Year in review: Breastfeeding (and baby-led weaning)

Like I did for pregnancy, I am taking Maya’s upcoming first birthday as an opportunity to record some of my thoughts about her first year all in one place.  I’m not sure how many topics I’ll get to, but I’ve currently planned three posts: this one about one year of baby feeding, one about perspectives on labor/delivery/recovery, and one about motherhood.

I think that this post’s topic is probably the most important one for me to write, mainly because I didn’t have a textbook experience with breastfeeding.  Therefore, I think it’s beneficial to have that story out there so that other women 1) are prepared if they have a similar “abnormal” experience, and 2) can know that it is possible to continue nursing in the face of challenges.  This post is an accumulation of the things I’ve learned over the last year and what I wish I’d been able to tell myself before I started breastfeeding so I could have adjusted my expectations accordingly.

To any regular readers of my blog, it’s no surprise that I have a very complicated relationship with breastfeeding.  On one hand, I think it’s amazing.  I never have to worry about the nutritional content of breastmilk, it’s jam-packed with immunological factors to keep baby healthy, it’s always readily available with zero preparation or cleanup, it travels beautifully on trips, and best of all, IT PUTS THE BABY TO SLEEP.  I find it incredibly ironic that there’s such a push to stop mothers from nursing their babies to sleep.  If some company announced tomorrow that they’d come up with a miracle liquid that you feed to a cranky baby and it immediately and reliably puts that baby to sleep with zero tears, they would make a bazillion dollars.  Bazillion.  But yet when that miracle sleep liquid comes out of boobs, all the “experts” tell you not to use it...what. the. fuck.  I mean, I guess that the downside is that you (the mom) are solely on the hook for bedtimes (which are shortened because of nursing, in my opinion), but it’s not like I’ve got really exciting evening plans that preclude taking 15 minutes to nurse my baby to sleep.  She goes to sleep just fine at daycare, and they ain’t nursing her there.  And when visiting hotels/in-laws/am on a plane/in a restaurant and need baby to shut up so everyone won’t kill me, nursing is indispensable - truly magic.  There are clear, significant positives to the whole nursing business.

However, I’ve also had a hugely rough go of it.  It is, without question, the single hardest physical challenge I’ve ever faced.  My best analogy for it is that it’s like running, which I *hate* but try to do anyway because it’s good for me.  I don’t ever get that endorphin high that good runners extol - I find every second of running to be painful and difficult, and then I’m super tired when I’m done, which makes the rest of my day more challenging.  Under those circumstances, it can be incredibly difficult for me to motivate myself to go out and run, so I often plan runs that I then skip - a lot.  Nursing, essentially, is like I spent the last YEAR going for runs that I hated, multiple times a day, EVERY SINGLE DAY WITHOUT A SINGLE DAY OFF.  I cannot believe that I’ve accomplished that!

The main reason for my dislike of breastfeeding is that despite what all the nursing books say, it has always been painful for me.  The books - and lactation consultants - are in complete agreement that nursing should never hurt, and if it does, you’re doing something wrong.  Well, actually, I’m not doing anything wrong - and it still hurts.  And moreover, I’m not alone - pain is one of the top reasons why women stop nursing prematurely.  

First, I have always experienced “transient soreness” (transient, ha ha) - a “normal” pain at latching that goes away after about a minute, but is meant to stop after about the first few weeks of breastfeeding.  Mine is still going strong a year later, and after numerous lactation consultant assessments, is probably due to a combination of my nipples being ever-so-slightly flatter than normal (look fine to me), my baby’s ever-so-slightly imperfect latch (looks fine to them, but she always has deformed/creased my nipples while nursing so that they look slightly smashed for a bit afterwards), and her stronger-than average sucking strength, which has been present since birth.  This pain is small potatoes, though - I just wanted to document that it never went away for me and that there was nothing that I was able to do to fix her latch, despite great effort.  It’s just the way she - and I - are built (but FYI, she definitely has no lip or tongue tie, so it isn’t that).  Letdown also sort of hurts, and always has.

There are times when nursing is reasonably comfortable, and these are the times when (blessedly!) all I have is the pain at latching/letdown described above.  But these times are in the minority, which was not what I expected at all going into breastfeeding.  After all my research prior to Maya’s birth, I had expected nursing to be like breathing or maybe peeing - you don’t really think about it, it doesn’t hurt, and you never really have to think about “managing” it.  For example, you might get an occasional cold that messes up your breathing, but that’s the exception, not the norm.  

Over the course of the last year, I have found that there are two things wrong with this analogy: first, shit can go wrong all the time (see figure below), and it takes time and practice to figure out how best to deal with it.  Second, peeing and breathing depend only on you, while getting milk out of your boobs also includes another strong-willed, opinionated person who may or may not cooperate at any given time.  Nursing is decidedly NOT like peeing or breathing.

In my experience, breastfeeding has been more like the old WHO pandemic phases: 1) pandemic alert, where there are signs that there’s about to be big trouble, 2) you’re actually in the pandemic, and it’s bad, and 3) inter-pandemic, where you’re just waiting for the next malfunction.  The causes of my breastfeeding crises have varied among infections, recurrent nipple trauma (aka teething/biting/tooth rubbing or dragging), nursing strikes, plugged ducts, pumping problems, the works.  I think the only thing I haven’t gotten is full-blown mastitis, where you are super sick with an awful fever and you can pump green pus out of your boob.  I don’t know how I escaped that one - and I haven’t finished nursing yet, so I guess there’s always time to sneak that one in, too!  In the early days, I posted this figure from Breastfeeding Made Simple, which suggested that such problems are so rare - and so minor - that everyone has smooth sailing once they get past the initial hump.  Well, here’s what my experience actually looked like.

From Breastfeeding Made Simple: this is what I thought I'd experience!

My "cartooned" experience of breastfeeding: each of the spikes to a "10" represents a unique instance of plugged ducts, bite trauma, infections, nursing strikes, etc., all necessitating dedicated intervention and then recovery.

On the upside, my difficult experience means that I feel *absolutely none* of the sadness commonly associated with weaning.  The best two points of my breastfeeding journey so far have been at six months when Maya was finally able to eat solids and now at twelve months when I’ve finally stopped pumping at work and she’s on cow’s milk at daycare (we’re still in transition and she’s getting a mixture of breastmilk and cow’s milk, but we are very close to completing this transition).  In both cases, it’s been a huge relief to have some of the feeding burden lifted.  I am happy to nurse her outside of work for the foreseeable future, until Maya decides that she’s done (or until my milk supply craps out), but this averages out to maybe three times in a 24 hour period, a far cry from where we began.  I now think of nursing as solely a way to give her an immune boost, especially through another long winter, and not at all a way to give her nutrition.  The weaning process is well on its way, and I am very, very happy about it.

Which brings me to my review of baby-led weaning - it’s been a raging success for us.  There are women all over my birth club message board who did not do BLW and who are now in a panic because their kid won’t eat anything with any texture and is now also refusing purees.  There are a bunch of one year olds with weird aversions to chewing or swallowing, or major problems picking up food items.  Maybe Maya would have been fine no matter what or how we had fed her, but I feel very, very lucky that she eats like a machine - anything and everything we put in front of her - and I believe that BLW was a positive influence on her feeding abilities.  My issues with nursing would be horribly compounded right now if she wasn’t such an awesome eater of solids, so it ended up being absolutely imperative that she eat well.  The one-and-only downside to BLW that I’ve discovered is that because she eats everything we do, she feels *entitled* to eat/drink whatever we have.  This means that husband feeds her tastes of ice cream and brownies when he really shouldn’t, that she wants coffee and wine and other sorts of things that we do actually prohibit, and that she is very upset when we deny her.  It’s probably good for her to experience some disappointment, so all in all, I give BLW a resounding “yes” vote!

So what advice do I have for new moms struggling to continue nursing when it isn’t at all like how they were led to believe it would be:

1. It does get easier at six months, and again at 12 months.  There may be ups and downs until then, but overall, the trend is toward “better.”
2. Expect problems throughout.  Half of my issue was being angry that nursing wasn’t like it was “supposed” to be.  If you have an easier go of things than expected, then you can just be pleasantly surprised :)
3. Critically analyze your pain so that you can quickly categorize your problem and treat it accordingly, especially if it’s nipple pain, which was harder for me to figure out than a standard plugged duct where you can feel a giant lump.  Comparing the pain to three kinds of common ailments (pimples, new shoe blisters, and infected cuts/scrapes) helped me a lot: 1) throbbing pain with an awful pressure behind it, like a pimple? Probably a plugged duct, nipple variety.  2) Raw, scraping, surface pain that feels worse when things rub it, like a blister?  Probably nipple trauma/overuse.  3) Sore when you press on it, pain feels deep or shooting, might be slightly itchy, like an infected cut? Probably an infection, either bacterial or maybe fungal.
4. Ibuprofen is your friend.  Just buy a huge bottle and keep it within easy access.  Without exception, it should be your first go-to when anything starts to go wrong and you feel like quitting.  Things will be much, much rosier once it kicks in.

A final perspective: Am I happy that I nursed my baby for a year?  Yes, completely.  I do wish it had been easier, but I am 100% happy that I did it.  Would I nurse another baby, if I were to have one, and for the same amount of time?  Yes, absolutely.  I even think it would be a bit easier the second time around because I know a whole lot more now.  Also, there is some pride involved in overcoming a difficult challenge.  I *am* proud of myself for making it to a year, even though I pretty much thought it sucked.  My only outstanding question: what will I feel like in 10 years?  Will I have forgotten all the bad stuff and really look back on nursing quite fondly?  Will I miss it?  I hope I’m still blogging then - and remember to think about it! :)