It was 54 days breastfeeding with injured nipples. And then the fissures closed completely. And I started to love breastfeeding.
August is called Golden August by publicity campaigns in the area of health, as it is the Month of Incentive to Breastfeeding. Personally, I feel mixed feelings about this. Because, while I am happy that there are such necessary campaigns, I am also sad that we need an incentive campaign for something so basic to the human species.
We are mammals, therefore, we suck. Nature created the perfect food from mammalian mothers to their babies, and yet exclusive breastfeeding is a struggle in modern societies across the world. Why?
Of course, an important part of the answer lies with the food industry, which for decades has hijacked the title of producing the perfect baby food from women. This title has been recovered with a lot of struggle by the scientific society and by women themselves, who often find themselves in crazy clashes with their own pediatricians. About this, there are hundreds of articles, reports and news. In some searches you see all the bullshit.
I want to talk here about the more domestic side of this issue. This side also has a lot to do with capitalism and post-industrial revolution societies, but which seems invisible, precisely because its effects occur from the door of the house inwards.
Think of a modern traditional family: mom, dad (or often not even him) and baby. Living comfortably in her apartment, with all that stuff that the algorithms sell us from the first moment they discover us pregnant.
However, even with all the comforts we have today, it is difficult to hear a mother of a baby who reports that it is easy to breastfeed. Doesn't it look weird? With all the technology and comfort we have, shouldn't it be easy to offer a breast?
How did we survive as a species for thousands of years without the food industry if it's so hard to learn to breastfeed a baby?
The answer is simple: in the old days there was a village. No woman with her newborn baby spent hours and hours alone with him and with all the housework and professional obligations. No. There was always a perennial support network made up of mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters, most of whom also had small children. If a woman, for whatever reason, was unable to breastfeed her child, there was another woman with milk, empirical knowledge and availability to help her.
There is no silicone nozzle, electronic babysitter, chair that rocks alone and canned milk to replace it.
But our society tries to pretend it does.
What you need to have successful breastfeeding is information and mental health, that is, you need a support network. And not just a support network that frees you from obligations beyond the baby, like cooking healthy meals and cleaning services (although this is extremely important), but a support network that encourages you to breastfeed your baby and believes in your suckling power, that you may believe in it.
My relationship with breastfeeding comes from my crib. My mother breastfed her three babies for over 2 years. If she had difficulties at first, other than a little pain, she doesn't remember. But one thing is certain: she had a support network and believed in her ability to lactate. She felt that urge to feed and cuddle her baby (what we now call exterogestation) and found no obstacles to that. A companion who knew the importance of lactation and was not in the way was an extra help.
Out of sheer convenience, there was no chance of her falling for the canned milk industry. She didn't want to wake up at dawn to make bottles, let alone wash them, so what could be easier than focusing on the baby's needs and offering the breast?
In addition, there was the issue of family respect for this immense need that human babies have to be at the breast (for reasons that go beyond feeding), so for her, breastfeeding for so many years was also a question of refuge. Nobody demanded anything from her when she was breastfeeding. There was nothing more important than that in the world.
I grew up hearing that I never got sick from being breastfed for so long. I saw my mother breastfeeding my sisters and even other babies, whose mothers were in difficulty (a practice that is not sanitary, it should be noted, but which was socially accepted in the 1980s).
I also remember her using her chest to solve all things: did it fall and hurt? Chest. Sleep? Chest. Frustration? Chest. It was easy and wonderful.
I grew up deifying breastfeeding. And still good. Not really my beginning in lactation was easy.
I had a non-delivery. I won't tell you everything here, because it's a long story that goes through other places, but if you're interested in reading it, my birth story is here on this site .
When Otto was born I was exhausted. I knew how important it was to maintain the correct attachment during the baby's first contacts with my breast, to avoid injuries. However, on the second day, I fell asleep breastfeeding, he took my nipple wrong and opened a huge crack. I started to compensate with the other breast and the same thing happened.
I, with all my support network, much like my mother's, almost gave up breastfeeding. I didn't give up because I knew it would pass. And passed. But during the whole process I was bombarded by out-of-control information: a nurse at the hospital telling me to use a nipple shield and ointment, grandmother trying to convince me to give a pacifier while I listened to professionals I trusted and my mother telling me to get rid of all paraphernalia and keep your chest out, take care of the latch, put nothing but my own milk on the cracks and hang in there.
The thing only started to walk when I trusted my body and got rid of all the paraphernalia. I needed privacy to be topless, a towel to bite on at the beginning of each feeding, patience and courage.
It was 54 days breastfeeding with injured nipples. And then the fissures closed completely. And I started to love breastfeeding. I have no doubt that my lactation has had a huge impact on my child's health and the bonds we have. It also had a huge impact on my understanding of my own body and the love I have for it today.
This honeymoon lasted a long time. Until Otto turned 1 year and 10 months old, to be exact. At that time I started to hate breastfeeding. My baby wasn't so baby anymore, I was anxious to fully resume my professional life and I didn't want to perform the mammal mother as many hours of my day as my big baby still demanded.
I woke up every day looking like I had run a marathon, despite sleeping next to my baby and not waking up for him to nurse. I ate A LOT. Even so, it looked like a stick of skinny. I felt like I needed to rescue who I was, beyond that mammal, to feel whole again. I wanted my body to be fully mine again. I was in crisis with my breastfeeding.
But I had a very clear goal in mind: I would breastfeed my son until he was two years old. Because I felt like he needed it, even though I wanted to run every time the tete lasted more than 5 minutes.
It was two months talking to him that the tetê was going to end. And I spoke the truth to him, in whatever way was possible. I said that he was already big, that he was already eating well, that he didn't need to breastfeed so much anymore and that I needed the tetê to end so I could be happier and play with him more. I repeated this speech many times. He covered my mouth and ignored me.
As we approached his two years, I intensified the conversation and started counting down with him. He already spent the weekends with his grandmother for me to work at the restaurant and that made me decide to put the grandmother in the weaning game.
I explained everything to her and, on Friday, I put him to breastfeed and explained that we were saying goodbye to tetê and that after that weekend we wouldn't need him anymore. We took a picture to mark the day and it went to grandma. It was very difficult for me to make that decision. I couldn't take breastfeeding anymore and I knew he didn't need the teat so much anymore.
When he came back, my mother-in-law told me that he was fine (as he always was) and that she had talked to him and explained that he was now going to have cow's milk. Hearing this, he asked: "but I don't have a cow, grandma". Clearly thinking about how he would go to sleep suckling the cow.
I had put bandages on my nipples when he came back, because we slept together and he would breastfeed at dawn without waking me up before weaning. On the first day he asked for mamá and I explained everything to him again with a sinking heart. He whimpered for like 3 minutes and fell asleep.
On the second day the whining lasted less. On the third day he didn't even ask. And that's when my heart broke.
It felt like I had broken up with an abusive someone I loved very much. I was no longer happy breastfeeding. But I didn't expect to have to go through a kind of weaning mourning.
I spent about 10 days thinking about returning to breastfeeding if he asked me to. But receiving support from my family to stay in the decision. He didn't ask. But he continued to love the tetês as if they were his friends. There was a time when they had names and got good morning before me.
The other side was that I felt the loss of a great weapon: tetê's super power to cure any physical and emotional pain. That part was pretty crazy for me. It fell and I didn't know what to do. Just hugging him wasn't enough. But was.
It's strange how the weaning period was a much more difficult process for me than it was for him. I stopped having pain in my breasts only after 40 days (I didn't want to take medicine to dry up my milk). And I only stopped having milk a year later.
This is my breastfeeding story. And she is similar to many and different from so many others. Like everything else in motherhood, each mother and baby make their story. I'm not here to serve as a mirror for anyone, because if I had another child, my breastfeeding story with him would probably be different from my first one.
During the pandemic, when my professional and financial life became a mess, I even felt like having another child just to have refuge in the maternity of a newborn. But I soon realized that this wouldn't solve any of my problems, it was just a desire to escape.
Today, I'm still passionate about this subject and I've already supported some friends to go through complicated phases in lactation. I have the babies and mothers I helped in a special place for me. I know I made a difference in those lives.
Regarding mothers who, for whatever reason, cannot have this experience with lactation, it is important to say that it is wonderful that we managed to develop an artificial food that meets the nutritional needs of babies with some efficiency. Just as the bond formed between mother and baby can be developed in different ways that do not include breastfeeding. In no way do I believe that mothers who have not breastfed their babies are “less mothers”. But none of these aspects minimizes the importance of talking about this subject to prevent mothers who want and can breastfeed their babies from doing so in the most peaceful way possible.
I have great friends who could not fully breastfeed. Some due to previous surgeries, others due to misinformation and lack of support, others due to mastitis with poor follow-up. For whatever reason, the support network is also essential in these cases.
One of the craziest things about motherhood is how we forget the difficulties of each phase (even for humanity to have a future, right, people?). For that reason, it is super important that there is a support network, a village with ancestral knowledge and, now, also scientific knowledge.
And it's amazing how social media has made this village possible in a new way. Much of the support I've received, and for which I'm immensely grateful, has come from my moms group, which grew out of a group of pregnant women on Facebook. In addition, there are huge groups, moderated by lactation consultants whose information is all based on scientific evidence and where you can find studies and support from other mothers who have been through similar situations.
There are also lactation consultants (nurses, nutritionists, speech therapists, etc.) who can be hired, or found at milk banks, and they do a wonderful job, being able to look at you closely and solve your difficulties in a human and unique way.
Read, get to know your body, be prepared to be surprised by the mishaps and also by the wonders of this journey. But also be prepared to ask for help. She's necessary for you to be the amazing mother that you are, but sometimes it gets a little weird because you're alone with your baby when you shouldn't be.
We are no longer in the village. But the village can be found and built.
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Lívia Farah is a woman who fights, cares and cries, who learns every day to face the world with a thousand demands on her mind and a child in tow.
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chest.me
@putapeita
/bitch
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