When Breastfeeding Awareness Is Painful
This year was the first year that I’ve had a baby during world breastfeeding week that I wasn’t breastfeeding.
Every other newborn and I have marched forward with breasts out proudly, triumphing in what was, for us, a relatively easy relationship with nursing. While my first son had been demanding in his frequent feeding cycle, by the time I had my second, I was a confident, assured and educated doula and second time nursing mom.
I’d like to think that I’ve gotten even MORE relaxed the third time around. While my daughter took to nursing like her brothers, I definitely didn’t have the same supply the third time around. Preparing for stocking the freezer with milk in my absence to attend births and work away from her became more difficult.
At first, I chalked it up to the fact that we were giving bottles earlier than we had with both the others, who had staunchly refused bottles for a few months. Our daughter simply didn’t have that luxury - on her two month mark I was gone for 24 hours supporting a family in labor. Over time, I noticed that I was no longer easily able to keep up with the demand of pumped milk when I was gone.
It was during this time that we decided to introduce supplemented milk in my absence, which I hadn’t done with either of the boys. Ever.
Surprisingly, it was a freeing decision. My daughter was already taking a bottle freely, so the pressure of pumping enough was off and I could attend to work and nurse with her at home.
Just prior to the one year mark, for medical reasons, we had to force wean my daughter. I was going onto a medication impossible to nurse with - a conclusion come to after frequent calls to the Infant Risk line, two trusted lactation consultant colleagues and my doctors. I tearfully ended what was supposed to be a gradual, slow to end part of my mothering relationship with my child, before both of us were ready.
Is my daughter traumatized, worse off, or less healthy because of my need to end that relationship early? I don’t believe so. Am I?
I thought I wasn’t.
When the posts began this week, the week I always felt included and united in solidarity with the other women that have had such an easy time, such a hard time, exclusively nursing, tandem nursing, supplementing and nursing, exclusively pumping, I started to feel isolated.
I didn’t have a baby to nurse this week, and I should.
This ignited in me a renewed purpose for the awareness around breastfeeding in light of the week’s advocacy and support. For every mother who has found support in her nursing goals, we need to uplift the mother who is grieving an early end to her nursing relationship as well. The mother who might feel left out. The ones who felt they might have failed, or needed to give up nursing to go back to work. Who, before better laws were in place to support them in the workplace, needed to quit pumping because it was just too hard to make it work at their place of employment.
We need to step up and continue to educate that yes, breastfeeding and the education and goals and resources are vast and great. But we also need to guide women to find what works for them. To give the very best supplementing guides. To help praise their decisions to feed their children. To hug them when they’re feeling isolated, especially this week, because their journey didn’t look the same as another’s.
I realize this might come as a blow to the breastfeeding community. For so long, the cry of educating for better nursing support has created a deafening roar. Simply, that may not be everyone’s path. Inclusivity around nursing and feeding options and roads has a seat for both the exclusively nursing mother and the mother who needs to, as I did, find other avenues of feeding her child the best way she knows.
Because at the root of World Breastfeeding Week, I feel, is a sense of support for humanity.
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