The recent media report about the benefits of breastfeeding, coupled with my own breastfeeding relationship with M, has me thinking a lot about the "girls" and what they do.
On Sunday, we introduced M to rice cereal since he will be 6 months old tomorrow. Perhaps because he is my last baby, this milestone has not been as "exciting" for me as it was with his older sister and brother. Where before I saw solid food as the opening up of the world for my child, now I see it as an eventual closing of the door to breastfeeding, the end of a chapter in my life. And that makes me sad.
My breastfeeding experience has been at times extremely difficult, and always totally worth it. It is amazing to look at the rolls of fat on M (and G and N before him) and know that my breastmilk did that. Breastfeeding my children is one of the things of which I am most proud.
From the get-go, I have been a breastfeeding nazi. I did not, under any circumstances, want to give my children formula for a number of reasons. The cost for one. Why pay for something I can produce for free? Plus the fact that formula is not what nature intended for babies to drink. Would I rather my baby be given stuff produced in a factory full of ingredients I can't pronounce or my own milk? Since my OCD brings with it tons and tons of health- and germ-related anxieties, the idea of not giving my babies breast milk that is chock full of antibodies was simply intolerable.
This diehard approach to breastfeeding has been a blessing and a curse. My determination to do it made me just plug on through all the difficulties I have experienced in my breastfeeding career: severely cracked nipples, nipple eczema, a ductal yeast infection, mastitis (at the same time as the yeast infection). Whenever I have had a time when I felt like throwing in the towel, I read in the breastfeeding books I own about all the benefits of breastfeeding to steel my resolve to just keep going. Get over the hump. I'm pretty good at persevering when I believe strongly in something.
But this determination has, at times, brought with it considerable pressure and anxiety that I've brought on myself. Breastfeeding failure means personal failure. If I stopped nursing before trying everything under the sun to preserve the breastfeeding relationship, then I simply wouldn't be the kind of mom I wanted to be. I would have let my children and myself down. I'm not exaggerating when I say I would have been (and still would be) devastated to stop breastfeeding prior to 6 months or a year.
Clearly, in 36 years of living, I have yet to learn how to be gentle with myself.
And unfortunately, I tend to think everyone else should have as crazy high standards for themselves as what I do for me.
1 comment:
I've never been so much of a purist, since my mother was...and ended up starving my little sister (who was exclusively breastfed and yet gained just 2 oz in 3 months). I still wonder if my sister's ADD and other brain difficulties was somehow started with this lack of fat for her brain.
And then there was my sister...whose breasts literally just didn't produce milk, probably due to her hormones during her teens that led her to have "immature breast tissue".
I think you just cannot know the story behind why a mother isn't breastfeeding...and I know for a fact it isn't always laziness or inconvenience or lack of perseverence. Sometimes breastmilk ISN'T best.
But even though I feel strongly about this, when I went to the doctor with my newborn Michael, and he wasn't thriving...gaining 2 oz in his first month, despite being my best nurser of the 3 kids...when I was first faced with the fact that my breastmilk just wasn't cutting it...I fought it tooth and nail. And I felt such a sadness that I couldn't do it. And I judged myself 10 times harder than I have ever judged someone else. So, I guess, why ARE we so hard on ourselves? :)
Post a Comment