I’ve been thinking a lot lately about expectation. I awake every day with certain expectations: how my time will be used, how I will meet the needs of those around me, how I will find a way to feed myself in the midst of all of this. Very often, my expectations don’t match up with reality. My expectations of early motherhood certainly didn’t…and I’m not alone. Every time I teach a breastfeeding class to mothers about to meet their little ones, we talk about what a realistic view of the first weeks of their baby’s life will be. Sometimes the expectations are absolutely dead on…most of the time they aren’t. These stories all speak about the expectations of new motherhood.
From Tara:
I had my first child when I was very young, so I had no idea what I was doing or what to worry about. I remembered my mom breastfeeding my brother, easy. Suddenly a screaming, colicky little girl was in my arms. I didn’t expect uterine contractions, sore nipples, her waking up to nurse every two hours, everything being so hard. But in the midst of all the unexpected, the hard and the chaos, were these beautiful moments of calm, looking at each other while she nursed. Those moments saved me, turning me into a mother.
From April:
After a difficult labor with my first child, I was exhausted and overwhelmed. I felt dismissed by the nursing staff when I asked questions about nursing. They sent me home with a “starter kit” for formula feeding “just in case”. I tried to nurse for a week but I gave up. Eight years later, I had my second child. I was determined to nurse. I educated myself much better than I had the first time. I felt much more confident. I nursed him in the delivery room minutes after he was born and successfully nursed from then on.
From Julie:
I always planned to breastfeed. But when my daughter arrived, it ended up being much harder than I thought. We went through five lactation specialists in two days during our hospital stay. The pediatrician on call as we were checking out of the hospital actually encouraged me to start feeding her formula. But we persevered, including a week of pumping and bottle feeding because she wouldn’t latch. We finally went to a sixth lactation specialist who gave me a nipple shield and the rest is history. She’s 10 months old now and has never had formula. Take that, doc!
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I am still collecting stories for this project. If you have one to share, in 100 Words or Less, please email it to me using the Contact Page.
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