Nursing mom

I have had the awesome privilege to experience nursing my kids.

Nursing helps me sleep. It helps me calm down my kids in a hurry, floods my body with feel-good calm-down hormones, and puts my sleep cycles in synch with my child's, so that their night-waking is less disruptive to my night.

Nursing keeps me in touch. I am hormonally, biologically in touch with my child. We are a pair. We are rarely apart and it is hard for me to leave them for any length of time. Listening to my baby cry is close to physically painful. I think that is by design.

Nursing has connected me to many other wonderful moms. I meet them at La Leche League and in attachment parenting groups. I sit next to them in nursing rooms, and on chairs in the church nursery. I join them in celebrating nursing, this natural and amazing gift, in person at events, and online, through facebook, forums and blogs. I stand with them through Human Milk 4 Human Babies. We are connected through nursing, and to most nursing moms, this is of profound significance.

Nursing keeps us healthy. My breastmilk is perfectly adapted to meet the nutritional needs of my baby. I make precisely the right antibodies that my baby needs to fight her cold. I protect us both from cancer, from obesity. I keep my baby hydrated, even when she is vomiting. I keep away her ear infections. I can treat diaper rash or an eye infection with a few squirts. And I burn calories every day to make it. Extra brownie, anyone? ;-)

Nursing is free and healthy, empowering and beautiful. I feel blessed to have experienced it, because I know not everyone does. I have been lucky. I have the support of my mother, husband, friends and La Leche League. I have the knowledge I needed to be successful, and the encouragement I needed from health care professionals. And I have been blessed with the stubbornness needed to persist in the face of challenge.

I have been bitten and scratched. I have been in tears over a baby who would not latch. I have woken up insane amounts of times in the night to nurse a fussy baby who would not sleep. I have had over-supply, under-supply and a painful plugged duct. I have been criticized for how, where and for how long I choose to nurse.

About all of these things I can say the same thing: Worth it, worth it, worth it.

To all the other moms who might want to nurse, I have just a little advice. Learn all you can. Meet other nursing moms. Believe your body was made for this. And don't give up. I can't promise it will be easy. But it will be worth it.

The risk of reading too much

What a funny little parenting trajectory I have been on. Getting pregnant as a twenty-something career women, I did everything I thought I was supposed to. Attended all my appointments with my GP, switched to OB-GYN visits in the seventh month, bought everything the baby magazines told me I needed, had a lousy hospital birth experience, and took home my struggling-to-nurse newborn son 36 hours after he was born. I planned to care for him "by the book", and expected to be pretty much like the other young parents I knew, with the exception, of course, that my child would be just a little smarter, better adjusted and more well-behaved then their children were. I never anticipated morphing into the mother I am today.

So, to borrow a line from Talking Heads, well, how did I get here? And I think it all started when my son was about 2 months old, and decided sleep is for the weak. (Thanks to amberjee at
http://sleepisfortheweak.wordpress.com/ for bringing humour to this most debilitating of parenting dilemmas). At first, I thought it would pass. It didn't. Then, we tried on that much debated practice of having him "cry it out". And when I said we tried, I mean, for about 5 minutes one desperate night. I can't even pretend we had the stomach for it.

But, I believe in research, right? I figured the answer to this problem is in a book somewhere. Or on the Internet. And I, resident research queen, will find it. What I was really looking for was something to convince me that leaving him to "cry-it-out" was really the best for everyone concerned. If I could just find an argument convincing enough to quell my guilt, I could silence my inner sobbing mama, and muscle through it. But I never found that book or article. Instead, I found increasingly convincing books and articles outlining why I shouldn't do it. Pleading with me, even. Begging me to listen to that inner mama, for my child's sake. And that, folks, was the beginning of my descent into granola land.

The first book I read on the subject was The Baby Sleep Book by Dr. William Sears. Prior to picking up the pink book with the adorable sleeping infant on the cover (the infant I wanted to have living in my house), I had never even heard of the infamous Dr. Sears. Now I could probably tell you everything you never wanted to know about him. Other sleep books that pulled me further into the land of gentle parenting were The No-cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley, and Sleepless in America by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka.

And I didn't stop with sleep books. I couldn't! Because these books told me more than how to cope with disturbed sleep. They told me that they believed in my ability to parent. That there was something inside a parent that was superior to empirical research. That it was okay to make my choices from the heart.

For someone who works in a VERY research-based, empirical field, reading these books felt like indulgence in contraband. It was like flirting with the enemy, and I couldn't get enough. So I read more titles from Pantley, Kurcinka and Sears. I added in titles published by La Leche League, and started attending local meetings, where I found more books to read. I read Good Nights by Dr. Jay Gordon, and lost my guilt over co-sleeping. I read The Natural Baby by Janet Balaskas, which helped to normalize breastfeeding, night waking, baby wearing, and responsive parenting. And when I read Lu Hannessian's Let the Baby Drive, the validation high lasted for weeks.

It has not been a perfectly smooth ride, mind you. In my previous post, Fear of a unique path, I described my difficulties in knowing how far to walk along this road, how to decide what is me, and what is just conforming to the alternative crowd. I still do not buy organic, my son is vaccinated, we have plastic toys. But I am much further from the mainstream then I would have guessed 2 years ago. We are still nursing, we cloth diaper, we co-sleep on and off... And it all started with sleepless nights, and the local library. Be careful what you read, my friends. Ideas are powerful things.