Breastfeeding has not been an easy experience for Anjana Shekar. From nipples being squeezed by strangers to home remedies to increase milk production, she writes on the challenges of being a new mother.
Content advisory: This story may contain distressing themes.
In the beginning, I did not think a new mother may not be able to breastfeed her baby. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Pregnancy prepares the female body to lactate. Breasts enlarge and various hormones help with the production of milk. All mammals nurse their babies as soon as they are born. It took me a while to even accept that breastfeeding was going to be a problem for me.
Not that my pregnancy was a breeze. I developed a bleed around the fourth month, which is considered to be the most vulnerable time of the pregnancy to lose the baby. So I spent a few weeks in bed and moved around like I had a ticking bomb inside me. Those were some of the most uncertain periods of my pregnancy but it was also the time I slept a lot and read a lot. I naturally revelled under the brief time when nothing was expected of me. I really couldn’t complain.
After an uneventful second trimester, as I was mentally preparing myself for labour, I developed vertigo. I had experienced vertigo a couple of times earlier but it was never this persistent and never this strong. The doctors concluded that some underlying conditions could surface during pregnancy and all I could do was wait for it to pass. Back in bed again I was, this time without the comfort of sleep or the company of books. A dear friend eventually helped me get over vertigo and that is a story for another time. As I entered my 36th week and when it was finally go-time, I thought the worst was behind me.
Labour itself was not so hard but the story really begins with what comes after. Over the next few weeks after giving birth, many things changed. The baby was out but the body looked, felt, and worked differently. It definitely was hard to take care of myself or even process all that was happening to me and my body with a baby around. I was piling away thoughts for later. I had shed the young woman’s body and in its place was new skin. Deflated and sagging and scarred in places. Temporarily, there was detachment from the body, I now understand. But I suddenly found myself without any shame over my own body. I felt no embarrassment in leaving the boob out in front of others. Nipples were squeezed by strangers and I let them. The body had already been exposed, its intimate places revealed. There was no shame anymore.
But I was made to feel a different kind of shame. One that is forced upon every new mother.
From conception to birthing to nursing, new mothers are placed under a microscope for all their experiences, for all their choices. I would repeatedly hear the word “pathala” (not enough) with a sympathetic nod from different women. Some expressed doubts if I was producing any milk at all. Some were surprised the baby even chose formula over my milk.
Very soon I began my conversations with the guests who had come to see the baby, with a confession of not being able to feed him. As much as breastfeeding is fraught with uncertainties for lack of better scientific research and methods, it is also rife with judgement.
I remember the night we came home with the baby. He was just three days old and I had been nursing him continuously for four hours straight but he just wouldn’t stop crying. I was exhausted, ready to give up. But every time I released the baby’s mouth from my breast, he would cry, eyes still closed, his movements frantic, feeling, searching, wanting. It was one of the hardest nights in my recent memory.
I also had a faint feeling of losing control, of everything going downhill from there. The anxiety that filled my body as a new mother was perhaps one of the reasons why I was feeling this way. Adding to it was my mother, on whose validation and guidance I depended, often repeating the words “varala, pathala” (Tamil for “not coming, not enough”). I definitely did not want to give my baby away to be fed by the bottle. He was, after all, nurtured inside my own body, and so it only seemed natural that he be fed from my body. I was placing myself under duress and severe self-scrutiny.
There’s usually an aura of “good vibes only” that surrounds breastfeeding. The act of secreting milk has a lot to do with the power of the mind as much as it has to do with biology. “Don’t ever think that your milk may not be sufficient for the baby. Just don’t. Don’t even think it,” said a close friend while I was pregnant. It felt strange but she was also a mother and a certified birthing instructor. I couldn’t laugh it off.
There’s usually an aura of “good vibes only” that surrounds breastfeeding. The act of secreting milk has a lot to do with the power of the mind as much as it has to do with biology.
But my experience so far has only taught me just how fragile this process seems to be. A lot of it depended on the first hour, first day, first week, and first month of the baby’s birth. Introducing formula feeding, early on, will only work adversely to breast milk production. So does the thought of having an inadequate supply of breast milk. Knowledge about the right breastfeeding techniques also play a crucial role. Interestingly, a lot of it depended on the baby. Suckling sent cues to the body to produce more milk. And once the baby is given the bottle, he would definitely prefer it to the breast. One misstep and many things could go wrong.
So next came the endless list of home remedies to fix my supply. Countless pods of garlic boiled in milk, fenugreek seeds swallowed whole with water, boiled tapioca seasoned with mustard, red chillies and salt, a congee made using rice, garlic and fenugreek seeds, bun soaked in milk, rusk dipped in milk, water, water, water. The hours I spent pumping into a bottle, mainly to prove to myself if not to the others, that I was not completely devoid of milk, brought me little relief. The teaspoon of milk I produced at the end of half hour made me feel worse than before.
I’ve been able to make sense of my own pregnancy through what other writers have said or written about their own. The one I keep going back to is what Annie Ernaux, one of my favourite writers, said about “future generations passing through” her. I came across an excerpt from her memoir Happening, where she had written, “[…]To accept the turmoil of reproduction inside my body and, in turn, to let the coming generations pass through me.[…]” That stayed with me and when I was trying to come to terms with my own pregnancy, it helped me the most. I imagined myself to be a part of something bigger.
Similarly, all that I knew about breastfeeding were the things I read in books. Two particular nursing mothers became, sort of, symbols in my head. I often thought about Guy De Maupassant’s mother on the train, with her breasts full of milk, and the mother in Pearl S Buck’s Good Earth, who let her milk flow down (like a waterfall) into the earth from one breast while nursing her baby on the other. I had perhaps stowed away these images in my teen head, not able to fully grasp the meaning of those lines. I now thought of those women enviously for I may never know what a full breast felt like.
My own mother, I learned, would squeeze her breasts in the sink at her workplace. “It would feel heavy and I wouldn’t be able to feed you for eight hours straight. My breasts would start to feel like stones,” she once told me. Another time, she said that in her case, milk poured out from her breasts when she had me. “I don’t understand why it isn’t happening for you,” she wondered. Such comparisons only made things worse for me.
My own mother, I learned, would squeeze her breasts in the sink at her workplace.
I was told that I was breastfed until I was 1.5 years old. Nursing, I thought, would be no problem as long as I wanted to do it and the baby wanted to be fed. In reality, this may not be the case for all mothers. A study done in 2019 in a limited sample size of 150 participants found out that only 26 percent of the mothers practise exclusive breastfeeding, while 74 percent preferred or practised mixed feeding. Factors varied—from the mother’s education to her personal choices.
My father, it turns out, was breastfed by my grandmother only until he was about three months old. “She became pregnant with your aunt very soon and they brought home a buffalo so it could be milked for me,” he told me one day, perhaps to make me feel better. My sister, on the other hand, born eight years after me, was nursed by my mother for about six months. It was our inside joke, where my sister would make fun of me for drinking more than my fair share. My mother later revealed that 1.5 years of breastfeeding did not mean that I was only fed breastmilk all the time. “That was only for the first two months!” she said, sounding genuinely surprised that I didn’t already know this. “I had to go back to work. You would also be given Aavin (Tamil Nadu’s cooperative milk brand).” So much for the self and society-inflicted trauma I put myself through.
The breakdown was imminent and it came in about 75 days after having given birth. Seventy-five days of trying and willing and even forcing myself to produce more breast milk. It was 4 am and I had not slept the whole night, trying to feed a baby that, by now, clearly preferred the bottle over the breast. That realisation hurt me the most. I wanted to get as far away as I could from the room and the baby and all that my life had become.
I walked to the nearest beach and found myself momentarily alone. As dawn was breaking, tears rolled down my face. I thought of all the way things could have gone wrong for me. I thought of why I wanted to feed the baby so badly. It was perhaps because I felt I was missing out on an important experience and it vexed me that I had no control over it. I stayed crying for as long as I could.
The outpouring itself didn’t fix anything but it did help me loosen up a little, to take a step back. My partner, whom I had shut out until then, forced me to talk to a friend and I grudgingly obliged. It was this conversation that helped me process the whole experience. Getting to know her story, her experience that sounded similar, helped me be more accepting of my situation.
Women go through many life-altering experiences and it is extremely hard to compare one with the other. No two stories are the same but most often, we don’t find the need to talk about it. But I now feel that these stories need to be told and shared so someone else might know just how unique and, at the same time, universal their experience is. We are after all, a part of something bigger.
Anjana Shekar is a writer living in Chennai. She writes on food, cinema, culture and environment and her stories have appeared in The Hindu, The News Minute and The South First. In addition to long-form writing, she is also interested in translating short stories from Tamil to English.
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