https://www.facebook.com/TheLeakyBoob asked about this article http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4352172.html , “What do you think more moms need to increase how long they breastfeed?”

My answer:

Were it not for the right help at the right time in the right place that I had with my first, and for a mother who persevered despite difficulty, I would not have spent 9+ years of my life breastfeeding despite horrible horrible difficulties. Breastfeeding support needs to be RIGHT NOW, in the mother’s home, on the spot. In the hospital if she’s still there.

Structural problems (inverted nipples, tongue tie, IGT) need to be spotted early and addressed quickly in the right manner.

I’m an experienced breastfeeder. It took us weeks to diagnose our issues with my second baby and months to diagnose them with my third, despite a depth and breadth of experience few moms can match. If I had a hard time, what chance does a first time mom have in a family that is not supportive?

Moms need help available to them RIGHT NOW when they ask for it. When I told my midwife with my first that I was in horrible pain and could not continue to feed at the breast and needed a pump, she was at my house in half an hour, and had the problem fixed soon after that. The only reason it took me a week to call her? My problems (which occured within an hour of birth) were not addressed at the hospital.

With my second child, I thought everything was all right since she was nursing without it hurting me… it didn’t hurt because she wasn’t doing more than mouthing the nipple. Dramatic weight loss, poor gain led to weigh/nurse/weigh/pump/bottle feeding for a couple months… but we got far better results once I figured out I could just manually express into her mouth. Had I known then what I knew with my third (that hand expression was an option for increasing intake at the breast) I think I would have gotten a hell of a lot more sleep those first few months.

With my third child, we looked at his mouth, looked at his tongue and said, “Oh, no tongue tie.” But the tie was posterior and things didnt’ get easier, didn’t get better, and I think the thing that saved us was I already had a reflex to massage the breasts constantly while I nursed. At 2 months I was fed up with how much it still hurt, and a week later his tongue tie was diagnosed, and it took a week to find a practitioner who knew how to fix a posterior tie.

While things were at their worst with my son, I felt like I’d been lied to. About everything from “Babies come when they are ready” to “Nursing gets easier”. For me, every baby has been in some ways harder than the last, though my middle child took the cake for number of biting incidents. I came to the conclusion that there are no hard and fast rules for “how nursing will go”…and that it is possible to be a staunch advocate for breastfeeding without actually enjoying the process of breastfeeding most of the time.

And that’s important. So many moms get the message that breastfeeding is this lovely glowy magical experience of bonding with their baby. It can be. But that’s not why it is important. It is important because babies NEED it. Because with my first, she turned out to be allergic to soy and dairy, and that could have been a real nightmare without the breast. Because my second didn’t tolerate citric acid or citrates, and if you can find ANY formula on the market that doesn’t contain citrates, I’ll be impressed. Because my third baby’s tongue tie meant he didn’t really deal very well with bottle nipples. (There’s another lie… that bottles are always easier. 2 of my 3 kids could not cope with bottles without choking, even on very slow nipples.) Because all three of them have a famiily history of autoimmune disease, obesity, diabetes, digestive issues, etc…. Because without breastmilk my second child might be far more disabled, or dead.

I don’t think formula is evil. I fed my foster son formula, it was what we had, he did fine. But you never know if your baby is going to be one who tolerates a relatively inexpensive formula… or if they won’t tolerate anything on the market. So many mamas end up on the milk share boards because their babies fail to thrive on formula. Most babies on formula may do okay in the short term. But it’s a gamble. And if we can help moms breastfeed successfully despite the fact that breastfeeding isn’t always easy or perfect or natural or glowingly beautiful… that’s fewer babies with problems. And the more mamas making milk, the more milk available to the mamas who can’t.

I asked my mother why she did it, wincing over a pump with my sister when I was a teenager. She just said, “Because it’s the right thing to do for the baby.” That got me through a hell of a lot more crappy nights of blistered nipples and a baby who wouldn’t latch than anything else anyone ever said to me. Not “Breastfeeding is easy” but “Breastfeeding is worth it.”