The real breastfeeding kit

I was recently looking for a birthday present for my sister-in-law, who is expecting a baby in November. I wanted to give her something that would be useful in the first few weeks and months with the little one, and since she is already sold on the breastfeeding, I thought some support in this area would be a good idea.

I typed ‘breastfeeding kit’ into amazon, and found nothing but a collection of bottles, bottle sterilizers and pumps. It was more like a bottle feeding kit than a breastfeeding kit. It all seemed a bit disconnected from the physical and emotional part of breastfeeding, and a bit sad. It also reminded me of the low breastfeeding rate and general attitude towards breastfeeding in this country.

The UK has the worst breastfeeding rate in the world. Only one in 200 women - or 0.5% - is still doing any degree of breastfeeding after a year. Compare that with 23% in Germany, 56% in Brazil and 99% in Senegal. In the UK, 81% of mothers had tried breastfeeding at some point, but only 34% were breastfeeding at six months and 0.5% at 12 months.

So what is going on?. Many reasons have been given in the national papers, mainly citing social pressures and cultural attitudes, about why the rate is so low. In the 1950’s, formula milk landed with force and many people adopted it. I can't help thinking that the knock-on-effect of two generations of women who haven’t passed the breastfeeding practice and skills on to their daughters, is starting to show. It's like a dying art that people have lost touch with.

My own experience with Mole was touch and go, and the breastfeeding was tipping in the balance, it could have easily never taken off. She did not latch on for the first four days. The mid-wife called her ‘slow’ and ‘lazy’. In hind sight, I think she was right. Mole just didn’t want to do any work, and I sat up with her night after night, turning into a tearful, exhausted shadow of my former self, trying vainly to get her to settle onto my boob, while watching her get more and more hungry. It was a desperate, horrible time.

Then finally, on the fourth day, she mystically turned a corner, and for the next six weeks I spent most of my time planted on the sofa, being a 24 hour one stop restaurant, caught up in a crazy sleep-and-feed cycle, that left little time for anything else. I got through all six series of Mad Men this way.

After this initial postnatal period, the feeding really came into its own, and we LOVED it. We fed everywhere together. In our local cafe, me noshing on my favourite avacado with cinnamon bagel, Mole noshing on me. On the bus, on the train, on a park bench, in the doctors waiting room, in bed, and at the dinner table. For that last one I had to drape a tea towel over Mole's head to avoid showering her with spaghetti bolognaise. It was free, it was portable, it didn't need any prep, it was on tap, and it felt great.

But what I didn’t sufficiently realise at the time, especially during the shell-shock early weeks when it really would have made a difference, was the total lack of support. Mr M&H was at work all day, my extended family lived miles away, and bar the occasional fleeting family visit or a meet-up with a friend in a café to swap new-mummy stories, I was alone. I remember thinking, when Mole wouldn't let me put her down for a minute so that I could so much as go to the toilet: "This is ridiculous. No-one has ever expected this of me before. If this was a paid job, it would be illegal!". It was relentless work with no breaks, and it was isolating. Millions of women go through this isolation, and I think it is a major blind spot in our culture.

I have a vivid memory of a dream in which I was walking through a jungle, moving through the trees, and become aware of a very affectionate huge insect, like a dragonfly, buzzing its wings against my chest. I came round in bed, and realised it was Mole, snuggled against me, suckling. My life at that time seemed to fade in and out between dream world and reality. My brain was struggling to adapt to the seismic comet that had just landed in my previously ordered life.

I reminisce on this now, to show that while we (Mole and I) managed to make the breastfeeding work in the end, I can totally see why so many people throw in the towel in the first few weeks. I do think it has a lot to do with social pressures, negative comments and attitudes about breastfeeding that knock a new mothers fragile confidence, and maybe even an unwillingness to undergo what breastfeeding demands, which is basically to let the baby take the lead in what was previously your own life.

But another reason is the unrealistic expectations about breastfeeding. I was totally unprepared for how hard it would initially be. This was not made clear to us in our antenatal classes, either in the NHS ones, or the NCT ones. The midwives were pushing the ‘Breast is Best’ campaign, not least because breastfeeding is projected to save the NHS millions of pounds in years to come, with the generation of healthier people that will result. Midwives are amazing people and they work incredibly hard, but they are under-resourced and have limited time to spend with each mother, meaning that even though they want to help, they often can’t give the time and attention needed.

We got very little guidance on what daily life would be like, what the breastfeeding routine would look like compared with the bottle feeding routine (a lot more intense), and that it is normal to be exhausted and to cry in the first days and weeks.

Perhaps they didn’t want to scare us off, but I think if we had got a more honest picture of the breastfeeding experience, this would have helped hugely in assuring me that there was nothing wrong and I was in fact doing an awesome job, and that the definition of a good mother does not depend on looking like one of those impossibly clean and glamorous looking mum models on a glossy magazine cover. Which is just as well, because I was permanently covered in spit-up and occasionally pooh for the first four months.

To that end, going back to amazon, I decided that I would put together my own breastfeeding kit, one that is honest and based on experience, and might make those first few weeks easier for people who are using their boobs for the first time, as it were:

1. Nipple cream (for the first two weeks of chafing from being gummed 24/7)

2. Nipple shields (for when the chafing gets really bad and you need a bit more protection)

3. Nursing bras (I like the ones marketed as ‘night time bras’, which don’t have any seams or clippy bits. They are more like crop-tops with stretchy cross-over panels that you can pull to the side for quick hassle free feeding, essential for when you’re half asleep)

4. A subscription to netflix (for all the hours of sitting you’ll be doing)

5. A U shaped pillow (to rest your arms on)

6. A neck pillow (just to make you really comfy)

7. A trolley table that you can stock up with drinks and snacks, TV remote etc. This should be positioned to be easily reached with one hand without having to lean forward or change position. Depending on which side you are feeding, the trolley can then be moved to your left or right free arm.

8. Muslin cloths (for spit up and general spillage)

9. Baby sling (for wearing them around the house, or out and about. If they won’t be put down or settle, you can at least be mobile and hands free with them relatively happy on your chest, which is where they want to be for the first three months)

10. Breastfeeding multi-vitamins (as an insurance policy to make sure you don’t get run down, and because cooking proper food will probably go by the wayside for a while).

11. Breast pump, for occasional deflating when needed (saves your boobs from exploding).

12. Breast pads, for those who suffer leakage situations. I never did, but its handy to have them just in case.

Speaking of cooking proper food, and other domestic tasks commonly lumped in with motherhood, this leads me to my final point.

Ideally one would have a live in cook, cleaner, shopper and older child minder for the first six weeks after having a baby. I actually think this should be provided by the state for everyone who has recently given birth. Since, unfortunately, most people don’t have this service and we may be waiting rather a long time for the government to provide it (unlike Holland who provide a subsidised post natal nanny, amazing!), here are some forward planning techniques for surviving the first six weeks which should make a huge difference:

Cooking: Stock up your freezer on pre-prepared frozen meals which can be taken out and de-frosted the night before, and then simply heated up. It just takes some organisation and forward planning in the weeks leading up to labour, but it’s worth it.

Cleaning: To a large extent cleaning can go by the wayside for a while. Ideally your partner / friend / family member can be enlisted to do the basics like run the hoover round, change the bed sheets and attack the kitchen and bathroom with bleach once a week. For the daily tasks like washing-up and laundry, having a washer/dryer combi and a dishwasher makes a huge difference. If you don’t have these already, it’s worth selling off your old appliances and investing in these. You won’t look back!

Shopping: Two words – Online Delivery. Need I say more.

Older child minder: This one is probably the most tricky as they’ve yet to invent a machine that will do child-minding, apart from perhaps the TV. The upside is that if this is your #2 baby, then you will already be aux fait enough with things to hit the ground running, in a way that you weren’t with baby #1. The other good thing is that you will have probably already built up a network of playgroups and play dates with other mums from baby #1, which will help to occupy the older child, and take them off your hands for a bit. This was definitely my experience. I just continued with Mole’s routine of regular playgroups and outings, and Hedgehog tagged along with us.

Lastly, it is okay to give yourself a break from time to time. I did end up buying in a stash of formula when Mole was about four weeks old. It was the ready made cartons variety, off amazon. It had been a particularly exhausting marathon feeding session, when Mole was doing one of her ‘cluster feeding’ bouts, which was most of the time.

By the time the cartons arrived a week later, the cluster feeding had stopped and I didn’t feel the need to use them, but it made me feel more secure to have them on standby all the same, for those occasional 2am moments. I think she had about two cartons during her first six months, and the rest we ended up putting in her porridge after a year, just to use it up. The official line on this is that giving any formula at all is the thin edge of the wedge and can jeopardise your supply. However for me that didn't happen. The formula never became a regular thing, it just gave me a break at the occasional time when I most needed it.

Finally, a note on milk expressing: Expressing does seem to work for some people, say perhaps to provide a milk supply for others to use in your absence, but from my own experience, it was more trouble than it was worth. The expressing was very time consuming in addition to the breastfeeding itself, and when it came to using it, Mole was not interested, she wanted the milk from the source. So six bottles of expressed milk (which represented about six hours of my time) ended up going down the sink.

Interestingly, I did a little taste test one day to try and figure out why Mole was rejecting my expressed milk. I compared freshly expressed milk, refrigerated milk, and frozen milk. The freshly expressed stuff tasted quite nice and sweet, the refrigerated milk tasted of cabbage, and the frozen milk tasted of vomit. Mmmmmm, nice.

It is still worth having a pump though, if only to help get your supply going in the early days, and to deflate on the odd occasion too, as you can guarantee your boobs will feel like they are going to explode at times.

That reminds me of another story of when Mr M&H and I went on our first romantic weekend away when Mole was 10 months old, and I forgot to bring the breast pump. By the second morning my boobs felt like they were about to explode. I was seriously considering going out into the street and offering my services to the first baby that I came across. Then I realised that Mr M&H could be my baby. After my second request he agreed to do the honours. That was when our romantic weekend took a strange and unexpected turn. It still makes me feel a bit weird thinking about it. But hey, that’s parenting for you. Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

On that disturbing note I’ll finish up, but there you have my thoughts on breastfeeding. It’s intense, a bit sh*t sometimes, but bloody amazing, and in the words of L'Oreal, "She's worth it".