breastfeeding

Breast feeding

�How will you be feeding your baby, Mrs Owens?�

The hospital midwife, like me, sat in a squashy orange leather chair in a consultation room at the ante-natal clinic. It was my booking-in visit, and I was thirteen weeks pregnant with my first daughter. The clinic itself was very clean, sharp and efficient, with desks and chairs laid at precise right-angles to one-another, and magazines in immaculate piles laid out using a set square. None were askew. It was as though they didn�t dare.

The midwife who sat opposite me was as neat and crisp as everything else, right down to the starched apron and the pince-nez glasses resting a third of the way down her nose. She had about her an air of quiet efficiency which served only to echo the impression that this unit ran with the precision of a well-oiled engine. It insisted upon its own competence. In short, I trusted her. I also trusted all the posters lining the waiting room walls which shouted �Breast is Best�, and to this, gave her my troth.

�I shall breastfeed.� I pledged, with all the authority of someone who has seen a hundred pictures of perfect babies suckling contentedly at their mothers breast in soft focus. The midwife smiled briefly, ticked a box on the form on her clipboard and went onto the next paragraph.

And so I was committed. I read absolutely everything I could find on the subject to ensure that I did the very best for my new baby, and listened to all the advice given to me by others who knew. Once, following the advice of a particularly strange counsel, I actually went to bed with a small packet of frozen peas in each cup of my bra.

As the end of my pregnancy approached, I prepared to breastfeed my new baby within minutes of the birth, and made sure my wishes were quite clear by writing them in red ink on my birth plan.

But of course rarely does a labour and birth go exactly the way one expects it to go, and my birth plan went completely out of the window. Gone was the soothing music because I forgot to put the tape in my hospital bag. And gone was the aromatic foot massage I had envisaged, as I couldn�t bear for my long-suffering husband even to touch me.

Instead I simply shouted all the swear words I could think of at him in a repetitive loop until the lights were dimmed (one of the things that did go according to plan) and Suzannah was brought into the world accompanied by the sound of me bellowing like a calving heifer. After five hours of writhing around on a delivery table I was so exhausted that when they handed her to me wrapped in a hospital towel, I could only manage a brief appraising glance before handing her straight back again. I went off and sat in the bath for an hour bursting into hormonal tears every few minutes, then slept for six hours solid. My new daughter Suzannah, who was always a placid baby, slept contentedly alongside my bed in her hospital crib patiently waiting for me to get my act together.

When I eventually did wake up, Suzannah gave a perfunctory bleat to remind me that one of my chief obligations as a mother was to feed her, and with quiet confidence, I set-to.

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