Just like riding a bike
If breastfeeding is supposed to be natural, why are so many
moms having trouble?
Lately in the popular press,
I’ve been seeing more and more descriptions of the difficulties
and frustrations moms are encountering in their early weeks
breastfeeding their babies. Sadly, this kind of difficulty seems
to be more and more common as more women are choosing to feed
their children the “natural way”. How can this be? Breastfeeding
is supposed to be natural, it’s not supposed to hurt, and it’s
not supposed to require an army of helpers and equipment to make
it work – what’s the matter with us?
Let’s take a little walk in the
land of analogy – humor me on this. Imagine that you’ve heard of
this great thing called a bicycle. It’s great exercise, saves
fuel – what a neat thing, maybe I’ll try it! The only problem is
you’ve never actually seen a bicycle or seen one being ridden,
and nobody you know has managed to ride one either. You have one
friend who tried to ride one once, but she fell off a lot and
you can still remember the awful scabs on her legs. But, you
know that there are a lot of places you could get to on a
bicycle, and you like the idea of a healthier transportation
choice, so you go out and buy a bicycle, funny shorts, a helmet
and a bunch of books on how to ride a bicycle, determined to
learn on your own. Maybe this is an awkward metaphor for
breastfeeding – but have you noticed what’s missing? The person
who runs alongside you, holding up the bicycle as you take your
first tentative pedal strokes.
All through history, women have
had these teachers running alongside them as they learned to
breastfeed. When you nursed your first baby, you were supported
by your mother, your grandmother, your aunts, cousins and
sisters, all of whom had breastfed their babies. They were there
to show you how, to provide encouragement, to run alongside
holding you up. There was a wealth of information that had been
passed down through the generations about how breastfeeding
worked. The collective breastfeeding knowledge was vast, and we
knew how to hold each other up!
To milk the bicycle analogy for
all it’s worth (sorry, pun intended), think about your exposure
to bicycles before you ever rode one. You probably saw them just
about every day, your parents rode bikes at least once in a
while, and you wanted to learn so you could get out with the
other kids in the neighborhood (who you saw every day). You had
a certain knowledge of what riding a bike would look like before
you even tried. Let’s wander back to life 100 years ago –
breastfeeding was like that. Families were larger, and most
babies were born at home. That meant that from your earliest
consciousness, you were exposed to breastfeeding. You saw your
siblings or nieces and nephews breastfed. You watched
breastfeeding with the boldness of a child – you put your head
right by the mother’s breast, you watched the baby’s mouth, you
absorbed breastfeeding into your knowledge of how the world
worked.
Skip ahead to the 21st
century – did you ever see a baby breastfed when you were a
child? Do you remember it? Were you told not to look? Many of us
stop being around babies by the time we’re teenagers, and most
don’t see babies through high school, college, our first jobs,
and well through our 20s. Even if we babysit, we’re with the
baby when the mother is gone, so it’s not like we see a lot of
breastfeeding. Had you ever watched a mother breastfeed before
you tried it on your own? I know I had only seen it from a
distance.
And now here you are, a new
mother. Women have been breastfeeding since there have been
women and babies, but never have we been so distanced from the
other women in our families and community. These days, most of
us don’t live in the same town as our mothers (thank goodness,
right?) and many of our mothers didn’t breastfeed us. Doctors
are often not adequately trained in breastfeeding, we hear lots
of contradictory advice, and many of us are surrounded by forces
that will try to undermine breastfeeding. Just think about those
formula ads promising happy quiet babies, free samples delivered
to your door, grandmothers questioning if your baby is getting
enough… oh, the list goes on and on. There are those around you
telling you why it will be hard and why you will fail, and the
bottle is the panacea for all things baby. This never happened
when breastfeeding was necessary for survival! And, to get the
last drop from my analogy, have you ever heard a parent tell a
child learning to ride a bike, “don’t worry, if you don’t figure
it out I’ll just drive you everywhere?”
So where does that leave us?
Usually alone, but we don’t have to be. Lactation consultants
can help us through the technicalities of the early days, but we
can also help ourselves. Pregnant women find that spending time
with babies helps them realize that every baby is different, and
any book that promises your baby will behave in any certain way
has obviously not consulted with your particular child.
Accepting babies as individuals allows us to accept an afternoon
fussy time as a personality quirk, albeit an unpleasant one,
rather than an imperative to fight your baby to the breast (with
the only alternative being a bottle). Allow yourself more help –
the pioneer myth of baking bread for breakfast, having a baby at
noon, and planting new crops in the afternoon is a lie that we
don’t need to live up to. If we invite those caring souls in our
lives into our homes to cook and clean for us for just a few
days, those panicked postpartum days can begin to feel like a
nurtured retreat from the world, which is how it should be. And
finally, the medical practitioners we see in the hospital need
to recognize that we are going home with breastfeeding largely
unsupported. Earlier follow-up, formalized ties to community
breastfeeding support, prescriptions for lactation consultant
follow up when a mom leaves the hospital with breastfeeding only
marginally established will all help moms get through the early
days without feeling so alone.
Yes, I will freely admit that
the breastfeeding advocates can be a little hard-core about not
giving bottles, but it’s only because most of us have seen the
progression of one bottle to two to five to no breastfeeding at
all as mothers lose confidence in their ability to nurture their
own children. If a mom makes an informed decision to give her
baby formula, that’s her choice. But I’ll be right there
alongside her fighting for breastfeeding to be as easy as riding
a bike.
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