Breast is best

Breast is best.  It's what the standard thought is in the health community, although not uniformly adhered to, it turns out.  But it's definitely a belief that I hold and I'm so glad that I have had the privilege of being able to feed my baby this way.  I say privilege because breastfeeding can be beyond difficult for so many women, including yours truly.  I was once told at a breastfeeding support group that "breastfeeding is natural but it rarely comes naturally.". I think the fact that there are so many breastfeeding "support" groups speaks to how challenging it can be.  Although JC latched well right from the start, I seemed to have a problem with low milk supply bc he wasn't gaining weight as quickly as the docs wanted.  Now I say "seemed" bc looking back, I think his birth weight was probably inflated by the iv liquid I was given during delivery, my milk was a little slow to come in bc of the traumatic birth, and I had a sleepier baby bc of the epidural.  Unfortunately, I had a healthcare team (doc, public health nurse) that got very concerned about his weight gain and really pushed formula.  I resisted for over a week but it was incredibly stressful (as at the time I was also dealing with a whackload of hormones) and this probably slowed my milk production moreso until I finally gave in and, at the advice of the third lactation consultant that I saw, I supplemented with formula using a lactation aid (a little tube that delivers the formula while the baby is nursing). I cried so hard the first few times and felt that my body was letting both me and my beautiful baby down.  I was so jealous of these mothers who have an abundance of milk, and I still am.  Fortunately, I got in contact with a private lactation consultant soon after I started supplementing (my fourth!), and she was so easy going that I started to relax and things slowly began to improve.  It was incredibly hard at times (still is), and I often thought about quitting, but there's something so wonderful about feeding my baby with my body that i kept pushing through and its been weeks since I've used formula.

So interesting though that the more I tried to control the situation, the worse it got, whereas when I accepted what was happening but did not let my thoughts spin out into negativity, things began to improve.  As a psychologist, I see this all the time with my clients and in other aspects of my life (e.g., sleep training issues), and this situation just reinforced the idea all the more.  Now at 3.5 mths in, I'm much more relaxed about my milk production and it seems to be more abundant as a result (incidentally, I also started praying for more milk and that has helped too).  Our minds are so tied to our bodies that the way we think can actually affect us physically, both in positive and negative ways.  Mieka Forte at miekaforte.blogspot.com recently wrote about the fact that we can only hold one thought in our minds at a time so we might as well make it a positive thought, and I'm in full agreement.  Now this isn't often easy to do by any means and sometimes we will dwell on the negative.  But for me, the more I think positively, the more milk I produce, and the more I get to watch my beautiful son grow and know that my body is responsible for it.  I truly feel proud of myself for persevering and proud of my body for coming through for me...once I let it do it's thing and stopped trying to control things so much.  It's a lesson I keep on learning, as I have a tendency to want to fix things.  But I know that counterintuitively, I can only "fix" things by accepting what is happening and acting in ways that move me towards my values and goals, while trusting that doing so will get me where i want to be.  So many of the psychological problems we struggle with (e.g., anxiety, depression, substance use, eating disorders) stem from our attempts to control our negative feelings, and the behaviors that result from these efforts become the symptoms and further intensify our negative feelings.  Instead, when we accept our feelings but act in ways that move us towards our goals, things improve.  Instead of worrying about my milk supply, I accepted the feelings that come with the challenge, but I acted like a person who wasn't worried about milk supply (feeding my baby whenever he looked hungry even though I didn't think I had anything to give him), and over time I realized that I had more milk than I realized.

I hope that this post will be helpful to those of you who may be struggling with breastfeeding.  I really encourage you to stick with it as much as possible and trust in your body because things do get better!  I wouldn't have believed that 13 weeks ago but it's true.  Good luck!