It’s more than a year since I had my baby and I’m still breastfeeding. If you read my first, furious column about it, you might be surprised: nursing was a challenge. We both cried for weeks. Sometimes I screamed in pain. The guilt I felt for using formula – despite my hungry pre-term baby’s need for it – was matched only by the fury I felt at the professionals who treat exclusive breastfeeding as worth the sacrifice of a mother’s mental health.
My mind boggles at some of the advice I was given: how I was instructed to pump after every feed, but no one thought to tell me that I needn’t continue this indefinitely, compounding my distress and exhaustion; the lactation-promoting drug – which I did not take because one of the side-effects was depression – I was prescribed despite my milk coming in as normal on day three; the NCT breastfeeding “expert” who said that the pain was because we were doing it wrong; my tiny baby who had not been in the womb long enough to fully develop his feeding reflex, with his tied tongue and his minuscule mouth opening and closing like a baby bird’s as he struggled to latch, and I, his mother, bruised and bleeding. I finally had to steel myself to firmly tell the health visitor that exclusive breastfeeding was no longer realistic or desirable for either of us.
