Three days postpartum I texted my best friends a picture of my nipple. It felt weird to do it at first, but my 24-hours-into-first-time-parenting-exhaustion threw social norms to the wind.

Like.

Heart.

(…)

BF1: Totally normal

BF2: Yep, that’s normal Erin! Should go away in a few days

Me: Phew!

Is this normal?

The blisters on my nipples: normal, for now. The twinge of pain with each initial latch: normal-ish, but wait and see. The blood? Common, but not normal as in okay, seek help!

The first weeks and months of breastfeeding are a crash course in a suite of parenting skills that become essential:

troubleshooting
finding resources
advocating: for you and for your kid

It’s branded with the misnomer natural because as most parents who have breastfed will tell you… it doesn’t really come naturally. In a classic Jedi move of the crucible of raising small children, sometimes it is thorough preparation that allows you to surrender to whatever reality you’re handed and learn what it is you really want. Take a scroll through #worldbreastfeedingweek and you’ll find heroic tales of trial and error, disappointment and forgiveness, exhaustion and isolation. Here are my best tips to launch you into your own breastfeeding journey:

control the controllables

That’s a phrase I use often when I’m prepping parents for childbirth and beyond: attend to what you can and surrender the outcomes. There are actual ways to prepare for breastfeeding and to set yourself up for confidence, assurance, and trust; and then, having done those things, you rest and surrender because nothing can prepare you for the particular child you birth, circumstances thrown at you postpartum, and how your body decides to react.

Here’s what you can control:

Join a breastfeeding support group on Facebook
why? You’re going to have one hand available in the postpartum to scroll and scrawl out desperate posts with likeminded moms to help you troubleshoot all the things, and it’s better to have found your people ahead of time so that they are simply a click away
Attend a (virtual?) La Leche League (LLL) meeting
why? Especially if you’re a first-time mom and don’t have many friends who have kids, it can help simply to be in a room of women breastfeeding (or on a Zoom call with them, heh). You can expect to see babies of different ages, including toddlers, breastfeeding, and you can observe how moms are holding their nurslings, what positions they are feeding in, are they using a cover or not? And you can listen to the questions they’re asking, the mini-crises they are sorting out. It puts flesh on the concepts you’re reading about. Here’s a local and virtual breastfeeding support group option from Healthy Babies Happy Moms
Take a breastfeeding class
Many hospitals offer them but there are also independent courses you can take. If you’re in Rhode Island or Southeast MA, Kaeli Sutton is a gift to birthing people and she offers a course called The Nursling: Breastfeeding and Bonding through her organization Open Circle. You could also check out Milky Mama’s Breastfeeding 101
Read or at least buy a breastfeeding book. I recommend the Bible of LLL resources The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding
why? You can browse the chapters and get a sense of the common issues you may face in a breastfeeding relationship (they can be boiled down to: supply issues and latch issues) and familiarize yourself with a book that should simply chill by your bedside ready to go for when you’re nesting postpartum.
My main critique of this particular book is the militant tone in the introduction as they make their case for breastfeeding. It’s complicated:
Breastfeeding was forced onto enslaved Black women at the expense of their own babies in the 17th & 18th centuries. Then white women took it back when slavery was abolished. Then midwifery was systematically erased in the 19th century and as hospitals and OBGYNs took on more of maternal care, formula was invented. In the 20th century, formula was pitched as the best way to feed a child and breastfeeding forced into the shadows or labeled “dirty” and a marker of lower economic status. The feminist revolution brought women into the workforce more and we thanked God for birth control and formula and breast pumps.
Our mothers (Boomers) were raised in the peak of formula advertising to the shaming of breastfeeding. It’s complicated. So, I get LLL’s desire to form an apologetic for breastfeeding, but I also hold how damaging that can be to have an all or nothing attitude that puts mothers’ mental health on the chopping block and casts shame onto moms who supplement with formula or choose formula altogether. See how the pendulum swings in history? Now most hospitals have robust breastfeeding education programs that don’t seem very inclusive of moms who choose to formula feed. Sigh. It’s a lot. Can God find us in the middle of all this mess?

cracked nipples and the christ

What better way to encounter Creator than in the very trenches of early postpartum? Your leaky body and leaky eyes and leaky gut and leaky heart are primers for spiritual encounter. Why? They’ve stripped away your illusions of self-sufficiency. They’ve forced you into need. Your newborn baby mirrors your inner child and you remember that just as you respond to baby’s cries and offer food and rest, God responds eagerly to you.

Our God-made-flesh meets us there in our soiled bedsheets, reminding us that our bodies image the gender-full God who nourishes us and to whom we are securely attached and bonded through no special intention of our own. Breastfeeding my own children gave me new metaphors to hold onto for my own relationship to God. The mystics wrote a lot about suckling at the teat of Christ. They really did. And the Scriptures make note of this special relationship that only those with breasts can know:

But you are the one who pulled me from the womb,
    placing me safely at my mother’s breasts.
10 I was thrown on you from birth;
    you’ve been my God
    since I was in my mother’s womb.
11 Please don’t be far from me,
    because trouble is near
        and there’s no one to help.
+ Psalm 22:9-11

Maybe these Psalms can also be in arms reach for you in those early postpartum weeks:

“Can a woman forget her nursing child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
16 Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands
+ Isaiah 49:15-16

a breastfeeding benediction

May you, mother ezer, nestle into God’s nourishing presence
May you find neither judgment nor expectation there
May your secure attachment to God not become another relationship to pour into, but a well from which to draw sweet water
May you find freedom and peace in the shape of your journey feeding your children
May you dodge the bullets of comparison and shame
And, because you are human, when the forces against you threaten to topple you, may you speak to yourself the way Mother God speaks to you.
As your baby nestles into the familiar smell and cleave of your chest, and their heartbeat syncs up with yours, and their body goes limp from satisfaction and rest, may yours do the same as Amma/Abba beckons you to stop holding your world together, and exhale in Holy Rest.

Amen.

P.S. Check out artist Kate Hansen’s Madonna and Child series of art here: http://www.katehansen.ca/madonna-and-child-project.html