I nursed my son for the first year of his life, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and I’m now five months into nursing my daughter. It’s been a hard-won battle to learn the art of feeding a child from my body but it’s been so worth it.
I am blessed to have had so many breastfeeding resources at my disposal before and during my first experience with breastfeeding. I know that’s not the case for everyone. I also know that there can be a lot of fear and anxiety surrounding breastfeeding especially with your first baby. So if you’re experiencing that now, here are a few things I’d share with a first-time breastfeeding mom:
- Know that breastfeeding is a learn-on-the-job endeavor — but taking a class beforehand might not be the worst idea. It’ll take a lot of patience and asking questions and likely tears but you will get there. You and your baby are learning together. And while most of your learning will come as you go, I found it so helpful to take a breastfeeding class before the arrival of my first. It calmed my fears and gave me information to refer back to in the middle of the night when it felt like a blade of glass was shooting through my nipple every time my son nursed.
- Don’t quit on a hard day. My husband and I took a breastfeeding class at the hospital where we delivered our babies before our son was born and the lactation consultant said a few things that have stuck with me to this day. This was one of them: Don’t quit on a hard day. It’s so easy to get emotional and overwhelmed and throw in the towel but she recommended taking a deep breath, letting cooler heads prevail, and assessing the situation once emotions calmed down. She was so right.
- It’s going to be hard at first — expect it. The oh-so-wise lactation consultant also advised that the first 4-6 weeks of breastfeeding would be really hard — and they were. But it gets better and easier.
- Honestly, breastfeeding can be nerve-wracking. There’s no way to know how much your baby is getting as he or she nurses; there’s no way to see how much foremilk and hindmilk and milk milk they’re getting. Is it too much? Is it too little? Is this really worth it? Cue more postpartum tears. Your pediatrician will likely have you track dirty diapers which can help alleviate a little stress as these numbers correlate to milk intake.
- Find a trusted in-person resource. Be it a lactation consultant (check to see if your pediatrician has one in-house), a breastfeeding group, or your local hospital, it helped so much to have someone check my baby’s latch and diagnose feeding issues that came up.
- Find a trusted (online) source and ignore all others. We live in an age where we can read about the experience of 50 different moms’ experiences breastfeeding within an hour and yet I’ve found all that really did for me was lead to overwhelm. Anyone with a platform can spew misinformation about breastfeeding. I found Kellymom.com to be a rich resource full of evidence-based articles on pretty much anything breastfeeding-related you could possibly think of.
- Feed with pride. I promise I’m not a breastfeeding extremist with boobs flying everywhere in public but I believe there is a lot of societal work to be done when it comes to normalizing breastfeeding. I almost always wear a cover when anyone aside from my husband, sister or close girlfriends are around, but I do not apologize for the fact that my baby needs to eat. It’s been my personal choice to feed at brunch while shoveling eggs Benedict in my mouth one-handed, on the beach overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in coastal New England, and on a farm (yes, this actually happened last month). I didn’t think too much of it at the time but now that I’m onto breastfeeding a second child, it’s been cool to reflect on all the different places I’ve fed a baby.
- In the end, fed is best. There are so many reasons why women can’t or chose not to breastfeed and that is certainly no one’s business but your own (although every blessed person on the internet may deem otherwise). If at the end of the day, bottle feeding or pumping works better for you, than that is the best way to feed your baby. There shouldn’t be any shame about that — Fed. Is. Best.
