Nothing personal... Should breastfeeding be done at home because it's 'personal'?

This morning again I heard someone say that they would feel awkward if they saw a mother breastfeeding in public because it’s so ‘personal’. That’s an argument that often comes back in discussions around breastfeeding in public, it’s ‘personal’ so it should be done behind closed doors.

Does that mean that it’s the only ‘personal’ moment that passes between a mother and her baby? Does that mean that fathers don’t share anything ‘personal’ with their baby? And what about formula feeding mothers? I think that a lot of what passes between a child and her parents is very ‘personal’, i.e. characteristic of their own, close, special relationship and that they don’t share anything similar with anybody else.

I have a picture of my husband with our first daughter. She must have been around 15 months. He was holding her in his arms. His nose just touched her cheek. His eyes are closed and he is smiling. I think that it was a very personal moment between them. Does the picture make anybody feel awkward? No. How would it be received if I posted it on social media? I honestly think it would mostly generate a benign indifference. Now, if I had a picture of myself breastfeeding the same daughter, with the same loving expression on my face and I posted it on social media, what the reaction be? Exactlly…

If a mother nuzzles and kisses her baby’s neck, that’s personal, isn’t it? At least I think it is. I certainly would not want just anybody nuzzling and kissing my baby’s neck. If people witness a mother nuzzling and kissing her baby’s neck, how would they react? They might go ‘Aw…!’ Or smile indulgently and remark to their neighbour ‘How cute is that?’ I doubt that they would write an article about it, or tweet about it because it happened where they’re working - as some employees in restaurants have reportedly done - or take a photograph of the mother and try and shame her on social media.

Nor does breastfeeding always feel that ‘personal’ to a mother. When you’ve been breastfeeding for weeks, months, and that every time that you sit down to have your own meal your baby is hungry, then you feed your baby and get on with feeding yourself without necessarily gazing into your baby’s eyes and sharing a special moment with her. Is it still a ‘personal’ moment then? My own experience as a mother, in such a situation, was that it was just feeding my baby in relative comfort: no crying and I’m eating myself so everyone's a winner.

What makes ‘personal’ moments so special between parents and baby, by the way, is the release of oxytocin. We release oxytocin in lots of different situations when we feel content, happy, connected. When we share a cup of coffee or a glass of wine with good friends, when we hug someone, when we play with our children, etc. Are all these things anything to be ashamed of or hide?

And yes it’s a breast, yes it’s in somebody’s mouth. Others have written extensively on the mistake it is to associate breasts and breastfeeding with anything that has to do with sex. Breasts are not sexual when a woman walks in the street, talks with men, works, feeds her baby. Fingers and hand can be very erotic in context, and yet nobody sees any sexual meaning in a handshake, a comforting hand on the shoulder or a mother stroking her baby’s cheek. That’s the same with breastfeeding, the same!

It can be personal but so can hundred of other human interactions be, and it’s not sexual. End of.

Anne

Breastfeeding in public - by Hema

I’m a small chested girl trapped in the body of a big chested girl.  I’ve never been  comfortable with having whoppers so I knew the whole pregnancy and breastfeeding thing was going to be tough on me.  Apart from trying to find clothes that fitted my  top half, breastfeeding in public became the ultimate challenge.  The Mama scarf I  had bought pre-birth proved to be too small and such a fiddle that it drew more  attention to myself as baby squirmed and wriggled.  I would break out in a sweat trying to keep my eye on everyone else's gaze while making sure I didn’t reveal myself.

I was not a cool breastfeeding Mum and paranoid thoughts fuelled by the  comments of the few dominated these moments. It’s hard, very hard to conceal such generous proportions but when baby is wailing on  a hot summers’ day, I was forced to sit somewhere and pull myself together.  I tried to read people's faces,  see if they knew and were judging me.  I tried to be casual  and pleasant in the hope that either nobody would notice or that they would be nice about it.   In  the end I  wasn’t over-exposing myself and as I had picked National Trust gardens,  I may have benefited from the relaxing atmosphere.  After a while, I became quite good at finding solitary corners and adopting a subtle manner.

Of course, if I stopped breastfeeding, they would return to their normal size (yes,  still going on about that) which would have made me feel better.  However, something unexpected had taken place.  This tiny little being had done away with  some -although not all- of my vanity.  Or maybe it was because I had fought tooth and nail to make breastfeeding work that I needed it to go beyond my planned six months.  In fact, I continued until my daughter was around seventeen months old for many  reasons; some good, some silly, some just plain egotistical.  However, from difficult  beginnings, breastfeeding had transformed into something rather beautiful.

It had taken six to nine months to recover from the shock of motherhood so I had only just  begun to really appreciate my baby as I had imagined I would and giving up  breastfeeding at its highest point suddenly seemed like saying no to Daniel Craig, it's  nuts.

Hema Simkins

Valuing mothers - a breastfeeding counsellor's perspective

Here is another picture I found on Pinterest (yes I know, I often refer to Pinterest! It's probably my preferred social network). I hope you can zoom in and actually read it! If not you can see it here.

I think this short text is absolutely brilliant. It illustrates perfectly one of the core principles of counselling, what American psychologist Carl Rogers called Positive Regard or, in lay terms, to value, respect, care for.

It's something essentially important for a breastfeeding counsellor and the dramatic fact of our profession... *holds the back of her hand to her forehead, Shakespeare-like* ... is that, because we are passionate about breastfeeding, others sometimes think that we only value breastfeeding when, actually, we value whatever a mother does for her baby because we value The Mother first.

It is possible to be passionate about breastfeeding and care deeply for a formula feeding mother! And vice versa : it is possible to deeply value a formula feeding mother and be passionate about breastfeeding!

Anne x

Breastfeeding art

Once you start looking there are many beautiful works of art depicting breastfeeding. I have chosen a few to share. I like the stories they are telling, like that first one, set in a factory. I also like the fact that some of these pictures are going back as far as the early 17th Century but they all feel so close to us, it's very easy to relate to the mothers.

This is a fragment of 'La Cigarreras' (The Cigar Girls) by Gonzalo Bilbao, Seville, 1915. Mothers were allowed to take their baby with them to feed them and could use small factory cots.

'Les âges de l'ouvrier' by Brussels' artist Léon Frédéric, 1897. This is the third part of a triptych representing the life of workmen : the working men, the children and youth, the mothers and infants.

 'A Lapp Mother and Child' by Nico Wilhelm Jungmann, 1905. A well bundled up baby for breastfeeding in cold climate !

'Mother and Child', attributed to Hugues Talbot, beginning of the 21st Century. Such a homely feeling to this scene by the fire.

'The Family' by Dementi Shmarinov, 1957.

'Nurturer' by Anna Rose Bain. A modern breastfeeding scene, not so different from much older representations, such as this following one.

'Mother and Child' by Pieter de Grebber, 1622.

'The Holy Family with Sheperds' by Jacob Jordaens, 1616. Mary's milk is highly symbolic in religious art.

'Young mother nursing her child' by Mary Cassatt, 1906. So much tenderness in that picture... I love the gesture of the child reaching for his mother's mouth and the mother holding her baby's foot.

A Lady Nursing her Child in a Drawing Room, by François-Guillaume Ménageot, early 19th Century. She looks as if she just came back or was going to go out but her baby needed a feed !

'First Born' Gustave Leonard de Jonghe, 1863 . Peer support ? :)

Silence! By Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1759. You can just imagine how this young mother might feel, with one nay asleep in her arms, a very small child asleep too - which might be a rare occurrence - willing the oldest to not disturb them.

'Lady Mary Boyle and her son Charles' c.1700 by Sir Godfrey Kneller. An unusal portraying of an English lady.

Multi-tasking by Ricky Mujica. Do I need to add anything ?!

Bertha Wegmann c. 1900. I wonder what's the story behind that picture... Was the mother working in the fields, carrying her babies? Again, observe the deep tenderness between mother and child! Beautiful.

Guest post - What we, as mothers, need: support

This week a have a beautiful post from a talented blogger and real life friend of mine! The blogging world knows her as Recipe Junkie and her blog is well worth a visit if you don't know her yet.

Sally is giving us a beautifully moving and compelling account of her experiences as she became a mother, showing us that, in the end, every mother faces different challenges and knows her own struggle and that it's ok to ask for help :)

Turns out that despite the ‘childbearing hips’ and the fairly practical approach to pain and all things gory, I was rubbish at giving birth. Not in the ‘wimp-out-get-me-an-epidural-immediately’ way, but things just didn’t work out right, either time.

While the giving birth bit was pants, the breastfeeding was fine. I didn’t love it, but it worked, with a bit of perseverance. It didn’t occur to me to do otherwise to be honest. My mum breastfed me and my younger brothers, and while I can’t remember it specifically, it’s what I perceived as ‘the norm’. And perhaps after the first emergency c-section, there was an element of “well, I’m damn well going to get this bit right”. I was vaguely aware of the health benefits of breastfeeding, but possibly more importantly, I’m also inherently lazy. The thought of all that sterilising, and measuring, of making sure you had enough of everything with you, well, it was all too much for me. I could barely remember to take the baby with me when I left the house (if I did) in the first few months of my first born, so the thought of taking anything other than my boobs to feed him, well, it would have been too much.

I remember being in hospital after section #1, lying in my bed in an amenity room, unable to lift my baby out of his cot to have him next to me to feed, but eventually, I got him and we lay there, getting by together. I was visited by someone I think from the Leche League but to be honest, I can’t remember and she was pretty rubbish – cooed on about the beauty of breastfeeding when I wanted some practical support about what I should actually be doing, and the midwives didn’t have much time to spend helping breast feeding, but it just worked.

The early months with my son were difficult ones for me. I had mild depression, didn’t feel like I’d bonded particularly well with my baby. I did too much too quickly after the section, and didn’t recover as well as I might have done. I didn’t feel like seeing anyone, and I remember finding the NCT ‘get togethers’ with my ante-natal class particularly difficult – one of the other women was very confident that ‘she would always be doing the best for her baby’, while I was plagued with indecision and self-doubt – the classic woman with career who falls apart (a little), faced with a defenceless and completely unpredictable infant, unable to admit I wasn’t coping or to ask for help.

I did have anxiety about feeding – especially on the days when he did nothing but feed, or, worse, the days when my breasts were achingly full to the point where my nipples felt they might just ping off, yet he seemed to refuse point blank to feed, while I would sit there leaking milk and tears – but mostly we got on OK on the feeding side of things. Given the fact that I was mildly depressed, it was only a blessing that he piled on the weight like a dream, and my milk or ability to feed was never questioned. Eventually, I gave in, admitted I wasn’t coping in other aspects, and got support from the health visitor when my boy was about 6 months old, enabling me to sort out my depression issues and carry on with life. My boy and my boobs agreed to part company when he was around 10 months old and I went back to work. Earlier than some, later than lots of others. It was an amicable break up – on both sides, and my boy went happily on to solid food without a backward glance.

Fast forward a couple of years, and my daughter arrived, a week early, in true emergency style. Forget the calm undertaking of the first ‘emergency’ section: I went into labour while we were in Southampton General Hospital where my lovely boy was having chemo for the leukaemia that he had been diagnosed with 3 months earlier. Despite the desire of the ward’s admin officer and fundraiser who had originally trained as a midwife, giving birth on a ward full of immuno-compromised children was not desirable, and I had nothing with me, not even the bag with the kit to collect my cord stem cells in the event that my son needed a transplant. The events of that afternoon/evening will forever remain implanted on my memory – my husband driving from Southampton to Basingstoke at a speed that would make your eyes water, him trying to make arrangements for our son without worrying me (while I thought he was sneaking off for crafty fags), my mother speeding down the M1 in thunderstorms to be there to help us out, finding out that there was no gas and air left (I kid you not), the moment when the monitor I had been strapped up to because of the previous c section indicated that my unborn baby’s heart beat had disappeared and we had to hit the big red button, screaming at the nurses to make sure they had the blood bags to collect the cord blood, and swearing at the chirpy anaesthetist (“Hello, my name’s Ben and I’m your anaesthetist today!” “F*** OFF YOU ARE TOO YOUNG GET ME A GROWN UP!”).

The general anaesthetic was probably a great relief to everyone.

When I woke up, I had a baby girl. Amazingly after all the trauma, she was perfect. I stayed on the delivery suite, and despite the midwives concern, wrapped her to me using a blanket to hold her on my chest. I was desperate to get home, to my son, and fortunately, established breastfeeding with my daughter relatively easily. I was much more confident as I knew what I was doing, and had coped with a section before, and the scary midwives in charge of me were mostly well pleased, apart from the fact that I wouldn’t put her down very much. “She should learn to sleep on her own” they berated me. But I’d learnt from the first time, and it was easier to keep her swaddled to me than to keep putting her down in her cot. I did spend the first couple of weeks clinging to the floor with my toes each time she latched on, but I knew it would be OK eventually and it was.

I fed her for around 9-10 months – as with so many thing with the second child, the details are forgotten. I took her with me wherever we went, which was mostly the paediatric wards of either North Hants or Southampton General Hospitals with my son. It meant that in all the chaos of my son’s illness, when she was often left in a buggy in the corner of a treatment room, this was something I could do for her. And given that I spent so much of that time dealing with the more complicated aspects of keeping my son alive it was wonderful to be able to spend time with her occupied in such a fundamental, and fundamentally simple and life-giving activity. I will always treasure that time.

The thing about breastfeeding though is a bit like the birth itself, or any aspect of child raising. You can beat yourself up for not having ‘the proper’ birth, or for not breastfeeding – or breastfeeding but feeling miserable about it as some people do, but the way I see it is that you need to have the support to get on with your situation and make the best of it. I didn’t get particularly good support on the breastfeeding side of things – or anything else - with my first child, but I muddled through the first few weeks, and it was OK. With child number 2, by virtue of the fact that my son was ill, I was surrounded by paediatric experts, and while they were primarily concerned with my son, we had fantastically holistic care which meant that if I was worried about my daughter, I could ask.

I had no depression following my daughter’s birth. Ironically, the people who should have been looking after me and my daughter, the local health visitor/nurse team, were the ones that were no help at all. There was fantastic health visitor who helped me out before my daughter was born, in relation to my son, but she retired, and, honestly, the baby clinic was terrible. To be fair, I didn’t make it often, but one occasion I have vividly implanted in my mind is when my daughter was 8 months old. We actually had time between my son’s chemo appointments to go to the baby clinic, and I proudly went in with my beautiful girl, who I was still breastfeeding, but who was being conveniently easy to wean. She hadn’t put on much weight since the last time I’d taken her, but she had started crawling. She was fit and beautiful. So there I was with a healthy baby, plus a nearly 3 year old with no hair who looked, frankly like a cancer victim, and the nurse in the clinic laid into me for feeding my daughter cow’s milk from a cup. There was no interest in the family circumstances, she didn’t ask about my son, or what my daughter was eating in terms of solid food, or the fact that I was still breast feeding her 3 times a day. I was close to abusing her by allowing her to drink cow’s milk.

I managed not to punch her, and left. Fortunately, I was on my way to hospital with my son anyway, and had a brief sob with one of the paediatric community nursing team before the amazing, awesome, wonderful consultant came bustling in and told me to pull myself together, anyone with any sense could see that my daughter was fine – “Well, no, the guidelines say you’re not supposed to give her cow’s milk, but look at her - she’s FINE and you are doing a WONDERFUL JOB” she told me. And that is what we as mothers need. Support.

My challenges, especially with my second child, were about holding it together, not about the feeding itself. The decision to feed both children was pretty much a no brainer. But, especially after the birth of my daughter, I was lucky to have friends and family to support me through that time, as well the doctors and nurses caring for my son. But everyone faces their own challenges bringing up their kids: physical challenges, emotional challenges, and what we all need is support, not criticism, to help us through it. The thing is that we’re all mothers, all struggling with raising our children and looking after them as best we can, and we should support each other, and be able to find support.

Apart from the incident I have described above, the support I had helped me through the challenges I faced in that period, and pulled me through a really, really tough time in my life. If the challenges a woman is facing relate to actually feeding her child, then she needs the support to help her get through those challenges too, and the ability to know where to get the support from. And it’s really OK to ask for help - whatever the challenges – it’s not a relative thing – it’s personal.

Sally

Breastfeeding dads !

Recently I came across this lovely picture on Pinterest :

Except for the fact that the baby is facing the wrong way (just a small matter !) it struck me as quite a good example of the breastfeeding position called side-lying.

It got me thinking about what makes a breastfeeding relationship what it is, how the bond is tied, and how dads can find their place in this relationship.

I think we often forget that breastfeeding is not only about feeding. Let's reflect on what a breastfeeding mum does when she 'feeds' her baby :
- she holds her baby
- she sits with her baby
- she sleeps with her baby (sometimes, if it's her choice, like the dad in the picture)
- she gives comfort to her baby
- she gives milk to her baby
Breastfeeding mums talk about the time they spend sitting down, feeding, and by feeding they encompass all of the above. So, once the baby is fed, why couldn't dads do the same ? Yes it is sometimes difficult to put a baby down after they've fallen asleep while feeding. Yes they sometimes keep sucking for comfort. But there is a difference between being put down in a cot or moses basket and being cuddled in dad's arms!
Many breastfeeding mums might find that, maybe with a bit of rocking and singing when they change arms, their baby will be perfectly happy to finish their sleep with dad. And isn't it the precious bond and relationship dads are really after when they express the wish to feed the baby ?!

I found other pictures of contented babies in dads' arms, that are strongly reminiscent of breastfeeding positions :

Cradle hold (almost perfect, baby would just need to be turned in a bit more)

Laid back (just look how peaceful they both are!)

Rugby hold (not quite but close enough!)

Naomi Stadlen wrote a beautiful book called What Mothers Do, Especially When it Looks like Nothing. Maybe that's all  fathers need to do to experience the same sort of bond as mothers have with their baby. Doing nothing else than being with their baby, feeling like they're doing nothing when they're actually doing everything ;)

Anne x

Missing me or my boob?!

I was facilitating a breastfeeding session on Thursday morning so, once again, I had to leave DB with a baby sitter, and it just doesn't get much easier.

As soon as the baby sitter arrived DB knew what was going to happen. She held her arms out to me, put her head on my shoulder and then pushed up with her feet so that as much of her as possible was curled up into my neck! She does that...

I pressed DB against me, even closer if it was possible, kissed her and said I would come back. Then I took my things, all ready beforehand, with DB cuddling up to me, then deposited her on the sofa with a last kiss and literally legged it out before the tears that had started to fall gathered momentum!

When I came back she was playing with the baby sitter. Although she did that thing of crying again on seeing me (I think just to pick up where we had left off and showing she had not enjoyed herself at all...!) she couldn't resist showing me what she'd been doing, her little face lighting up then.
She also cries if I leave her with DH, except if her brother and sisters are around.

She loves her daddy though. She even is a bit of Daddy's girl. Only yesterday morning I was upstairs when she woke up but she declined my offer to pick her up and instead made her own way downstairs to find Daddy!
On Monday Daddy took her and DS on a trip into town, on the bus! She was quite happy to leave me behind. It's lovely to see her like this but a bit unsettling too...

I think that, as the picture I chose to illustrate this post suggests, a lot of breastfeeding mothers can get the feeling that it's their boobs their baby is missing.

But then bottle-fed babies are the same and I think bottle-feeding mothers can experience the same feeling of frustration at their baby not accepting the care of others but being quite happy to have fun without them!

I know, really, that it's not just my boobs she misses and that it's all developmental. All the same... It's hard work!

Anne x