Part 8: 'Why should you be different?'

Friday comes around, and I decide it’s time to babymoon.  My breasts have had the stimulation of my son’s nursing (with the SNS), plus regular pumping.  Tommy’s now used to latching again.  So for the first feed of the day, I decide, I’ll ditch the SNS and top ups, strip down to skin to skin with my son, and let him stay there feeding as long as he wishes.  My husband has to go to work, so he leaves us wishing us a lovely day in bed together, and for once instead of dreading it I am excited about my son waking for his next feed. 

Alas, the babymoon is a disaster.  Without the SNS Tommy won’t contemplate latching, and just screams and fusses.  Instead of some wonderful, bonding, skin to skin time, we’re both crying, frustrated, and distressed.  Eventually I admit defeat, run downstairs and get the two bottles: expressed (I’ve only managed about 10mls) and formula.  I don’t even have time to fiddle with the SNS as my son is desperate and the parts are all still in the sterilizer.  So I let him down the two bottles one after the other, and he finally falls asleep on my chest. 

A thought strikes me – I’m due my last community midwife visit before they discharge me.  I carefully ease Tommy off my chest and onto my bed, so that I can go and get a shower.  After all the screaming, and alone in the house with no one to take over while I wash, I don’t want to wake him, so I leave him in the same position, on his chest, in the middle of the bed, pulling up the duvet just to cover his back.  I rush off and shower, and manage to get into my dressing gown as the doorbell goes.  I run down and open the door and sit down with the midwife to talk about how I’m getting on. ‘Where’s the baby?’ ‘Oh, he’s upstairs sleeping – come on up.’  As I lead her up the stairs I suddenly realize what I’ve done – my son is asleep, stark naked apart from his nappy, on an adult bed, on his front, covered with a duvet, and surrounded with empty bottles of formula.  The midwife’s face drops when we go in - I must look like the worst mum in the world.  I try to explain what we’ve been doing and that he’s not always left like this, and she seems to buy it (or she just wants to sign me off and move on anyway). 

I tell her my newest plan for breastfeeding, hatched in the shower after the clearly failed babymoon.  I’ll continue to feed using the SNS, and just ditch the breastpump (I strongly feel the need to simplify one way or another, and all the time at the breastpump for mere drops is just getting me down).  ‘Oh no – you’ll have to keep pumping if you ever want to get back to exclusive breastfeeding’, she tells me.  ‘Even if you’re not getting much from the pump, your breasts are still getting the stimulation and the signals to produce milk.’ So much for that plan then – back to the round the clock triple feeding, even though I’ve been doing it for 16 days now non-stop, with no sign of my milk supply increasing.

So I keep going, trying to make sure my breasts are stimulated either with the pump or by feeding (with or without SNS) 12 times in every 24 hour period.  I find that Tommy will latch on without the SNS now, so more often than not I feed him like that (for an hour or so), before offering a top up bottle afterwards.  It’s the run up to Christmas, and the family are gathering, who all of course want to see the new baby.  I sit and feed feed feed, as they gather around and helpfully say things like, ‘Is he actually feeding?  He looks like he’s fallen asleep.’  ‘Oh look, he’s really woken up now he’s getting his bottle.  He’s enjoying that, isn’t he?’.  ‘What that boy needs is a dummy.’ On one occasion I’ve switch fed for a couple of hours while chatting with my aunt. ‘I’d better get his bottle’, I say. ‘Does he need one? I think he’s full up on you.’ God bless her for saying so, but still he cries and roots, and in comes my mum with the 90 mls which, sure enough, he downs with enthusiasm.

I’m an emotional wreck, and I change my mind from feed to feed about what to do and whether to keep going.  Why am I so bothered about this?  I obsess about the practicalities.  ‘I don’t want the hassle of having to make up formula all the time.  And how on earth are you meant to manage when you’re out and about? If I could even have enough milk that I could feed if I needed to when out, I wouldn’t mind doing some formula feeds at home.’  I tell myself I’m being practically minded, but the truth is that I’m filled with shame at the thought of formula feeding in public.  After all, a carton and a sterilized bottle, or an icepack with some premade milk – what’s so hard about that? What’s really preying on me is the thought of what people will think of me, whipping out a bottle to feed formula to a tiny little baby.  To be honest, thinking back on it, I’d never myself really paid any attention to how anyone around me has fed their babies.  It’s not something I generally registered, and I certainly didn’t give it any thought.  But for that time I’m sure that breastfeeding is the norm, and that getting out a bottle will guarantee me looks of icy disapproval.  (How wrong I was on that one!) 

My husband, I know, will support me in whatever I decide to do, but he finds it hard. I’m usually the stable one in our relationship, keeping him on an even keel, so he is freaked out by seeing his wife reduced to an emotional wreck, eyes red with tears and flip flopping every hour from optimism to despair.  He wants me to stop putting myself through it all, and tries to take the pressure off.  After every phone call with his mum, it seems, he comes along to tell me of yet another family friend or relative who couldn’t breastfeed.  ‘Plenty of women can’t breastfeed.  There’s no shame in it.  Why should you be different?’  ‘But I am different,’ I want to say.  ‘I’m tough.  I’m determined. They were weak.  They didn’t try hard enough.’ It brings me no comfort to hear yet another story of someone who tried and failed; I don’t want to be just another one of their number. After all, I know that anyone can breastfeed.  It’s just a matter of toughing it out.  So I keep on and on, setting alarms, feeding, pumping, strapping on the SNS, sterilizing, sterilizing, sterilizing, through night and day until something improves.