Every woman wants to experience motherhood and almost every girl who becomes a mother thinks that breastfeeding is something natural and just because everyone does it she can do it too. Most women like me don’t think they need to go to a lactation consultant until the baby is born or not even then.
And that’s where we go wrong. Every mammal breastfeeds and we are no different. But it’s more complicated than it looks. My journey is somewhat similar. I delivered my firstborn at 40 weeks 3 days and I was over lactating. Everything was right on the 1st day of breastfeeding until I went to the feeding room at the hospital and figured out I was doing it all wrong. My baby wasn’t latching — at all. What I thought to be a good latch was a shallow one. A nurse finally taught me and gave me a nipple shield and my baby latched like a pro and I fed like an expert with it.
A couple of months passed and my frustration with the nipple shield increased. The need to sterilize it every time before use and the need to start doing without it as we were going to travel with baby at 3 months made me realize I should probably throw the shield in the bin. This is when I got through a lactation consultant and got to know that the nipple shield reduces milk supply. The only reason I could do this for so long was because of over lactating. From crying to making my baby cry to I am done days, suddenly one day the baby latched without it and then there was no looking back. We nursed for 22 months.
Again came the time to breastfeed my second born. And how they say every sibling is different. So is every pregnancy and every breastfeeding journey. My second-born not being able to latch well troubled me every day. It seemed like he was on a breastfeeding strike and I had to struggle every day to feed him. He would latch and get away as soon as let down happened and didn’t want to latch-up. With tons of reading and visiting a lactation consultant, I figured out what to do during let down.
Do you know what to do during a let-down? Moving yourself back like in a slanted back chair and feeing helps with the fast flow of let down to your baby. Baby won’t choke if you do that.
Breastfeeding – The First Milestone From fighting rigid minds to feed formula to your child, to traveling around the world and staring back at people when they stared, to not listening to the family doctor when he rubbished extended breastfeeding and called it a mental satisfaction. I have been quite a rebel and followed my heart to go on and ended up nursing my boys for 22 months and 20 months. I just have one thing to tell all the mothers out there, “Listen to yourself, read enough and be strong and always visit a lactation consultant when in doubt. It’s good to listen to folks at home but don’t follow them blindly. You will get there, all of us do.”
