It was 2010 and I was deep in love with my first baby, a son we named Sam. I birthed him with no pain medication, and felt such a mountaintop high initially, but as I descended that mountain, things were not all that well.
Things went awry in the hospital. At first latch, things were perfect, but then, the staff shared expectations that I breastfeed on a loose schedule with breaks up to 3 hours at night, and my instinct to simply feed on demand, according to my son’s hunger cues, was thrown into doubt.
My dear mom, trying to assist me, took night duty with Sam when we were back home from the hospital. Though she knew I was breastfeeding exclusively, she offered the pacifier to help him soothe himself back to sleep when he cried, and I missed more opportunities to feed on demand. He was “such a good baby” for letting me sleep long stretches at night. The truth was I wasn’t sleeping soundly. My instinct was to co-sleep, and I was ignoring it.
Next we noticed profuse vomiting, a sign of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and dismissed it as a laundry problem. I decided to weigh Sam by holding him in my arms on our home scale, and thought my scale must not be very accurate, because it wasn’t showing weight gain. Surely it was just faulty.
We didn’t have a pediatrician, but used a family physician instead. Our doctor expected things were going well if he didn’t hear otherwise from us, and he had us on a schedule with fewer visits than pediatricians schedule. At 1 month, I finally went in to have the doctor weigh him. He was not gaining weight. One of the nurses bottle fed him formula while I tried my hardest to not bawl.
I was so committed to breastfeeding. How could this have happened?
The turning point in this story, my grief and dismay that breastfeeding wasn’t working like I wanted it to, ultimately helped propel me to a place of growth and compassion. I did continue to supplement with formula for a time, in addition to trying every trick in the book to boost my milk supply. Sam grew and got medicine prescribed to him from a pediatric gastroenterologist. I eliminated dairy from my diet which helped his GERD tremendously. Things got so much better, over time. I ended up breastfeeding him into toddlerhood!
I’m sad for both myself and my son that breastfeeding was a struggle, and happy too about the victory of it — that I didn’t dive up. Today that imprint comes with me to my work with nursing parents; I feel so deeply for parents and their babies, and encouraged by their determination.
Certified Breastfeeding Specialist, West Palm Beach, FL 