ailbhe | Mothers, and how they hurt each other

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Mothers, and how they hurt each other

I've been thinking about this a lot lately [No, really? We'd never have guessed - Ed.] because someone I care about is having trouble feeding her baby the way she hoped to before the birth. This woman is, apart from fabulously intelligent and caring and hard-working and funky, the very first person to ask if I was ok after Linnea was born.

And I wasn't, and she asked, and she cared, and I am still all teary-eyed thinking about that.

And now she's having trouble feeding her baby. She's just like the other three women with babies I'm closest to - they were from my antenatal class. She's just like lots of women. They want to breastfeed and it's hard. So I'm going to talk about all of them as one person.

She is breastfeeding. When her baby was born, she put him or her to her breast, and the baby sucked, or didn't suck, and if he sucked it was excruciatingly painful, and if she didn't it was terrifying. She is pumping every day, sometimes every hour. She is bleeding; she's bleeding lochia, because childbirth is messy and bloody, and she's bleeding from cracked and chapped nipples. Her baby is losing weight, or not gaining weight, which in a newborn amounts to much the same thing - after the initial weight loss, babies are supposed to grow fairly rapidly, really. She's still pumping. She's waking every 90 or 120 minutes during the night to spend 30 to 120 minutes awake trying to feed or pump or both.

A woman I know attached her baby to the breast for four-hour periods, using the breaks at the end of these periods for going to the loo and eating. She did this for weeks. Her baby continued to lose weight. She kept trying every waking hour to do what felt right and natural and what the scientific evidence told her was right.

I am related to someone who kept breastfeeding even when she found her own blood in her baby's nappies; her nipples bled that much. Have you ever found blood in your baby's nappy? It's scary.

And the thing that all of these women also have in common? They all, at some point, gave their babies formula. In a bottle. More than one bottle, even.

And the babies grew, and got fatter, and cried less and smiled more, and started to play with their toes. And on the one hand, the mothers were overjoyed! And on the other, they were -

Guilty.

They were failed breastfeeders. They gave up. And people like me, who had a certain amount of chapping and bleeding and mastitis, but who never seriously thought "My baby is starving to death! My baby is starving to death!" reacted in various ways to these women desperately trying to believe that they were still good mothers, that they hadn't irretrievably damaged their babies, that they shouldn't call a trusted relative RIGHT NOW and have the infant adopted by someone with enough love to relactate using drugs and electric milking machines and barrels of lanolin nipple salve.

"I didn't quit. I bled. I pumped. I kept going as long as my baby wanted to."
"I know someone who never fed from her own breast at all - she pumped for her twins and donated to the milk bank while running a 24-hour trucking business and baking all her own bread from organic wheat she grew on top of her trucks. Which she drove herself. With one leg. Her twins won the Olympic High jump two years ago - joint first."
"I suppose, if you don't really want to breastfeed, it must be pretty hard."

And it doesn't matter if for every one of those responses, she gets five that say "Aw, honey, how sad. You're doing fine. Keep it up." Because she already believes the voices that say she's doing wrong.

This is why the entries on "How to be a bad parent" and so on aren't actually all that funny. Because all the time women need to reinforce their beliefs in their own way of mothering, and the easiest way to do this is to look at how other people's ways don't work so well, and condemn them, preferably without thinking "Well, maybe there was some difficulty I can't see here." Because every formula-feeding woman who tried to breastfeed sees every breastfeeding woman as a slap in the face, a personal reprimand. And every breastfeeding woman sees every bottle of formula as a statement that her contribution is worthless, that she gave up nights of sleep and moments of human dignity (have you ever used a breastpump? You need a well-attached sense of humour and a hot compress) for no really good reason, especially if the breastfed baby has, ooh, conjunctivitis, to pick a random one, and the formula-fed baby is in rude health. Or vice versa.

We need to change the way we work. We need to encourage breastfeeding, sure, but not because it's a heinous evil duty that we owe our babies. Not because they will die if they get formula. But because it's great!

No, really, it is. It's fantastic. I know. I do it. When it works, it's fabulous. Everyone loves it. Mother, father, baby and siblings all go all squooshy. People who've breastfed happily feel a huge rush of hormonal happiness when they see another woman breastfeeding happily. It's cheap, it's lazy, it's got a high learning curve but it's learnable for most people, and, as an added extra bonus, it has some scientifically proven superiorities over formula.

Here's what it's not: It's not a good enough reason to dread every time you may have to feed your baby for six months. It's not a good reason to ruin your health, your baby's health, your relationship, your job. If you can't do it, however hard you try, it's not a good enough reason to feel like a failure for the next 5 or 50 years.

I breastfeed like a pro - I always have. Total walkover. I get to feel like a failure because I had a high-intervention birth experience that left me doubly incontinent [we know, we know - Ed.] and I breastfed while taking non-trivial amounts of codeine. Like 240mg a day for 9 months, more or less.

Later I can feel like a failure because I homeschool, or don't homeschool, or fail to recognise the indicators for Aspergers or ADHD or dyslexia or whatever else might make my baby not quite fit in. Because, you know, by the time I notice them, I will have not noticed them for a while. Check back in 6 years and see.

No-one wants a mother who thinks she's a failure. It can't be good for them. So let's start being nice to each other. Let's start trying to feel good about the way we've ended up doing parenting, without assuming that other people haven't achieved the same things through lack of effort. Let's assume that they all tried really hard. Because, you know, they did.

And if they didn't, you're not going to guilt-trip them into trying harder. You'll just make them defensive and miserable, and they'll talk your methods down until they feel sure they're doing it right again.

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. Your mother told you so. She was right. Mothers usually are.

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I have just read this, nodding all the way through.

You're right. You're absolutely right.

I hope that reading this post will make me stop and think the next time I am going to say something singularly unhelpful to another mum who happens to be doing something differently from the way I do/did it.

I'm not sure my sister-in-law has ever forgiven me for saying 'oh, what a shame' when she switched to formula feeding her baby. I knew at the time it sounded awful, but I just couldn't think of what else to say.

"If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all"

Thanks, Ailbhe. A welcomed kick up the backside for me!

My doula gave me the best breastfeeding advice I got. (Have you noticed that when I got good advice I remember, it's because it was usually remarkably non-histrionic? Histrionic advice is almost never very useful.) She said, "Yes, it's important for a baby to have breast milk. It is more important for a baby to have a healthy and sane mother. It's really worth trying to see if you can do both of these at once, but if you can't, healthy mama wins. For her sake as well as yours."

I breastfed Grace for nine weeks. I stopped then for a variety of reasons none of which seem to make an awful lot of sense now. If I don't have to go back to work, I will probably breastfeed this one (!!) longer, but we'll see how it goes. The people who encouraged me said, "Every day, every feeding, is better for the baby than not having had that one. If you breastfeed for two days, that's not a failure, that's having given yuor baby two days of something precious. If you do it for three days, that's even better."

It's a nice way to think of it.

You had good advice, from your doula and from those people.

I recognise your name, and I'm not sure where from. Usenet, I'm sure. My name's Linz, from alt.fan.pratchett (many years ago), alt.usage.english, rec.food.cooking (long ago) and a bunch of uk. groups. Have you been in any of those groups?

Just call me nosy...

No, sorry, none of them. I was pretty active on Usenet for a long time, but basically on Jewish, political, or occasionally random other religious groups (usually as the 'Jewish perspective' on certain questions, and as a listener).

I shall be wondering for ages now!

MKP, I guess? At least I know her too ... *waves*

I watched my SIL go through this with her kids - breastfeeding, not breastfeeding, and everything else. I thwapped my own mother for making SIL question her decisions and parenting style.

My brother was breastfed until he was 2 weeks old. At his checkup, my mother commented that he slept ALL THE TIME. The doctor looked him over and asked what she was feeding him. Mom replied that she was breastfeeding. The doctor was agahst - my mother was taking phenobarbitol to prevent seisures, and that passes through breast milk. My brother was drugged. The nurses had encouraged mom to breastfeed, and no one had bothered to check what medications she was on. So it's not like my mom is the font of all parental wisdom.

I, of course, not being a parent, know exactly how all children should be raised: exactly as their parents think appropriate. If I EVER criticize your parenting, please feel free to thwap me with a cluestick.

It's been a long time since this was posted, but there was a link back to it, and I just had to comment on this comment: I, of course, not being a parent, know exactly how all children should be raised: exactly as their parents think appropriate.

FANTASTIC! There are far far far too many non-parents who think they know exactly how to parent, and just love to weigh in on how parents should be parenting. Reason being, "I was a child once" and "I have friends who are parents, and I've seen how it works". Gah. Just no. Sure, you get an opinion, it just doesn't get weighed as heavily as that of people who've been there.

My mum got slapped in the tit by a nurse who said something along the lines of 'well you'll not feed her much with those.' She mentioned it the other day. I'm 28 and it still annoys her. Do I remember? Do I hell. Do I care? As if.
And that crap about how women who don't breastfeed not bonding properly with the kid? Well, my non-breastfeeding mum failed to bond with me to the extent that I'm still bloody living here at nearly 30. It's like you said in the other post. If you think you're doing it wrong, you're probably doing it exactly right because you're thinking about it and worrying about it and if it's all effortless... well if it was I'd've done it. But it's not, so I haven't and I'm not going to.

Bravo. My mother got the whole thing about how she couldn't really be a responsible mother if she went back to law school ten days after I was born and thence continued to work full-time when I was young. Obviously, leaving me with a babysitter was going to cause me terrible trauma, mean I would never bond with her and probably never feel properly attached to any caregiver (or else I would decide that the babysitter was my mother and she herself would promptly become as irrelevant to me as she deserved), etc.

My gutsy, lawyer mom is my hero and role model. And my daughter is named for the dearly beloved woman who took care of me during the daytime when I was a small child, and with whom I remained close until her death. And I never once got them confused.

And my friends who work full-time at caring for their own children are aces too. And I don't see a shred of conflict between those two positions.

Go caring parents. However they go about it. Period.

Thank you :)

I still feel guilty over Holly deciding she didn't like breasts any more at 12 weeks, which also overlapped with my PND starting.

Madly enough, I get embaressed bottle feeding Holly in public as it makes me feel like a bad mother. Perhaps I won't any more.

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.

Nema (desolateirony.blogspot.com)

That was an interesting and thought-provoking article. Thank you.

I'm 52 and had my babies in the years when "Breast is best" first came out ... and I remember my NCT ante-natal teacher bending over backwards to encourage mums to a) TRY to breast-feed b) understand some of the mechanics and finally c) accept what life has thrown at them if they *really* don't want to or can't breastfeed. I *love* to see a baby at the breast and it still disturbs me to see a baby bottle-fed, though obviously not as much as it would to see a baby starving and/or a mum destroying her health by her attempts to breast-feed. Your post was very moving and I have soft tears on my cheeks still. I agree with what someone else said. You *should* submit this as an article to a parenting magazine or three. It would do so much good. Thank you for writing it. :-)

Ailbhe, you are wonderful, and your writing is bringing tears to my eyes. I second everyone else who's said you should submit this for publication in print.

Anyone who's known me for about the last two years of my life know what a hell pregnancy and giving birth was. Not to mention the battles (and I mean kicking/screaming/namecalling/threatening BATTLES) I ended up having with the boobnazis here at LJ because I started out BFing and switched to FFing.
I tried it. I HATED Bfing. Hated it. Hated feeling so..attached. Like I couldn't go anywhere..not even to the bathroom by myself..with the baby attached to me.I hated the initial 'fullness' that comes with having a baby..my boobs were big enough already and a pain as it is. I hated that extra heaviness,the soreness that wouldn't go away.
I,too,felt guilty about not BFing at first. But then I realized (after many nights of tears and guilt-ridden yellfests with my hubby)that not BFing is actually OK. Formula,while it's not breastmilk, will not kill my son. He was on formula from 3 wks of age till just after his first birthday last month. He grew (!!shocking!!),gained weight,hit milestones like a champ. All on formula. And non-organic babyfood (which I know..I know..lock me up and throw away the key for that too).
Your writing is amazing. Thank you for having the ~~guts~~BALLS to share it with the world.

You are a brilliant writer, A. I can't disagree with anything you've said so literately.

you're not going to guilt-trip them into trying harder.

And anyway, it's often pointless. Where's the point in telling a woman now that the advice she was given six months ago about breastfeeding was wrong? She's not in a position to restart now. Where's the point in telling my best friend the cons of weaning her 6 month old baby to formula? She's got 3 older sons she breastfed to 14 months, she's now got those three, plus two step-children, plus a full-time teaching job. Yes, she could pump - in between planning lessons, arranging timetables, setting homework, marking homework, eating, sleeping...

Other mums do things differently from me. And when I see my mummy-friends and people start getting defensive about what they do, I remind them that we do what works for us. No right, no wrong, just what works.

Thats excellent. I second the suggestion that it should be published somewhere.

The last 10 weeks have been an education for me. I was determined to breastfeed, I'd believed all the "if you're doing it right it won't hurt" stuff from antenatal classes. I couldn't imagine ever giving up. Then I developed thrush in late pregnancy. Then I discovered I had Reynaud's syndrome. Then I started getting plugged ducts. I was probably within a feed or two of giving up on more than one occasion.

To an extent the guilt factor was what kept me going but on the other hand it made me feel dreadful for contemplating giving up and that wasn't constructive.

There were a few things kept me going. The fact that L was thriving was one. Had he not been I couldn't have done it. A dodgy weight gain would have tipped the scales. That I discovered he had a dairy intolerance was another - I knew the potential for him to be very ill on formula. I had excellent support - an independent midwife, friends who'd been there and fought their own battles. The wonderful misc.kids.breastfeeding.

The most important thing was the few days of (relatively) painfree feeding I would get when the diflucan kicked in (it took three courses, the final with both of us taking it) showed me what it *could* be like.

What was soul destroying was some of the comments. All the questions about latch were infuriating. It was back to the "if you're doing it right it won't hurt" line. Yes it blimmin' well might. You might have thrush, you might have a not uncommon circulatory problem (Reynaud's) or you might have a plugged duct. I knew the latch was fine, not only had it been checked but when the thrush was gone the pain from the rest largely disappeared. In a warm room, with no thrush, it was as it should be. I was even assured that no way no heck could Reynaud's cause pain in breastfeeding.

The final thing that helped was sitting down last week and coming up with an exit strategy - what I would do if I decided to give up. Somehow that helped me carry on. Those on my friends list may remember that I got pregnant with L the week I decided to take a break from trying and that I went into labour three days after deciding the timescale under which I would accept an induction!

This week, I finally think we're through it. Its been 10 days since we stopped the diflucan and touch wood no symptoms. The plugged ducts come and go, but I can deal with them in a day or two now and move on. I'm going to copy this to my own LJ for my records. It probably needs adding to.

I meant to add, and forgot.

One of the things that makes me angry is the women who tell the stories of other people who overcame this and that and still breastfed (the one I personally am sick of seeing quoted is the woman with no arms who breastfed) they're seldom the ones who have had actual real genuine problems. The ones with the problems, generally, understand the temptation to give up, understand the struggle and don't say these things. They may tell their stories, but they don't do it in a "well *I* could, why couldn't you" fashion when people are genuinely struggling (though I know I personally still get pissed off at the ones who don't even try).

No matter what it is, "I did it, so if you don't it's just laziness" really bugs me. There is *always* something you can't see.

I don't get pissed off at the ones who don't try - they just obviously aren't getting it. They Just Don't Get It. The science isn't good enough, because they were formula fed and they're fine. That's why I say we need to promote the snuggliness bits. The short-term benefits for the mother, rather than the long-term lowers-your-chance-of-cancer ones.

Just popping over to say hello ...

This was a stunning piece of writing. As a prospective adopter, not being able to breastfeed is something I've had to come to terms with (I know some adopters do breastfeed, but feeding and physical contact are traumatic issues for so many adopted children that it's often out of the question). You summed up a lot of my own feelings about parenting, and the way women treat each other, and this was just what I needed to read, today.

Do you mind if I friend you?

Go ahead! I'm flattered.

*applause*!!

This needs to be published. Seriously.

In the meantime, may I link to it, please?

Link all you like. I am *such* a comment whore. Where would I publish it? Do you think someone might pay me? Wow.

You're clearly the best mommy-writer on LJ. I think you may actually have a book here.

Hi. You don't know me. I like to lurk in boob_nazis and I came across this link. I must say that you have hit the nail right on the head. I am still breastfeeding my 14 month old, way longer than I ever thought I would. I have seen across message boards, and in real life too many mom vs. mom fights when really, there shouldn't be. As mothers we should all be able to support one another...BF or FF, circ or non-circ, family bed or crib.

As mothers, we are automatically ridden with lots of guilt. We shouldn't be getting some from other mothers too.

And if they didn't, you're not going to guilt-trip them into trying harder. Truer words have never been spoken.

What a great entry, and I hope you don't mind the random comment.

I just found this from a comment you made in

griffen's journal. Wonderful. I applaud heartily. As a mother who dealt with two inductions and a c-section, I just want to throttle people who act as those those were "lesser choices." I suffered from significant PPD -- to the point of psychosis, with my first -- and I also can't stand people who criticize new mothers who take psychiatric meds to stay sane. As far as breastfeeding... I can't believe how nasty some people can get.

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Mothers, and how they hurt each other

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Thank you!

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