It just comes natural...or so I thought

As a new mom I am constantly learning new things or realizing things don't happen the way I previously thought they did. One of the main things that I've had to restructure my thinking about over the last few weeks ended up being much more frustrating, and at times emotional, than I ever imagined.....breastfeeding. I always assumed that breastfeeding was something that happened naturally - both a mother's ability to produce milk and a baby's ability to latch on and drink it. I know there's big debates on the breast milk vs formula topic but I always figured that women who fed their babies formula did it by choice. When I was pregnant I fully planned on breastfeeding exclusively, because of the health benefits, the convenience and of course the fact that its free. Then I had a baby 6 weeks early and everything changed. 

With Baby Girl in the NICU and being fed through a tube for the first couple weeks, obviously nursing was out of the question but  I could pump so that she would get breast milk and that ideally my milk would come in. So I pumped when I was at the hospital and I pumped when I was at home...every 3-4 hours as much as possible. I even got up in the middle of the night just to pump. I was getting some milk every time, but it never seemed to increase much, at least not to the point where I was able to feed my daughter just with my milk. The hospital staff said that it would probably increase and get better once we were home but in the mean time to just keep pumping so that's what I did. Once Baby Girl was able to I tried to nurse her, which is where we encountered the second problem - she couldn't latch really without the help of a nipple shield and even then she wasn't getting much more than half an ounce. 

To make a long story short, I tried for 3 weeks after we left the NICU  and never got to a point where my milk volume increased to a level where I could just feed her my milk or where I could get her to latch on for more than a couple minutes at a time. It was a hard thing to deal with because I thought this was something that I was supposed to be able to do but instead I was failing my small daughter in one of the most basic ways. Of course she was still being fed, but she was supposed to be getting breast milk but I couldn't provide it for her. 

I started talking to some of my friends that have kids about my frustrations and several of them said that they too weren't able to breastfeed their kids either. Then I looked online and found more stories of other women that couldn't either and I started to realize that its not my fault and that I'm not failing my baby. Once I accepted that I was able to start rethinking my plans. All together I tried for 6 weeks to get my milk to come in and it never did but by the end I was ok with the fact that it wasn't going to happen so I returned the rental pump and threw in the towel.

Since making that decision, and changing my views on the whole subject life has gotten much less stressful. Sure its not exactly how i wanted things to go, but things aren't in my control. And on the bright side I can have coffee and wine now so that's an added bonus.