Marianne wrote: "I feel it is a crying shame that breastfeeding problems are considered so 
normal and I always chime in with Nikki when she desperately wonders what 
has gone wrong with us..."

It's a widespread problem in many countries.  From a recent e-mail query sent me by a mother: "We had breastfeeding trouble from the start, pretty much like everyone else, I think: soreness, cracks, blood and tears."   Her reason for writing to me was Raynaud's phenomenon, described to a T in her e-mail, and I think she was able to get help where she is.

*Pretty much like everyone else, I think* kind of jumps out at me, anyway.  I'm a very unforgiving person, and I attribute our ongoing struggle against painful soreness and nipple trauma to flawed information from the health services.  For years maternity services staff used a Norwegian translation of the RCM's 'Successful breastfeeding' as a kind of training manual.  Only problem was the translator was not someone who worked with breastfeeding mothers doing practical guidance, and 'corrected' what he thought was a typographical error, changing the word 'nose' to the word 'mouth' in the step by step instructions for how to get a baby on the breast.  This meant that everyone was teaching mothers to position the baby with its mouth opposite the nipple, rather than its nose, and the book was found in every single ward, and on the private bookshelf of virtually everyone looking after mothers and babies the first week of life, for more than a decade.  Hideous.

Nowadays nobody looks at books, so we have a DVD that shows a baby barely opening its lips and getting a nipple pressed between them, as an example of 'good' attachment, and another segment in the same DVD that shows a mother having her baby, who appears to be a few centimeters too high up on her body, attached at her breast by two hands belonging to some staff person - one hand on her breast to steady it, and one hand behind the baby's neck, to direct it.  The mother's hands are not involved except to encircle the baby.  The sequence is possibly inspired by Sally Inch's film 'Breastfeeding: the Essentials' but whoever got the inspiration failed to understand that the key to Inch's 'method' (if one must call it that), is that the mother DOES IT HERSELF which she is able to because the baby's body is well positioned in relation to her own body.  

Honestly, what has saved breastfeeding from some of these well-intentioned but disastrous attempts to 'help' it along is that we still, miraculously, have a cultural expectation that babies be breastfed.  If the cultural expectation is also that it may be painful and difficult at first but it's worth sticking with it, then I guess I should count my blessings, but I really don't buy it that all women should expect to endure 'soreness, cracks, blood and tears'.  I am probably delusional since a survey a few years ago showed that more than 80% of new mothers in Norway reported having 'rroblems' in their first month of breastfeeding, but I still think much anguish could be avoided by paying attention to the first few feeds, being available to help anyone who is having more than slight discomfort at that time.

Rachel Myr
grumpy in Kristiansand, Norway

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