I Love Breastfeeding

I love breastfeeding. I love the incredible health benefits it gives to myself and my children. I love that as a mom on the go I can just feed on the sidelines of gaelic/soccer/ rugby/ athletics fields whilst watching my older kids train. Not to mention the swimming pool, ballet lessons and the grocery store car park. Breastfeeding is highly compatible with life as a taxi driver - oh sorry, I mean mum of three! 

I love that it's free. I love that I can leave the house with a nappy and wipes and my boobs.  I love that my body knows exactly what my baby needs.  I love the journey that breastfeeding has taken me on, different with all three of my children. Each journey throwing up different challenges.  It is these challenges that have led me to seek out help and support. And I have found it in spades, both on and offline.  There is a whole community of incredible, strong, knowledgeable women who have got my back.  

My seven month old has a posterior tongue tie and an upper lip tie.  I knew within days of his birth that feeding wasn't what it should be. Yes breastfeeding can initially be sore and uncomfortable but when your toes are curling and you are in tears dreading feeding your baby there is something wrong.  But every breastfeeding problem has a breastfeeding solution and with the right help and support difficulties can be overcome.  Sometimes a minor tweak or change in positioning is all that is required.

Breastfeeding my littlest at times makes me really sad.  I fed his older sister until one day when she was two and a bit she announced 'they don't work' and that was the end of that!

This time around I've had recurrent mastitis, sore, cracked,bleeding nipples, blocked ducts and the latest joy of joys is vasospasm - a constriction or narrowing of the blood vessels in the nipple causing extreme pain (especially on cold days). We've had two failed revisions and I've had times where I just want to scream in frustration. I feel I'm being deprived of the magical experience I know breastfeeding can be.

Being perfectly honest I'm looking forward to the day my son weans and that hurts my heart. Maybe if he wasn't my last I'd be more inclined to look at artificial feeding methods but he is my last. I'll never have this time again and so I'm determined that I will breastfeed for as long as he needs and breastfeeding needs are about so much more than nutrition.

Often those of us who are passionate about breastfeeding are accused of bullying and of making others feel bad. We are portrayed as doing something shameful by feeding our hungry babies in public. We are made to feel our bodies can't do what they are designed to do. We are undermined with poor information and ridiculous myths.

I've had a doctor tell me to stop making a martyr of myself and to give formula when I presented with a particularly bad episode of mastitis, advice that could have landed me in hospital, away from my new baby.  I've had health professionals tell me tongue tie isn't real, that it's some sort of trendy fad and that my son doesn't have one, when it was been doubly diagnosed by experts in breastfeeding.

And that is the crux of it and why so many of us feel we fail.  We are being failed by a complete lack of investment and it would seem interest on the part of our Government.

I'm so thankful to the incredible women of Cuidiu, La Leche League and Friends of Breastfeeding, who give so freely and generously of their time and their training, even at 4am, when you're a blubbering mess of hormones and tiredness.  I'm so thankful to the wonderful online community of mommas who are strangers to me in real life and yet know more about my parenting journey than some of those I meet at the school gate on a daily basis.

And I'll be forever grateful to the amazingly kind momma who after my latest online vent on a particularly bad day,took it upon herself to not only send me a treatment which would help ease my pain but also to include some delicious chocolates and some very kind words of encouragement.  A real hero.  Her kindness and the mantra of never quit on a bad day has kept me going.