Nursing with Itty Bitty Tittys



Nursing with Itty Bitty Tittys*

This confession is difficult for me to make and my face is getting hot even imagining you reading this but here we go…

When I was a teenager I tried to start a babysitting “business” to make a little extra money. I had gotten baby sitting jobs every once in awhile without trying but I wanted to get some regular clients so I made a big poster and hung it up at the church where we were doing home school co-op. The poster listed my credentials such as “oldest of six children” and “three years experience in paid child-care” but also stated near the bottom

“no bottle-fed babies please”

Here’s where I was coming from with that:

My mom breastfed for fourteen years straight, she tandem nursed, she nursed while pregnant and she even nursed a child who was old enough to read. I grew up spending time at our local WIC office while my mom gave advice to new moms as a Lactation Peer Counselor. My mom whipped it out in restaurants, at the YMCA on the side of the pool during our swim lessons, at family gatherings, at the park and even while leaning awkwardly over a cranky, carseat-confined babe in our mini-van. My mother once helped lead a “nurse-in” to protest the library telling a nursing mom to keep her nips concealed and she was once called a “seductress” and kicked out of a home school group for nursing her toddler in the sight of innocent teenage boys. Our freezer was always stocked with gallons of hand pumped breast milk and my mom supplied many less fortunate babies near and far with her liquid gold. Although my mom never directly said this to me I believed for a very long time that breastfeeding was effortless, bottles ruined babies teeth and made them fat, sick and stupid and that mothers who did not breastfeed their babies were selfish and lazy.

So, now you understand why I was putting mothers down while trying to get a babysitting job at the wise old, all-knowing age of fourteen...Well, I hope you understand.

Around the same time of the judgmental poster I was wasting a lot of time agonizing over my breasts...like every teenage girl ever. Several times a day I would think about my bosom wondering when my breasts would grow. I would stare longingly at my peers as their chests swelled. I wore baggy t-shirts in hopes that people would think my boobs were hiding in there somewhere instead of not existing at all. As I became an adult my breasts never developed and as the years passed I began to enjoy the way I looked and the envy faded. After all I never suffer with breast induced back pain, mammograms take ten seconds and I have no need for pokey underwire (or a bra at all for that matter). I barely thought about my breasts at all through my young adult years except when some rude person would feel the need to point out my physique to me...as if I wasn’t already aware. My girls get called “itty bitty titties”, “mosquito bites”, “flat” among other things but I prefer to call them “nearly A’s” because that is the only bra cup size I have found that fits me.

It never occurred to me that anything but my appearance may be an issue until one day when I was nearing adult-hood my mom’s midwife plopped her hand right between my nearly a’s and said “Yep! Just as I thought. If there is more than a hand’s width of space between your breasts you can’t breastfeed. You need to get on some hormonal supplements right away to try and fix this.” I was mortified at being man-handled without any warning or permission and also at being called out in front of my best friend (the midwife’s daughter) who had beautiful, perky, large breasts. I googled it many times throughout the years and asked every Doctor and OBGYN I met about the hand thing and no one knew what I was talking about. The only message I got was “Almost every woman can breastfeed and breast size is not an indicator of how well or if one will be able to breastfeed.” So, I put the fear in the back of my mind and it didn’t resurface until I was pregnant with my first child.

I asked the midwife I was seeing during pregnancy about my breasts and she said she had seen women with smaller breasts than me nurse twins and pump buckets of milk. So, again I put the fear away. After my daughter was born by C-section I passed out and wasn’t able to nurse her for the first time until hours later. I was semi-awake, lying in the hospital bed feeling leaden and drugged, disoriented and weak. I heard the nurses voice saying “It’s time for the baby to eat. Is her sister going to come and nurse her again or should I get a bottle?” I mustered all the strength I could and opened my eyes and said “No. I’m going to feed her.” My husband brought her to me and I shakily held her for the first time. When brought to my breast she licked once and then latched with a bit of a pinch. We were all relieved.

one of corinas first feeds

The Lactation Consultant came in the next day and said that my daughter had a beautiful latch. The third day she came for her second visit and I asked if it was normal for my baby to be nursing eighteen out of the last twenty four hours. She said that she didn’t need to nurse that much to satisfy her hunger but I could be my baby’s pacifier if I wanted to. She said “My advice: use a pacifier.”. I’d never heard of a breastfed baby needing a pacifier before.

We went home and my daughter continued to nurse for hours on end and then scream for hours on end. That went on for several days and then she was sleepy and lethargic and she slept and never cried. When we took her to get weighed at one week old the Doctor told us she was wasting away and we needed to supplement with formula. “Bottles!? Never!” My baby got skinnier and skinnier and sicker and sicker. She wasn’t peeing or pooping. My nipples literally fell off. I remember one diaper that was just a smear of meconium, and a chunk of my skin and some blood from my nipples. We started looking for a new pediatrician and took our daughter to a local midwife to get her tongue and lip tie revised. I knew almost nothing about it but I was willing to do anything to breastfeed. We had to wake our baby several times a day from her lethargy to swipe our fingers across her wounds in her mouth to keep the ties from growing back together. She bled and screamed and I cried. She never latched on again after the lip and tongue tie surgery. I pumped around the clock only getting drops each time, sleep was just a distant memory. We fed her my sister’s breastmilk through a little tube while she sucked on our fingers to avoid using a bottle which I believed would be worse than death. She didn’t react well to the frozen and thawed breastmilk and was screaming for over an hour several times a day with painful gas.

the dreadful sns feeder

I remember as a kid once talking with my mom and sisters about what kind of mothers us girls would be or which of us likely wouldn’t procreate at all. My mom said “I’m sure one of you will completely rebel and have c-sections and bottle feed.” I exclaimed indignantly “It wont be me!” and now here I was…

We talked to doctors and midwives and lactation consultants and everyone kept saying that breastfeeding is hard work and I just needed to keep at it...but don’t let her die. They said “It’s not you, it’s her.” Needless to say these words were not helpful. The local WIC office threw a party for “the nursing mamas”, I was invited but didn’t go for fear of feeling like an impostor. Sometime after the horror movie diaper I sat holding my baby and crying in despair and frustration after yet another session of digging at her open mouth wounds and I realized that my fear of bottle feeding was more about what people would think of me than it was about the bottle itself. At that moment I decided to bottle feed because that is what she needed to stay alive and that is what I needed to be able to sleep and stay sane. When she finished her first bottle full of formula I cried...with relief. She was comfortable and happy for the first time in her very short life. 


babywearing and bottles can go hand in hand

She went on to reach almost all of the baby developmental milestones four to eight months early, she got sick as a baby only once and she stayed lean and muscular. I learned that in a lot of ways bottle feeding is actually more work than breastfeeding. I learned that almost all women want to breastfeed and try hard to. I learned that breastfeeding is not effortless; even my champion nurser of a mother told me then about her struggles breastfeeding a baby who refused to latch and another who couldn’t suck and she had to hand express into his mouth to keep him fed. I felt ashamed for my previous elitism and my daughter and I recovered quickly and bonded like any breastfeeding pair with lots of skin-to-skin snuggling, co-sleeping and baby wearing.

Now here I am with baby number two. It looked like we were going down the same road again. Our baby was up crying for four or five hours every night and marathon nursing but never seeming satisfied. My nipples were raw and I would cry with pain at most feedings. In the first couple weeks as my baby dropped weight I kept at it but I knew I wasn’t going to breastfeed at any cost this time...I wasn’t going to get up extra in the middle of the night to pump, I wasn’t going to get her mouth cut open, I wasn’t going to let her struggle and choke on a little tube and I wasn’t going to scramble for donor milk that she probably couldn’t digest anyway. I just kept nursing her and keeping an eye out for dehydration.

We started supplementing with formula when she was a week and a half old, first with a medicine syringe in the corner of her mouth as she nursed and then a couple weeks later with bottles. Even after we started using bottles I continued to latch her on to my breast anytime she rooted or fussed and she continued to nurse. At first we couldn’t keep up with the number of bottles she was taking but over the last couple weeks the pile of empty bottles by the sink has gotten fewer and fewer. With the help of an amazing Lactation Consultant we've estimated with her weight and weight gain and ounces of formula taken per day and figure she is getting about half of what she needs from me. I am very happy with this and I plan to keep on like we are, even if my milk supply goes down from here. I know that I look strange in public when seen with my baby suckling from my nearly A’s and a bottle waiting beside us. It’s even more obvious now than when I was exclusively formula feeding my first born that I failed to provide enough milk. I believe that I am more vulnerable now to judgment from people like my fourteen year old self than I was the first time around. Now instead of looking unfortunate I look to some like I’m not trying hard enough or am not trusting my body. I still believe that almost all women can breastfeed and I am working hard. It’s no cake-walk doing the work of both breastfeeding and bottle feeding.

Plus...I do trust my itty bitty titties to provide comfort, to create a special bond and to put my baby to sleep. 
Breastfeeding is about more than just food.


In the end I’m grateful to my babies and my boobs for giving me the experiences I have had. I’ll never make my kid suffer to keep up appearances again, I’m no longer a milk-nazi, and I have grown to make less judgments in general about anyone’s parenting choices...most of us are doing the best we can with what we have.


life is good

*It should be said that not everyone with small breasts will be unable to produce enough breastmilk. I am one of the 2% of women who have a real biological issue with milk production and I happen to have small breasts. Breast size really isn't much of an indicator of milk supply. 


Epilogue:

Wren is still happily breastfeeding today, two weeks from her second birthday! She often says "Boobies...milk....good." after nursing and it melts my heart every time. 


Comments

  1. Oh Sybilla I nearly cried when I read this. It truly felt like when I tried nursing Abigail as a baby. I had already had one baby I never nursed and felt so guilty about that. But I was young and had never even seen a nursing mom. When Abigail came along I was determined. But we had so many issues and my niplle completely detached. It was do painful and I was struggling with having had to have a c-section. I had so many feelings of being a failure as a mom because I couldn't give birth properly and then I couldn't even nurse. I only lasted a week with her. Then I didn't even try with Rowan. I felt guilty about that too but I knew it was the right choice. And I have your amazing mom to thank for helping me nurse Crimson.
    I've come to terms with my bottle fed babies and c-sections now. I look back and know if we didn't have these modern helps my babies and probably myself would have died in childbirth. And even if we survived that they would have starved to death.
    It can be hard though as teens to let go of the things we learn from family. I was avidly against pacifiers and even said so to a mom once when I was a cashier. I feel guilty about it now. I was speaking only what I had learned from others. Not what I felt in my heart was right. My Abigail went on to use a pacifier till she was 3 lol

    I often felt like she and I didn't bond well when she was younger she had such a tramatic birth and early feeding troubles. And I blamed myself so much for her emotional struggles as a child. But even that went on to be ADHD that I was convinced wasn't real. Parenting is hard. All of it is hard. And we all need to lift each other up more! I'm so glad to see you are doing so well with your beautiful babies. You rock. You are enough. And at the end of the day what matters is not how you feed your baby but that you did what it took to make sure your baby was fed.
    If you ever want ir need to talk I'm here.

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  2. I want to add that for my c-sections one was definitely a real emergency. Its the only one I feel was medically necessary. The second was purely a doctor unwilling to allow me to do a vbac even though I had already had one successful vbac. She told me I could have my vbac if I went in to labor Monday through Friday between 8 and 5. And only if I delivered during that time. I of course went in to labor a month early and on a Sunday. So off to c-section I went.

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