Moms, Babies, and Breastfeeding

No one could be better prepared going into the situation. I am married with a wonderful supportive husband and family, both parents, both in-laws, and plenty of friends. I’m well-off financially. I’m well educated, finishing my doctorate, after all. In addition, my area of doctoral study was nutrition and my research focused on breastfeeding. I have had over five years experience counseling breastfeeding mothers and am an Internationally Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC), the credential to say you know what you are talking about concerning breastfeeding. The topic of my doctoral research was resilience in breastfeeding mothers and ironically, what I thought should be the easiest part of the birthing experience (breastfeeding), has turned me into one of my study population.

It amazes me that any woman in our society is resilient enough to keep breastfeeding through the hospital culture of uncaring that we have established and what often feels like stares in public. Indeed, I at one point felt that my study should include all women that continue to breastfeed in our U.S. culture, for now I feel that each one is a special, strong, hardy woman.

At the doctor’s office, I was informed that my baby had not turned over and was indeed breech. She had turned back and forth the entire pregnancy and I fully expected that she had turned the right way and was raring to go. She had seemed very active and wiggly the whole time and I was certain that she was head down.

I was shocked and really had nothing to say. He explained that rather than wait until labor progressed any further, that it was safer to do a c-section as soon as possible.

My birth plan was thrown out the window. I had wanted to delay all those procedures on the baby until we had a chance to bond, but they went ahead and did them without so much as a word to my husband or me. I’ve heard (in breastfeeding circles) that if a baby holds her tongue up to the roof of her mouth, it’s a sign of stress. Indeed, if they hurt her mouth while deep suctioning her, she might hold her tongue up so nothing else might hurt her. Here, while I wanted my breast to be the first thing in her mouth, since it is the most sensitive part of her body and the part of her most able to experience the outside, instead, here it was rough suctioning. I wanted her to imprint, just like a little duck, on me. Instead, she had a tube rammed down her throat. In the hours and indeed days that followed, I could see that she held her tongue up whenever I tried to latch her on.