Oops, I wasn't better after all

Total collapse last night followed by midnight doctor visit and big painkillers. Clearly, I wasn't better on Friday, when I went out and let Rob work.

So now I have to spend another two days in bed. This is ridiculous.

The doctor's visit was amusing, though. He knocked on the door while Rob was in the bathroom, and I tried to get off the sofa to answer it, but of course I couldn't, so when Rob let him in, I was crying on the floor. He couldn't hear what I was saying because he had earache and tinnitus, and he couldn't examine me properly because I couldn't bear the lights on and opening my eyes to shine his little torch in them was so excruciatingly painful. I had totally run out of Good Girl-ness, so when he asked if any illness ran in my family, I answered "melodrama, chronic hypochondria and depression," which wasn't very useful. He pawed at my glands and recommended painkillers.

I expect he found it very frustrating. It was a little scene of mutual incomprehensibility.

On Motherhood

Caveat: I have a slight temperature and a not-slight headache and a medium-slight sore throat. So this may not make any sense. You have been warned.

Today's Miss Manners

calls for people to stop telling mothers - potential, expectant, new or established - disaster stories. There's a lot to be said for that. I myself have, in the very recent past, posted a number of comments in various places along the lines of "Congratulations! As to your original question - I don't know. As soon as you contemplate becoming pregnant, everything you do is wrong, somewhere, so do your best. You can worry about what you eat now, what you feed them later, what you teach them to feed their children after that - as long as you're worried sick you're doing it wrong, you're probably doing fine."

I like being a mother. It's complicated at times like this - Rob is finding it hard to do all the daytime babycare as well as his usual evening stuff, and he's getting visibly more tired by the hour. But I like it. I like breastfeeding and cuddling and playing and feeding and eating and walking and clapping hands. And every day, through my own fault because I persist in reading news, I discover that I am doing something to ruin my child's life forever.

Ho hum. It somehow fails to make me feel like a failure, or want to do anything different. I think most of what we do is fine. So does Linnea.

(Today she rejected a banana in favour of breastmilk. I feel so honoured!)

The One Good Thing

(I wrote this a while ago, and wanted to wait until it hadn't won the competition I entered about successful breastfeeding stories. But it's just as true now, except the dates...)

It's 10 o'clock at night, three weeks before her first birthday, and my daughter is asleep. She had her last breastfeed of the day over two hours ago. I sat cross-legged and tried to stop her wriggling far enough to fall off the bed without unlatching.

She's always been an agile feeder, and an eager one. She wriggled constantly, from 16 weeks gestation to the day she rolled over in her hospital bassinet. She was trying to reach me for a feed that time - I couldn't move, between transfusions and catheters and multiple tears from the birth - and her bassinet was hooked over the edge of my bed, as for women who've had a c-section.

The early days with my daughter were hard. The birth was bad. I was left doubly incontinent and in constant pain. I was on high doses of codeine until after the first bout of repair surgery, when she was 8 months old.

But feeding was easy. I held her to my breast before the anaesthetic wore off after they wheeled us out of theatre, and she sucked. I couldn't feel it, but I could see it. After the anaesthetic wore off, people laid her on my hospital bed and she sucked lying beside me, or propped us both up on pillows. My lower body was in a puddle of blood, and my upper body in a puddle of creamy milk. I needed a lot of help to sit up, eat, use the toilet, have a shower - but Linnea needed no help to feed. She opened her mouth, tipped her head back, latched on, and MUNCHED. The hospital gave me nipple salve and changed the sheets several times a day.

My largest maternity bra was a 36B. Three days after she was born, I was tiger-striped and begging someone to go and buy a 38DD or E cup. By the time we got back from hospital, I was on the way back down, and settled in to a comfortable 36C. The stripes are still there. They are my triumph. I have no stretch marks on my belly to show for the nightmare of birth, but it is written on my body that *I feed my daughter*. I feed her *myself*. This is *mine*, to give to her, and even if I couldn't pick her up for days after she was born, I filled her hungry tummy with good, fatty milk and she grew.

I failed to deliver naturally. I failed to recover from the birth in a timely fashion. I will never have another vaginal delivery. I will never go into labour again. I can't have sex until after at least one more bout of surgery. But I am a SUCCESSFUL breastfeeding mother and I LOVE it.

MINE.