Last week was World Breastfeeding Week. It’s been important to me to share my experience because it’s been completely different to what I expected.
Before my son was born, antenatal classes made breastfeeding look relatively straightforward.
Get the latch right, try a few positions, feed on demand.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how hard it could actually be, or how little support there seems to be once you’ve had the baby.
We had a few complications after birth, so we were forced to combination feed and, eight months later, we still are.
Being AuDHD adds another layer too.
There is the sensory side of having a baby attached to you for hours, leaking milk, being touched constantly and now apparently having my nipple chewed.
Then there is the uncertainty. You can’t see how much milk a breastfed baby has taken, which is not ideal for an ADHD or autistic brain that craves certainty. The number of times I’ve celebrated being able to mainly breastfeed my son in a day, only for that to be replaced by guilt when I wonder if I’ve starved him because he seems so hungry.
And the executive functioning required to find breastfeeding support while recovering from birth, sleep deprived and looking after a newborn is ridiculous.
I don’t think antenatal classes need to put women off breastfeeding.
But I do think they need to be more honest.
Breastfeeding can be lovely.
Two weeks ago, we hit another milestone when I was able to breastfeed on a train.
As someone who has struggled from the very beginning with breastfeeding, it always made sense to just bottle feed in public. That was until my son started preferring the breast and I decided I wanted to get as close to exclusively breastfeeding as possible.
So I had to learn to get comfortable breastfeeding in public at a much later stage.
It started at mum and baby groups. Then gradually cafes and parks, until one day my baby needed a feed on the train.
So I went for it.
But it’s not just exciting milestones.
It can also be painful, overwhelming, confusing and really bloody hard.
For someone who struggles with rejection sensitive dysphoria, the lack of support, combined with my son basically fighting me every time I tried to breastfeed for the first six months, nearly made me give up at four months.
Telling women it is “natural” isn’t the same thing as actually supporting them to do it.