Guest Post: Tales from a "Nursing Failure"

Our latest guest post is from mom Kristen Hurst. In her post Kristen shares her struggles with low milk supply and how she initially wanted to breastfeed exclusively for six months but was able to do so only until her baby's four month. Although she considers her nursing career a "failure", I consider it a success because i felt she tried everything to make nursing relationship last. Low breast milk  supply is still better no breast milk at all! 

[caption id="attachment_1901" align="aligncenter" width="265"] Not all moms are wired the same way. Some struggle with breastfeeding, while for others, nursing comes naturally.                                 Source of Photo: nih.gov[/caption]

I remember before my son was born, I just assumed all babies naturally latched onto their mothers, just like a nursling fawn to its mother doe, mother nature at her finest hour; no fuss, fretting or worrying about such things like sore nipples, mastitis and a feeble milk production.   Yes, indeed, I got a crash course in nursing, taught to me exclusively by my newborn!

Not only did my son not latch, he screamed and reared his head back, refusing to nurse, at all. No matter how hard I cajoled, rocked and bathed him and enticed him to try, over and over again, it was to no avail and now we were both in tears. In my exhausted and hormonal state, I began to break down my nursing allegiance and eye that forbidden baby bottle.  I did call the La Leche hotline one night, out of options and basically a giant emotional mess, where they calmly told me to put the bottle down, and walked me through the whole nursing process.    For my son and I, it ended up being months of pumping, but I did get the breast milk down him, just not the way I had ideally envisioned.  I never did manage to produce much milk, even with all my incessant pumping, which made me feel like a failure.  After all, shouldn’t my body have continued caring for my child even after birth?

I had this image of my child and I bonding and connecting, that final little piece of the parenting puzzle, where it wouldn’t matter if there was a devastating natural disaster, I could rise above any dangerous floodwaters or devastating ashes.  Just my newborn and my lactating lifeline who would thrive with all my maternal glory.  Yep, didn’t quite happen that way, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try.

If this sounds at all like your breastfeeding experience, then I’ve got a few tried and true tips to heed and hopefully help you through the stressful first days of nursing.

• Breast milk versus formula: Let’s break down the differences so that as your child’s mother, you can make that best choice for them.  Breast milk is of course, designed as the perfect food for your child, it is balanced with gentle enzymes for ease of digestion, it has immunity boosting factors that can never be reproduced in a store-bought formula.  If you were like me, then you probably already know all about the unique qualities that breast milk has over commercially manufactured products, as a result I decided to supplement my meager breast milk with a couple bottles of formula.  As a fretful parent there is nothing more alarming than those weight charts, especially when your little’s ones weight has dipped into the ‘below’ average range.  My perfect medium became, pump, feed and then supplement.  And we went through this routine until I eventually dried up and he became strictly formula fed.


• Have a nursing plan: Like many pregnant mothers, I daydreamed of the day, when I held that tiny bundle, when he and I would find a cozy little spot to cuddle up together, just a blissful moment of feeding and nurturing.  So was the plan, and I had every intention of following up on it until of course, reality set in and thwarted all of my nursing dreams.  Fortunately, I was able to persevere and move forward and most importantly, care for my son with everything I had available.


• Support System: I can’t really complain here as I had great support, I remember my husband giving our son a tiny ‘cup’ of precious colostrum at three-o-clock in the morning, a miniscule portion I had painstakingly pumped out for him, as I knew that colostrum is an essential component for growing and developing newborns. My own mother came to visit and worked endlessly with the whole latching process, but at the end of the day, it just didn’t click!  Even appointments and consultations at the hospital and La Leche League failed to get the nursing going.  I had decided (sagely) that parenting was never going to be a perfect science for me.  It was time to go to a new plan, which meant ‘whatever works’.

Yes, parenting is an adventure and it starts right from the get go.  Don’t forget that what works for you and your family may not work as well for someone else.  I felt guilty at times when my son and I would meet for my ‘mommy/baby’ classes and I was the only one with a bottle.  I felt at times, they looked down upon me as somehowI lacked the same parenting philosophies or status that they all shared.   Of course, what they didn’t know was nursing had always been upfront and most important in my nurturing mind and my difficult decision to stop breastfeeding certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.

Many years later, my mother shared with me that her own mother had a lot of issues with breastfeeding and she fretted constantly about her own lack of milk and nursing prowess.  It all made sense to me, perhaps due to genetics and conditions out of my control, I truly couldn’t produce the same amounts of milk like some of my more successful nursing peers.

The good news? He turned out fine, but like I said about parenting, it’s never a ‘one-size fits all’ process, it’s a learn as you grow, one.

How about you moms, how do you measure breastfeeding success? 

Kristen is a stay at home mother of three who enjoys blogging.  She received her bachelor's degree in fashion marketing, and writes often maternity wear.  When she's not trying to juggle the lives of Casey, Austin and Ben, she enjoys painting and catching up with a great Jane Austen novel.

Also worth reading:

• Coming to terms with low milk supply


• How you could be wasting breast milk 

***