Feed the baby

I have watched so many friends nurse their babies. The baby cries, they pull a shirt up or down, grab a breast, pop the baby on, and Voila! The baby gets fed, drops off the breast milk drunk and content. When I had Caden I was completely unaware how hard breastfeeding can be, how it is a learned art, how it takes practice and perserverance and hours upon hours trapped under a newborn, and how, for some of us, it doesn't work out. Not because we are lazy or duped by the formula company, but because our bodies don't quite work right, or there has been surgery, or the babies don't ever get the hang of it, or life does not allow for the time it takes to nurse or pump or whatever needs to happen to protect the milk supply. I was never witness to the struggle.

I suppose in many ways breastfeeding worked out, as best it could, with Caden. I nursed him til he was past the 6 month mark, and pumped for a while after that. I never had enough milk, so he was never exclusively breast fed, but he had 1/2-3/4 of his food from me, and the rest was an amulgation of donor milk, home made formula, and commercial formula. I feel good, retrospectively, about the choices I made and the work I put in to give him the amount of breast milk I did. 

And yet. I was sad. I spent so much of his early infancy crying and wishing things were different. I felt like I was failing him as mother because my body could not produce enough milk. When people asked me if I was breastfeeding, I said no, even though I spent hours of every day doing so. It was as if that bottle trumped the breast, and if I wasn't doing it completely, I couldn't claim to be doing it at all.