07/08/2025
For World Breastfeeding Week, I thought I'd share my personal feeding experience, which was really challenging. In hindsight, I wish I'd prepared better for breastfeeding antenatally. I was so nervous about giving birth that I just thought I'd deal with it later.
I had excruciating ni**le pain and low supply. I was told bub had a tongue tie by a lactation consultant, but a paediatrician told me otherwise. In desperation, I had bub's tongue tie lasered at 9 days old. It was a heartbreaking experience as a new mum.
Things still didn't improve. I kept quadruple feeding: breastfeeding, pumping, topping up with expressed milk then formula. I then used a supply line, supplementing at the breast with a tube delivering milk from a bottle. All these steps meant that I had very little time to do tummy time with bub, who ended up with a very flat head!
I felt so ashamed that I couldn't just breastfeed like my friends. I was embarrassed about the supply line. I gained so much weight from all the medication that I took for months to build supply, which made me even more disappointed in my body. I had recurrent mastitis from pump trauma and poor latch.
I did this for 13 months. Looking back, I regret all the lost time I could've spent enjoying my baby, but my mind just wouldn't let me "give up." I wish I had the support to keep re-evaluating my goals, streamline the feeding process, and stop defining my worth as a mum by how I fed my baby. I just had my blinkers on and couldn't see another way.
Ten years on, I've grieved and come to accept that's how things turned out, that I did my best with what I knew at the time. As a lactation consultant now, there's so many things that I could've adjusted, streamlined, eliminated if I were assisting myself! While I can't rewrite that story, perhaps I might bring the support and hope that I wish I had to another family's story.
