It’s more than a year since I had my baby and I’m still breastfeeding. If you read my first, furious column about it, you might be surprised: nursing was a challenge. We both cried for weeks. Sometimes I screamed in pain. The guilt I felt for using formula – despite my hungry pre-term baby’s need for it – was matched only by the fury I felt at the professionals who treat exclusive breastfeeding as worth the sacrifice of a mother’s mental health.
My mind boggles at some of the advice I was given: how I was instructed to pump after every feed, but no one thought to tell me that I needn’t continue this indefinitely, compounding my distress and exhaustion; the lactation-promoting drug – which I did not take because one of the side-effects was depression – I was prescribed despite my milk coming in as normal on day three; the NCT breastfeeding “expert” who said that the pain was because we were doing it wrong; my tiny baby who had not been in the womb long enough to fully develop his feeding reflex, with his tied tongue and his minuscule mouth opening and closing like a baby bird’s as he struggled to latch, and I, his mother, bruised and bleeding. I finally had to steel myself to firmly tell the health visitor that exclusive breastfeeding was no longer realistic or desirable for either of us.
The benefits of breastfeeding are often overstated. A new University of Glasgow study may have made those who couldn’t breastfeed feel even worse. The study has found that compared to formula-only feeding, breast- and mixed-fed babies are at a lower risk of having special educational needs. “Yet,” says Dr Danya Glaser, visiting professor at UCL, and honorary consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, “correlation does not equal causation. The study has not been adequately controlled for the role of low socioeconomic status in both breastfeeding and SEN prevalence.” (It also struck me that babies who are premature or have undergone difficult births are at greater risk of learning disabilities. Establishing breastfeeding can also be more challenging with such babies.)
Research is to be welcomed, of course. As Joanna Wolfarth points out in Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding, we have more scientific research on tomatoes than we do on breast milk. Many studies should be taken with a pinch of salt, nevertheless. And I would like to say, clearly and definitively to any new mother, read the chapter on breastfeeding in Eliane Glaser’s Motherhood: Feminism’s Unfinished Business, and liberate yourselves from it.
Another thing that can go to hell alongside guilt is the myth of nipple confusion. Mixed feeding is the reason that I am still breastfeeding. No one talks about it because new mothers are so infantilised that we are considered better off not hearing about it, in case we get any ideas. I’m sure I’d have given up sooner had my husband not shared the work of infant feeding, forming a wonderful bond with the baby in the process. Mixed feeding has enabled me to work, socialise, go to galleries, and most importantly, sleep. It has helped me live a full life while breastfeeding. It has been, for my family, the best of both worlds.
There have been moments this past year when the baby’s need for my milk has felt annihilating, when my blood-sugar level has dipped so low I have almost lost consciousness. I have felt at times, to quote Elena Ferrante, “like a lump of food … a cud made of a living material that continually amalgamated and softened its living substance to allow two greedy bloodsuckers to nourish themselves”.
At others, breastfeeding has felt miraculous, and I have come to understand that old religious fervour for it, felt flickers of divinity and of reverence. In periods of illness, he has taken the breast where he would take no other sustenance, and I have felt pride and relief in his return to health, and in our bond. I can see why people get romantic and emotional, why Wolfarth cried in front of Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture The Good Mother – I stood in the same spot weeks after giving birth and cried too. Like her, it made me think of the bonds that nursing can create with the wider community. I will always feel a warm glow when I think of Karen, from Islington Breastfeeding Support, of my cousin Emily, who gave me 24/7 text advice while tandem feeding her children, and of Sue, the lactation consultant who changed everything.
Thirteen months on, and this morning, as I held my son to my breast, I felt a wave of love and loss. I am in the process of cutting down the feeds – slowly, to avoid too much of a hormone drop – and it’s by no means emotionally straightforward. “No one tells you how to stop,” my sister-in-law said, wryly, as she tried to wean her three-year-old. I do not want to breastfeed for that long – the baby has started nursery and besides, I’m going to Glastonbury without him – but there will be a mourning process.
Everywhere I look I seem to see mothers nursing their newborns, and I try not to stare, but I feel something akin to a craving, to be feeding a baby that small again, to be, in those short – or interminable – moments, his world. In Milk, Wolfarth writes of the Tintoretto painting The Origin of the Milky Way, based on a Roman retelling of the Greek myth of Hera, whose milk splatters across the sky and creates the stars (the cosmic dust of which is contained within all of us, an apt metaphor). The idea moves me. It makes me want to pay tribute to my own milk and the body that made it. Although it is time my son and I both looked outwards, for our universes to expand, I feel wistful. Despite its challenges, nursing him has been a privilege and a gift.
What’s working
One of the funniest books we own is John Burningham’s Avocado Baby, about a baby who grows so strong from eating avocados that he can fight burglars and bullies and push the car when it breaks down. Our baby is already a bruiser, but another benefit is that after eating a whole one for supper, he proceeded to sleep for almost 10 hours.
What’s not
Although I don’t regret recommending the Little Sock Company to readers, my tenacious son has finally worked out how to remove their baby-proof socks, so we are now back to bare feet. At least the weather is getting better, so his toes won’t get so cold.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
