I took my electric pump to Emirates stadium and pumped in the toilets of a flipping football game, so determined was I that she would only have breast milk. Lunacy.

If anything, the difference in my experiences, proved that so much of it is pure chance whether it works or not. I was the same person, both girls were the same-ish weight and so on, theres no rhyme or reason sometimes and berating yourself for something out of your control isn’t helping anyone, so just be kind to yourself. Ironically I only breastfed our youngest for a few months before we started mixing in bottles of formula because I really bloody loved being able to let other people feed her. It was GLORIOUS. Not having to express at all hours AND other people being able to feed her? The dream.

I’ve thought a lot about what would have made that first experience better because on paper, it shouldn’t have been as hard as it was. I was really lucky, I had a supportive partner and my mum came around almost every day to help as well, I wasn’t lacking support. All they both wanted to do was help me achieve whatever I wanted, but perhaps what I needed more than support for my deranged plan was someone close to me who I trusted to call it. To say that it wasn’t working and nobody was having a good time here. Easier said than done though. It’s a minefield for your partner/family because you’re shattered, hormonal and so so so emotional, they wouldn’t be talking to a rational person anymore, but a ball of exhausted weepy hormones. Like trying to reason with a very tearful grisly bear.

So it wasn’t that I needed more support, what I needed was someone to be my voice of reason when I couldn’t be reasonable. If we were ever to go for a third (ha!) then I would nominate someone whose judgement I trusted and that I would maybe have half a chance of actually hearing through the fog, and I would talk to them before I got close to giving birth and tell them what the slightly less tired, slightly more rational me wants. A bit like you do with a birth plan (ha!) where you write what you want in an ideal world and then what you want in different situations etc. Nobody has a post birth plan, so that would be my one major takeaway from the breastfeeding debacle of my first daughter; have a post birth plan established before you give birth, thank about what you want to do in the event that breastfeeding doesn’t happen and be prepared for that before it happens, complete with nominated messenger to shoot. 

Ultimately you need someone to be ‘you’ when you’re not ‘you’. Because you’re not you once you’ve given birth, you’re a whole other person that you’ve never met before. You’re still in there, and they’ll be back but it takes a while so talk to someone, or a couple of people and find your voice of reason.  That could be your mum, sibling, friend, whoever. I’d say probably not your partner, because at that point you’re probably going to irrationally hate each other because you’re secretly convinced the other is getting more sleep than you, but maybe if you’re kinder than I am, then your partner. Ultimately, focus on the end goal – a happy, fed baby. How many times does it come up in conversation as an adult whether you were breast or bottle fed? Exactly.