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 Our text showed pictures of breastfeeding, with good positioning and information that is not outdated today.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 *********************************************** Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html To reach list owners: [log in to unmask] Mail all list management commands to: [log in to unmask] COMMANDS: 1. To temporarily stop your subscription write in the body of an email: set lactnet nomail 2. To start it again: set lactnet mail 3. To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet 4. To get a comprehensive list of rules and directions: get lactnet welcome