Adventures in Breastfeeding

by Anonymous

When I had Becky, I knew NOTHING about babies. I had taken a class at the hospital and they did encourage us to breastfeed, listing all of the benefits to our baby's health. So I had decided that I was definitely going to breastfeed. 

After Becky was born, my mom came to stay with us to help. In the privacy of my own home, she tried to make me feel ashamed of it. She would always tell me to cover up more or she would make comments about how people used to have servants to do that kind of thing, making it sound like an unwelcome chore. Not only that, she would call me things like a giant pacifier. She herself had decided to bottle feed all her babies. 

Fortunately for me, I also had my MIL, Joanne, who had educated herself and who supported me and helped me learn how to do it well. Joanne's experiences with childbirth and breastfeeding would make you crazy to hear them. At one point a doctor had her on a diet of like one lettuce leaf and a cup of milk three times a day right after her baby was born so that she would get thin faster. She was starving!! One doctor told her that her baby would do better on canned milk, so she stopped breastfeeding and fed that baby on canned milk!! 

Fortunately as time went on, she and her doctors got wiser and she breastfed her younger kids longer and more successfully. But I also remember being in church, being so tired of missing every meeting, and just deciding to feed my fourth baby right then and there. (I'm probably doomed for that. ha ha.) I just think it's interesting that old ways of thinking can go on for so many years. My mother thought that it was like an aristocratic thing to use formula and a poor person thing/shameful to breastfeed and we're talking the 90s! Crazy. 

I'm all for helping and supporting new moms, especially with nursing. We're all so vulnerable when we get pregnant and then have a newborn. We need all the support from good sources that we can get!