I had one of
those moments yesterday, zoning out in Costas, that the endless faffing about
with coffee machines was not dissimilar to the mechanical putting together of a
breast pump. My husband used to liken
this to my assembling a machine gun. I
suspect that this was a stoic, if fruitless, attempt to make me feel that I struck a
glamorous and edgy figure in the kitchen.
As opposed to just being some task that I was destined to do approximately
8573 times, in preparation for the ritual throwing out of the OCD quantities of
frozen breast milk that had been stockpiled once several thick lines had been
drawn under breastfeeding.
Breastfeeding. Ah yes, how could I forget? That quagmire of failure, bastion of middle-class
competency.
It is fair
to say that I was not a natural at breastfeeding. I shall spare you the exceedingly long and
very dull story, but my eldest daughter ended up being mixed fed. Which I can tell you for free is the worst of
all worlds. My inverted nipples didn’t
exactly help matters in an already sorry state of affairs, so we ended up with
this ridiculous, self-patented scenario where – apart from the very occasional concession
to a nipple guard – I ended up pumping and feeding it to my daughter in a
bottle. In addition to formula feeding, as I was convinced my milk wouldn’t be enough. Basically a one-way ticket to
insanity. There is very little as
pointlessly time-consuming as pumping and then bottle-feeding it straight back to
your child, but that was the way I rumbled.
For 13 sodding months. And then I wisely stopped, had a good drink,
and promptly fell pregnant again.
You’d think that there would have been some lessons learnt here, wouldn’t you? But no, with my following two children – who
miraculously breastfed ok - I continued with the nonsense of pumping. Nominally in case of some emergency scenario
like alien abduction or a burst appendix.
I say they fed ok, obviously I mean ok in the sense of the obligatory 3
months of toe curling and health visitors sending you well-meaning (but
essentially useless) articles on wet-wound healing. It’s magical stuff.
Clearly this
doublespeak feeding strategy was the cause of some frequent discussion in our house
about the logic of keeping a freezer stacked with milk that was on a constant
going-out-of-date watch. But I probably
wouldn’t have liked to push this point too strongly with me at the time either. A sane person would have also invested
in an electric breast-pump, in some sort of a nod towards efficiency, but I was
much too far some down the road of crazy by now. Instead I worked my way through about 10
models on eBay, learning along the way that I couldn’t get a drop out with some
makes no matter how hard I tried. I also
learnt that if you want to stimulate the letdown reflex then don’t bother
reading anything that might even vaguely stimulate your brain. I became exceedingly skilled at zoning out, and imagine I was pretty amazing company of an evening.
In
retrospect I think the feeling of total failure with my first was not exactly
helped by the fact that I went on a post-birth NHS course where we learnt a
series of outstandingly helpful techniques like how to brush teeth, and when to start thinking
about weaning. I am not even slightly exaggerating when I tell you that one session was pretty much dominated by discussing the versatility of an Annabel Karmel guacamole dip for dinner parties. The dip, incidentally, was very good; I wasn't so big on dinner parties at the time so can't comment on that eventuality. All stuff that I presumably
could have read in a book, but in my state of new-parent panic felt that a good
old course would settle one and for all.
After all, this theory had worked in most other aspects of my life up
until now, and it also kind of distracted me from some of the scary health
stuff that was rumbling on with my daughter at the time. I was normal, see! Anyway, the other parents on this course were
totally rocking the breastfeeding thing, and the following few months were
punctuated with this weekly drain on morale.
I’d gleaned that I probably wasn’t in the same social group as
them from the off when they all talked about their husbands’ practices and Very Important business trips, but when a post-course knees-up was organised at one of their
houses, my suspicions were confirmed. My
car recognition is poor at the best of times, but even I could see that there
wasn’t a car in that cattle-gridded drive worth under £30k. So I turned around, and drove home in my 10-year
old Micra, punching air that being - nominally - a grown up I was free to go, and that the ritual humiliation was at an end.
The
breastfeeding was actually rather lovely with the second two after the first
horrific weeks. But the pumping sucked big time.
