August is National Breastfeeding Awareness Month. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’ve been tweeting all month long about breastfeeding facts and tips. And if you’re a Maternitique Facebook friend, you know we’ll be giving away a $50 gift certificate at the end of the month to one randomly chosen mom who answers our breastfeeding question on our wall. It’s not too late to enter. Join in!

Since August 1 (which marked the start of World Breastfeeding Week and kicked off National Breastfeeding Awareness Month), I’ve been thinking a lot about breastfeeding. Week after week, I’ve sat down to write breastfeeding-related blog posts, and week after week, I’ve left every entry unpublished.

First, I wanted to write about how beautiful breastfeeding is. Then, I wanted to write about how hard breastfeeding is. I began entries about how beneficial breastfeeding is for mothers and babies. I have pages that explore how politicized breastfeeding has become, and how frustrated that makes me feel. I started writing about resources to help breastfeeding mothers and organizations that promote breastfeeding. I have articles written about breast and nipple care, and the “10 Things You May Not Know About Breastfeeding.” I interviewed my sister-in-law, who’s in her 8th month of breastfeeding my niece. Finally, I wrote the following personal essay reflecting on what breastfeeding was like for me.

After all the research I did to try to share something in honor of Breastfeeding Awareness Month that other moms would find helpful, the most important thing I learned is that awareness about breastfeeding starts with being aware of yourself and what breastfeeding means to you. 

All of the above issues I explored privately this month are inter-connected. Breastfeeding is beautiful AND hard AND beneficial to babies and mothers AND politicized. It’s all true.

And I will share resources and articles and tips to help you if you’re thinking about breastfeeding or already doing it.

But after a month of unfinished drafts, I realize that before beginning any conversation about breastfeeding, you should first figure out what it means to you.

Breastfeeding–much like pregnancy, birth and sex–is an intimate, personal experience. We each have our own hopes and wishes for breastfeeding, our individual goals, as well as personal challenges and circumstances that affect how it works out for us: for better or for worse.

So, with that, I’d like to share how it affected me.

My Breastfeeding Experience

I breastfed my daughter, but for how long I can no longer remember. I do know it wasn’t for as long as I’d planned or wanted, and that it wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined nor as pleasant as I’d expected.

Throughout my pregnancy, I looked forward to holding my baby girl in my arms and locking our eyes together in bonded mother-child bliss as I’d seen in so many breastfeeding books and pro-nursing pamphlets.

When our childbirth educator suggested to our group of moms-to-be that we take the hospital’s breastfeeding class, I wasn’t interested. “Hey,” I thought, “birth frightens me, but having a baby suck on my breasts? That’s going to be a piece of cake.”

Boy was I wrong.

Shortly after my daughter’s 100% drug-free childbirth at the birthing center of our local hospital, after the photos had been taken and phone calls made and my mom and grandmother had left us to be alone as a new family, I expectantly, hopefully held my daughter’s head to my breast for the first time.

Nothing happened.

Several hours later, I tried again, nervously pushing her tiny face to my nipple waiting for her to open her mouth and begin the nursing baby-mother relationship with me. No luck.

Twelve or thirteen hours after her birth, sometime after midnight and in the deep part of night, she began to cry. A nursing walking on her rounds came by and barked at me, “She’s hungry. Feed her.”

I began to cry, too. “I can’t, I don’t know how,” I sobbed.

“What’s the matter with you?” snapped the nurse. “You can’t even feed your own baby? You just put her on your breast, like this.”

She grabbed my breast with one of her hands and pulled it, and slapped my baby’s face to the nipple with her other hand.

My wailing little girl didn’t appreciate her rough-handedness or harshness any more than I did and refused to take my nipple in her mouth once again.

I continued crying.

The next morning, I was attended by a different nurse who, thankfully, was a kinder, more compassionate woman. She reassured me that there can be difficulty in the early days and encouraged me to relax. She offered to request that the lactation consultant come by and visit me.

I thought everything would be all right once the professional came to teach me and my baby what neither of us seemed to innately know how to do.

Again, wrong.

Latching just wasn’t happening. And by the time I’d maxed out my 72-hour stay in the hospital, I hadn’t been able to feed my daughter for more than a few minutes total.

Looking back, there were many factors that could have affected our initial problems. Meconium was found in my amniotic fluid during labor and delivery, so hospital protocol demanded that the nurses suction my daughter’s mouth to remove it. My baby was taken away immediately after her birth, the cord cut quickly, and a a tube was stuck down her throat and up her nose to vacuum up the offending waste particles. After going through all that, I don’t blame her for not wanting to have anything in her mouth. Maybe they hurt her when they did that and it was too painful for her suckle.

Regardless of the cause, solutions weren’t exactly overflowing.

We weren’t supposed to bottle-feed her breast milk because she’d develop nipple confusion and it would compound whatever problem we were already having with latch. And we weren’t supposed to pump breast milk right away (why, I don’t remember) but it didn’t matter anyway because my husband and I had no money to buy a pump.

Father, baby and I were sent home with a tiny plastic cup and instructions to hand-express my milk into the cup and feed her from it until we could establish latch.

We did this for three weeks.

Okay, actually, I don’t remember how long it was. It could have been three days, but in that first week of brand-new, sleep-deprived, why-is-my-bundle-of-joy-squalling-non-stop motherhood, each day seemed to last forever.

Eventually, we made it work. After weeks (or days) of struggle, effort, failure and repeated tries, my baby girl and I figured each other out.

My pride at finally being able to feed my child was only slightly dampened by the incredible pain that accompanied our hard-won latching.

Like many women, however, I persevered through the pain. I applied tube after tube of lanolin to my cracked, bleeding nipples and gritted my teeth and gasped out lout with every latch until, mercifully, it stopped hurting.

In place of the pain, however, wasn’t the pleasure that I’d anticipated–and which had inspired me all along to keep up the struggle.

There were many times, perhaps even a majority of times, when I sensed that my DD and I were bonding, connecting at some visceral, instinctual level.

But often, there wasn’t.

My memories of breastfeeding also include looking down at my baby’s mouth stretched over my breast and feeling detached and strange, like I was inside someone else’s body having an experience that I could watch, but that wasn’t really mine.

Mixed in with the warm and fuzzy memories of lying on my side in bed with my daughter suckling at my breast are those of being bone-tired, and feeling like a cow being milked and the occasional annoyance, if not resentment, at the never-ending demands of the baby’s open mouth. If I wasn’t feeding her or changing her diapers, I was trying to bathe or feed myself, and so it went for months.

I don’t know if other moms have had that experience of feeling disassociated from their breastfeeding babies, but I’d have to guess I’m not alone in that. I know I’m not alone in feeling fatigued by breastfeeding and, well, let down (pun intended) by the lack of bliss.

It’s not that I disliked being a breastfeeding mother. I just didn’t find the pleasure in it that I thought I would.

As mixed up as my feelings might have been, the confusion and contradictions only amplified once I ventured out into the world as a nursing mother.

Like every other woman who breastfeeds, I encountered jokes, rude looks, embarrassed bystanders, and stares. Inside the pediatrician’s office, or my midwife’s office, or the Gymboree group I joined, I was supported. Breastfeeding was comfortable there around health professionals who nodded approval and other new mothers who smiled and nursed their babies, too. I felt in safe territory. Everywhere else? Not so much.

I found it easier to leave the room at family gatherings and nurse in private after my relatives teased me about the size of my milk-laden breasts. I forced myself to nurse publicly at the mall, or at a park or wherever we were when my daughter needed to eat even though passersby leered. I didn’t return their scowls; rather, I did my best to appear completely oblivious to the head-shaking and looks of disgust. I knew I was right, and they were wrong, and I leaned on that self-confidence. Nevertheless, I began to avoid nursing publicly because it made me angry to feel defensive and uncomfortable when I was doing the best thing I could to feed my child.

But I persisted. I went back to work when my daughter was around six or eight months old, and I kept breastfeeding her as long as I could. I rented breast pumps from a lactation consultant, but couldn’t produce enough milk to leave bottles for her during the day. So, I took a long lunch break each day to walk to my daughter’s daycare and nurse her. I tried different pumps to no avail. Finally, when I had to had to get my wisdom teeth removed and had to be under anesthesia, antibiotics and painkillers, and couldn’t store up anywhere near enough breast milk to have in advance for three days’ worth of surgery recovery, I gave up nursing. Without regret.

So that’s my story. 

As I read through it, I see that my experiences with the nasty nurse and the difficulties I had early on contributed to the rough start. I also realize that my expectations during pregnancy were that breastfeeding would be easy, natural and intensely pleasurable. So when things didn’t turn out that way, I felt disappointment. I also believed (and still do) that breastfeeding is the best choice for baby and should be socially honored, and I expected that strangers, as well as family members, would respect me breastfeeding my baby.

What are your expectations about what breastfeeding will be like? What do you assume you know about breastfeeding? Are your assumptions and expectations accurate, or could they be overly rosy (like mine were) or overly negative? How do you expect others to react to you whether you breastfeed or not? If you’re breastfeeding now, how have your feelings changed, if at all? How does breastfeeding connect with all the other emotions and values you have about motherhood?

In honor of Breastfeeding Awareness Month, I encourage you to reflect on these questions and understand what you’re bringing to this part of your motherhood journey. If you’d like to share, please do! Comments are open.