When I attended the parentcraft classes offered by the hospital where I was to give birth, the "teacher", promoting breastfeeding, enthused why anyone would not opt for breastfeeding. It's cheaper, more convenient, better for baby and mum. She did ask for anyone who had any doubts but didn't really await an answer, and I didn't feel like recounting second hand stories. However, I had been warned. Not by the NCT breastfeeding councillor, who also maintained that breast feeding is easy with the right support. The real warning came through the experiences of those who had their babies before me. Thanks to lucky circumstances, there are a lot of such people. And most of them struggled, some gave up in spite of extraordinary determination to breastfeed. Some, but the minority, seemed not to experience major problems, or simply didn't volunteer to tell me about them.

Looking back on the past six days since Cubling was born, hearing about the not so successful stories was the best preparation. I do understand the attempt to give confidence, promote breastfeeding in a place where it is not popular at all, and to give positive role models. The reality though is different. Today, I've breastfed perfectly, all went well, cubling got weighed and has put on weight. Yet the road has been bumpy and with lots of hurdles, and I can understand very well now why one would give up. And I'm not sure if I've truly mastered it yet anyway.

Day one was marred by a sleepy baby who didn't want to suckle, take the breast of feed in general. It was disheartening. There I was, having had to wait to see my darling until I was stitched up and wheeled into recovery, the longest half hour of my life. Then I was handed cubling and put her near my breast, expecting the magic search for the breast. Nothing. In fact, she remained uninterested in feeding for a full 24 hours, followed by an extremely mild interest in the following 24 hours. She did not suckle. She did not take the breast or could be convinced to open her mouth wide enough to attach her well. She only showed an interest in feeding three times in the second 24 hours of her life. Each of these times, there was no midwife available to help me with latching on and checking that I was doing things right.

As a result, for the whole duration of my three day hospital stay I felt the sword of formula supplements over me, the dread of the scales, the panic that something wasn't right with my baby and she would not feed. ever. I could observe the growing dehydration, but more than that saw my chances of actually picking up breastfeeding in hospital waning.

Thankfully, I had fantastic support by one midwife in particular, who would get me to express colostrum to get my own milk production actually working. The quantities were pathetic, the pain almost unbearable and I failed to learn how to do it myself, but it kept cubling going for the first 24 hours. During the second day, she fed herself, but I struggled severely with the right attachment, and it was a Sunday with a shortage of staffing. As a consequence, when I needed it most, nobody was available to help me with attachment, and with cubling only demanding a feed three times that day, despair was close and cracked nipples the symptom.

Day three and help was at hand at last.
Another midwife, not so hands on, but at least available and happy to check up on me regularly and to raise my confidence by saying that rare feeding is ok, helped me continue through the night. In the morning, someone must have read my mind and a trainee volunteer from the breastfeeding initiative came into the room asking me if she could do a counselling session with me for training reasons. I said yes, please, but do it for real, I need help. It was exactly what I needed. They checked attachment, observed the baby, told me about my right to demand a feed, went through my own positioning and how to deal with my already cracked nipples. Thanks to them, and cubling keeping a big load of meconium inside of her before she was weighed, I was discharged only 3 hours later, confident to breastfeed and with cubling's weight loss still in the "normal" range.

At home, cubling woke up. She screamed, wanting to feed constantly, but I had no milk yet and struggled, feeling inadequate and in agony due to my increasingly cracked nipples, which were by now bleeding. It was a hellish day, a night full of cries of hunger, then waking up to a lumpy breast. I was so naively unprepared and thought I had breast cancer, and whatever it was, I couldn't latch cubling on, the lumps were in the way. Eventually I found the right passage in the right book telling me it was engorgement and it could be eased by warm water. It took me 2 hours to manage to get cubling on, I was at the end of my nerves with her hungry cry, and burst into tears of relieve when, after finally managing to let her latch on, she finished her feed with real milk overflowing from her mouth. My milk had come in. Magic mummy milk.