Ultimately, I got over that fear, and my kids and I were much healthier, emotionally and physically, for it. It took time, though. I did not just take my baby out and immediately start breastfeeding in public. I was very paranoid about it. My grandmother called me a "floozy" for even considering it. No one in my immediate family had ever successfully breastfed, and I had only one friend (thank you, Daniela!) to support and help me. For Blaine's one-week check-up, I carried a blanket into the doctor's office. I tried hard to drape it over me and still be able to latch her on--even to the point of putting my own head underneath--and just couldn't do it. I was so fretful of what people would think, even there in the doctor's office, but I finally had to just take the blanket off and latch her on. For me, learning to get a baby latched on properly--and you have to see their mouth on the nipple to do it--was really difficult. I persisted, though, in making sure her mouth was very wide open and properly positioned, and I only ever got the tiniest bit sore, and never suffered the cracked or bleeding nipples many other mothers do.
And some people will say that I could have held the baby off, scheduled her, not fed her so often. That's not recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and it never, ever would have worked with me. Mothers differ a lot in how much milk they have available at any one time. I had plenty of milk for my babies--they grew fine--but in order to get it, they had to nurse really often. It was common for me to nurse my infants more than twenty times a day. (For this same reason, I never had much luck pumping my milk, either. I needed to nurse my babies too often to do that, and there was never very much there at one time.) Yes, it was work. I really believed that it was the best thing for them, though. I still do. The formula companies have done an incredible marketing job of phrasing all the medical issues as the "benefits of breastfeeding" when the truth of the matter is that it's the "risks of formula." All those statements they're required to put on formula? That breastfeeding "protects" against ear infections and cancers and gastrointestinal problems, how it "may raise" IQ? Well, breastfeeding is the standard, not formula feeding. The truth is that feeding formula increases the risks of all those medical maladies, and that it can lower your child's IQ. If formula companies were required to put that on a warning label, as they ought to be, a lot more people would be supportive of breastfeeding.
None of this means that I don't understand that not every woman can breastfeed exclusively. I couldn't, with Evan, and I fully blame that fact on his current food allergies. But when he was eight months old, I had a retinal detachment and had to hold my head at a 45-degree angle for six weeks. In addition, I wasn't allowed to lift anything over five pounds--which definitely included Evan, and even included my hospital-grade breast pump. Try as I wanted to (Blaine never had a drop of formula), I just couldn't breastfeed him exclusively through that. A few months afterward I had a corneal transplant, and yeah, you also have to be really careful when you have an organ from someone else's body sewn into yours, too.
After that doctor's visit, I had several more experiences with trying to hide my nursing in public. Sometimes I would try to go out to my car to nurse. If I was in the middle of shopping or something, though, that was a huge hassle, having to leave my shopping cart, trudge out to the car, nurse, tote the baby back in, and hope my cart was still there. I once dragged a chair into the bathroom of a restaurant and sat there to nurse. I got more go-to-hell looks from the biddies who walked into that bathroom than any other time I've nursed anywhere. One woman even expelled her breath sharply and said, "Disgusting!" And not only that, but I missed out on the adult companionship and the "getting away" that I desperately needed at that point. I mean desperately. Being a new mom is tough.
After such a horrid experience, many women would have quit nursing. I didn't. But I didn't do anything after that that advertised my breastfeeding. I didn't use a blanket (what baby wants to be under a blanket, anyway, where she can't breathe right or look around?!), and I never again nursed in a bathroom. I could latch the baby on quickly by then, and if someone didn't look my way at the exact moment I was latching her, they really never knew. My shirt draped over her mouth, and though part of my tummy showed (for those at the right angle for seeing it), my breast didn't. I'm honestly completely certain that besides the waiter (possibly--I've had people strike up conversations with me not realizing I was nursing) and the other people at the table, it was rare that anyone else was even aware that I was breastfeeding. Certainly far fewer people were aware than the continuous stream who walked by me in the bathroom that day.
As Blaine got bigger and stronger, she got more adept at latching. She could do it all by herself, and it wasn't the huge deal that it was in the beginning. With Evan, probably because I was experienced at breastfeeding by then, I never had the struggles with proper latching that I had with Blaine--and I didn't worry by then about breastfeeding in public, either.
Anyway. I don't want other moms to go through the initial worry I did, or to feed formula only because of their discomfort with public nursing, and the best way to accomplish that is for breastfeeding to be normalized. LJ's current policies--which do not allow default icons of breastfeeding if any of the areola shows around the baby's mouth or against the surrounding skin--work against that process. It ought to be common to see babies nursing, and it sadly isn't.
This is a long way of explaining why I'll be deleting my journal for a while, and why I won't be participating in yours (if you're on LJ) during that time. If you have anything then that you want me to know, just e-mail.
