The Truth About Breastfeeding

When C was a few weeks old, and I was expressing to take the pressure off my beleagured nipple, she would gulp down whatever ended up near her mouth – even milk straight from the fridge. I didn’t enjoy feeding her bottles, but it was a necessary evil, and as the health visitor told me, if I wanted her to take a bottle later on, I needed to introduce it at that point anyway. She also mentioned that if I wanted C to carry on accepting bottles, I’d need to keep it up, giving her at least one per week. I endeavoured to do this, more or less, although I was reluctant to do it really frequently as it seemed to make her windy and more likely to be sick. I have to admit that part of it was laziness as well. Since breastfeeding had become less painful, it was proving to be amazingly convenient, whereas expressing and bottle feeding was a bit of a hassle.

On my husband J’s birthday, we went out for a meal without C for the first time. My sister came over to look after her, and even though we were only going to be a couple of hours, I wanted to have a bit of wine, so thought it would be better to give her a bottle that evening. I expressed milk in the morning, and defrosted some frozen stuff just in case. My sister didn’t need to use the milk in the end (C had a substantial meal just before we left), but I thought my blood-alcohol content was probably a bit high when I got back, so I decided I ought to leave it an hour or so. C seemed pretty peckish, so J settled down to bottle-feed her. Half an hour and a lot of agitation later, very little had gone down, and we ended up trying to distract her until I could feed her again. I wasn’t particularly worried by this turn of events, but realised that we were going to have to make this bottle thing a lot more regular to ensure that C would take one readily when I wasn’t available to feed her.

The plan was for J, who would normally be feeding her in my absence, to give her a bottle of expressed milk each evening. Simple. Except that rather than making bottles appear more desirable, it transformed her into a small bundle of rage who wouldn’t have them anywhere near her. She turned her head and pushed them away with her hand (at least it was helping her motor coordination), refusing to swallow even the milk that happened to leak into her mouth by chance.

After a few nights of this, I was at my wit’s end. I hadn’t really considered that she might refuse to feed from a bottle in my absence. It had been so easy! Now I realised that I might have to accept that she’d reached the point where she might flat out refuse, even if she was really hungry. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to do it (a couple of times she’d sleepily suckled for a few seconds), but rather that she didn’t want to. C had realised that she could decide what to take into her mouth, and unfortunately for me, milk from a bottle simply wasn’t on the approved list…