My Love-Hate Relationship with Breastfeeding

With my first baby, breastfeeding just didn’t work. I’m sure lactivists would ask if I positioned her correctly or tickled her lower lip or expressed a bit of milk. Believe me, I tried it all (including spending many hundreds of dollars on visits from lactation consultants) but the truth is my daughter Chloe screamed at the breast no matter what I did.

Every day began hopeful, but soon descended into a maddening game of Should I Nurse or pump? that I got to play every two hours. I had imagined feedings as sweet, cozy affairs, but instead I dreaded them. It’s a terrifying feeling not knowing if you can feed your baby. After a couple of weeks using an impossibly awkward syringe finger feeder so as not to introduce “nipple confusion”, I gave in and used a bottle. Not long after that I decided to stop torturing us both, and gave up free-for-all nursing for more predictable pumping, which I kept up for four months before switching to formula.

There’s nothing I didn’t try, except maybe to persevere for longer. I was the first of my friends to have a baby, so I hadn’t known how hard nursing can be even when it is working, much less when it isn’t. Wasn’t this supposed to be the natural way women have been feeding their babies since the dawn of time? If so, shouldn’t it come naturally? What did it mean about my mothering abilities if it didn’t?

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