A Bit of a Boob

I’ve always been a bit scared of my own boobs.

They’ve always been this part of me that popped up out of nowhere, and garnered lots of interest from people other than myself. I could never understand why teenage boys were so obsessed with the two bags of fat stuck to my chest just because they were bigger sacks than most people’s.

I have appreciated them when they’ve balanced out my larger than average rear as part of an outfit, but mostly they’ve been these big heavy things that I’m too scared to touch in case I feel a lump, and make it impossible to wear pretty matching underwear because my size only comes in an array of beige.

During the last 3 weeks however, I have had a whole new world of all things breast opened up to me. Three weeks ago my gorgeous little redheaded bean of a daughter was born, and every day since my thoughts have been full of boob.

The first week, I’m going to be honest, was brutal. I had been prepared for the ‘breastfeeding journey’ to be a bit tough, but nothing could have prepared me for the toe-curling pain of a baffled newborn chomping down on your already cracked and red raw nipples. “It’s like wearing in new shoes” my mum told me, “they’ll toughen up eventually”. In the meantime I spent every moment in the space between feeds dreading the next round of torment. Have you seen the goat in Jurassic Park that gets tied to the stick waiting for a dinosaur to gobble it up for supper? That’s how my nipples felt.

I was told to feed through the pain, so feed I did, remembering that none of this was my daughter’s fault as nobody had told her what to do either, we were both just blagging it. A few times I cracked and sobbed on the bedroom floor as my husband gave a bottle of formula ‘to give my boobs an hour’s break’ – and I chastised myself with all the mum guilt in the world for not providing enough for my little girl without needing the help of a cow’s mammary glands. I now reflect on this in the warm light of day as being a ridiculous hormone-fuelled overreaction. But at the time, the pain is real.

One particular highlight of the first week was when I pulled my nipple out of my baby’s mouth and found her face was covered in blood. Crimson blood was all round her mouth and dripping from my nipple onto her baby grow. It was like a scene from a horror film, with my tiny 7lb daughter at the centre. Obviously, I screamed and then sobbed uncontrollably while my husband mopped up the tears, blood and human milk.

Whenever I didn’t have a person latched on to a breast, I was covering my battered nipples in lotions and potions. Trauma dressing, Lanolin, moist compresses, breast milk; I tried everything I could to get them to heal and man-up (ironic) to the task at hand. Breast shells were particularly helpful, small plastic cup type things that created a little dome of safety over each nipple so that they stopped sticking to the breast pads and ripping the scabs off every time I peeled the pads away. Never before have I had such intense interaction with my own boobs.

Many times my husband would walk into a room to find me sitting cross-legged and despairing with both boobs dangling out, various nipple paraphernalia scattered around me and a wiggling baby desperately trying to latch onto anything she can find.

And then there’s the day that the milk comes in. Nobody warns you about this. I was busy feeding my baby all this ‘liquid gold’ colostrum stuff and dealing with the nipple trauma when boom! Suddenly my boobs are like gigantic lumpy painful bombs waiting to go off. The morning it happened I had been up all night feeding, and the pain at 5am was so intense I jumped in the shower and tried to hand-milk myself. Sadly, my own boobs looked and felt nothing like the tiny pert knitted boobs we had been taught hand expression on at NCT classes, so I was unsuccessful. My husband was soon rudely awakened by a crying wife pleading for him to work out how to put together the breast pump and milk her.

In summary, all of the professionals who tell you that breastfeeding shouldn’t hurt – even in the first few days – are liars. They have either been fed that line to give to patients and know no better having never experienced it, or they are lying through their teeth. A close friend of mine who had a baby a week after I did is a health visitor herself, and after experiencing that first week of breastfeeding first hand, she told me that she wishes she could go back to every mother she assured that feeding was not painful and apologise.

However, there is hope! I’m now on week 3 of breastfeeding and the good old nipples are substantially toughened. I wouldn’t say they are quite at the ‘old boots’ stage, but the huge bleeding crevices have healed and the process of feeding my little girl is no longer painful! The hard work will all be worth it in the end – I know all the incredible benefits breastfeeding brings for both of us – but it has been a real labour of love to get started.

I hope that in a few weeks’ time I will be able to look back on this reflection with surprise, after the sleep deprivation has wiped out the memory of the pain, blood and tears, and I’m easily wapping out my baps on the number 42 bus and using the portable food system I was designed with.

Every achievement is one to relish, and I desperately don’t want to take anything away from the mums I know who – for whatever reason – are not breastfeeding. We all have our own stories to tell and there is absolutely zero judgement coming from this direction! Instead of propagating a breast crowd vs. bottle crowd, I’d like to think that we can celebrate every victory of motherhood and enjoy all the moments with each other whenever they happen.

So to all milking, pumping, formula feeding or bit-of-everything mamas, I am sending much respect vibes your way, you are (liquid) gold!