Like Gonneke and Julie, my eldest turns 28 this year. I grew up in a
university neighborhood in Seattle, and had seen women breastfeeding, though
furtively, all my life. I had been breastfed myself, and my mother spoke
warmly of it to me many times, but it would be a wild exaggeration to say
she practiced 'attachment parenting'. I babysat breastfed children,
including those of one very enthusiastic mother, possibly a LLLL, who talked
about it at any opportunity, even to her 14 year old babysitter. Then I took
an elective course on maternal-child nutrition at UW while an undergrad in
nursing school, from Bonnie Worthington-Roberts, in which we were shown the
film 'Bottle Babies', and had lectures on many aspects of breastfeeding. Our
text showed pictures of breastfeeding, with good positioning and information
that is not outdated today. I was in nursing school while pregnant, and got
prenatal care from a midwifery practice where my best friend was a student.
(She's now an IBCLC too.) All the information I got during pregnancy was
evidence based, and there was no commercial influence. This extended even to
the info I got from the hospital where my daughter was born. So there was a
steady stream of impressions throughout my life that all made breastfeeding
seem completely normal and expected.
Looking back on it some time ago, when I was trying to figure out why I
never got sore or unbearably engorged or even distressed, I realized that
NOT ONE PERSON ever put their hands on my breast or my child when we were
getting started, or indeed at any later point. Why would they? Note that
this is quite different from the typical experience where I now work, here
in Lactopia.
I have no recollection of learning how to breastfeed lying down, any more
than I can remember how I learned to walk. I also can't remember not
knowing how to hand express, but in all fairness it could well have been my
best friend the student midwife who showed me.
I knew how to hold my daughter in my arms and offer my breast, and she knew
how to latch on, and neither of us ever looked back. This, despite having a
pitocin infusion for the 20 hours preceding her birth which was an
instrumental delivery after a second stage so long that any other hospital
in the state would have had me on an operating table literally hours
earlier. Any other hospital would have isolated my baby for 'observation'
for at least 24 hours too, because my membranes ruptured nearly 2 days
before she was born. Instead, she was in my arms or on my body for 46 of the
48 hours we spent there. During visiting hours, one hour each day, she had
to go to the nursery, and we stood outside watching her, noses pressed to
the pane of glass separating us. No one told me to do this. It didn't occur
to me that there was any other way to do it. One of the people on duty on
postpartum was a classmate of my best friend, and she shared with me her
story of having spoon fed her daughter expressed milk for the first week,
when the baby finally latched - and I remember that story as clearly as I
remember the rest of my short stay in the hospital. I think I filed it away
under 'OK, so if she starts to balk, I can just do that too.' I asked that
person whether my baby was feeding too long or too frequently and was told
'We've stopped recommending limiting number or duration of feeds, in favor
of just feeding whenever the baby wants.'
I've written about this next part on LN before, but bear with me again. I
was that mythical beast, a pregnant woman who eagerly read everything she
could get her hands on about breastfeeding before the birth. I looked
forward to labor, and even more to breastfeeding. I anticipated a
life-changing experience that would be totally new and different from
everything that had gone before. But when I held her in my arms, I had a
very clear and jarring physical feeling of having Been There, Done This
already. She looked a lot like my baby pictures, and I felt that I was in a
familiar situation but in another role. It was as if I were suddenly two
people, myself as a baby, and myself as mother, and it was indeed
life-changing. I could not possibly have imagined on that day that I would
end up spending so much of my working life involved with breastfeeding. I
don't think I know anyone here who works with breastfeeding who had such an
unproblematic first experience herself so I guess that is just one more way
in which I am atypical.
I don't think it is just a funny coincidence that no one laid a finger on
us, and I never got sore. I was also very lucky, my children weren't tongue
tied or unable to move, root, gape and latch. But it does baffle me that
women where I now practice seem to have no intuitive feeling of how to bring
their babies to breast, when they actually see breastfeeding all over the
place, were breastfed themselves, and have gotten ostensibly good info all
along. Makes me really wonder why on earth the care we offer to women
involves putting them in institutions without their significant others at
this juncture in their lives.
Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway
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