Excellent message. I think you could sell that article to a parenting magazine, seriously.
I had some of the experiences you mentioned. I pumped for three months with my first baby. She never breastfed because for some reason her tongue was in the back of her mouth when she sucked. Of course, at the time I couldn't tell what was going in, or rather, what wasn't going in. I thought she was just fine, she was "eating" regularly, but she was getting very lethargic and yellow. When we went in for a check-up and she had lost 22 ounces at 5 days old, she was hospitalized for tube-feedings. She was basically near death from dehydration, but we didn't know. Then they bottle-fed her with extra-long nipples to train her to keep her tongue in position. After that, she refused to breastfeed. I pumped for as long as I could, but my milk supply dwindled and I had to supplement with formula. I finally gave up.
It went better with my second one, but I made the mistake of pumping breastmilk for the occasional bottle when I was out, and by five months he rejected nursing in favor of bottles. What a stinging rejection that was!
My kids are elementary school aged now, and sometimes I want another baby, if solely for the reason that I could get one more chance at breastfeeding successfully. Some reason to want another baby!
But people can feel mother-guilt about almost any topic under the sun. For instance, I wish I had started a daily diary for each of my kids, two or three sentences each day about something they learned or something cute they said. I can't go back and do that over, it's gone now. And sometimes when I meet a really smart child, I wonder if perhaps I shouldn't let my kids watch TV, I should have made them memorize irrelevant facts about dinosaurs instead. It's always something.
Anyway, thanks for putting it into words. It's a real issue.
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Date: 2005-05-14 03:17 am (UTC)I had some of the experiences you mentioned. I pumped for three months with my first baby. She never breastfed because for some reason her tongue was in the back of her mouth when she sucked. Of course, at the time I couldn't tell what was going in, or rather, what wasn't going in. I thought she was just fine, she was "eating" regularly, but she was getting very lethargic and yellow. When we went in for a check-up and she had lost 22 ounces at 5 days old, she was hospitalized for tube-feedings. She was basically near death from dehydration, but we didn't know. Then they bottle-fed her with extra-long nipples to train her to keep her tongue in position. After that, she refused to breastfeed. I pumped for as long as I could, but my milk supply dwindled and I had to supplement with formula. I finally gave up.
It went better with my second one, but I made the mistake of pumping breastmilk for the occasional bottle when I was out, and by five months he rejected nursing in favor of bottles. What a stinging rejection that was!
My kids are elementary school aged now, and sometimes I want another baby, if solely for the reason that I could get one more chance at breastfeeding successfully. Some reason to want another baby!
But people can feel mother-guilt about almost any topic under the sun. For instance, I wish I had started a daily diary for each of my kids, two or three sentences each day about something they learned or something cute they said. I can't go back and do that over, it's gone now. And sometimes when I meet a really smart child, I wonder if perhaps I shouldn't let my kids watch TV, I should have made them memorize irrelevant facts about dinosaurs instead. It's always something.
Anyway, thanks for putting it into words. It's a real issue.
Nema (desolateirony.blogspot.com)