Caring for a baby – feeding and settling

That first week was just terrible. I was having the breastfeeding issues, I actually had - the nipple trauma was that bad I had to pump - I sort of opted to pump milk. So I was expressing milk like for maybe an hour. He'd probably be - my son would be sleeping for maybe I don't know probably an hour, then he'd wake up, then I'd feed him, he'd go back to sleep, then I'd be expressing my milk [laughs] and like I'd just feel like [laughs] a cow on the dairy farm [laughs].

You know, just pumping and then feeding him and it was just - so the sleep deprivation set in. Plus my son was having a lot of problems settling and a lot of problems feeding as well.

I was very naive - very naive throughout the whole pregnancy and I think that was one of the things as well. I expected it all to sort of work out and my mum kept warning me, "You have to strengthen your boobs up", and you know and I never did. I thought, 'Oh I'll be okay, I'll be okay', and then it was just this unexpected - it was just so hard. Just such a hard thing. And then having to express as well. You know that was, yeah exhausting. I just felt like I wasn't getting any rest and then I tried everything to sort of make it work. I tried nipple shields, I tried like the nipple cream and even tried breastmilk to sort of ease the pain and everything and nothing, just nothing seemed to work.

And I think you know even with the nipple shields I don't think he was getting enough. Like he wasn't getting the milk out properly and there was one time where we actually did breastfeeding and he was - it was painless and he would like - because he loved it, you know he loved the milk and it just settled him right down and you know I just feel it was such a shame that I couldn't you know have that bond. Like I was just screaming in pain the whole time. And then I just felt like I was missing out on that and missing out on that bond. But then when he developed the cow's milk protein allergy I would have had to have changed my whole diet in order to you know keep breastfeeding him, like go dairy-free.

So I just thought well the amount of milk I'm making - I wasn't making enough. I had to sort of comp-feed. Give him 60mls of breast milk and then 60mls of formula anyway because he wasn't getting enough from me. So I thought, 'Well, for the amount of breast milk I'm making, I might as well just give it up and just formula feed him exclusively'. And I just - I found it so hard. I had that mourning period where I had to sort of stop and I felt like I was depriving him and the whole sort of bonding experience, but he was much happier.

I think I was much happier with the arrangement after a while, like you have more freedom. Other people can sort of take on the role of feeding and eventually when we found the right formula he just seemed to be like a lot happier so - whatever works, I think it's whatever works for your child and every parent/child relationship's different and if breastfeeding works for you that's fantastic and great but if it doesn't, then it you know it doesn't deprive - I don't think it deprives him any less. Like he's still getting fed and he was thriving after we found the right formula.

And of course, you know, breastfeeding's encouraged and all that kind of thing, but it did get to a point for me where I was just so exhausted and so tired that I would be feeding my son and not wanting to. I was just so tired. And I remember he'd wake up and I'd lay in bed and I'd go, 'Oh, really'. There was just no joy in it at all. And I think that's probably when I slipped into the depression - but I didn't realise it at the time. And I found myself becoming very mechanical, and I was just going through the motions and - I mean of course I cared about my baby and I would never harm him in any way but there was definitely no bond there, there was definitely no attachment and I remember being quite distressed that I didn't feel more than I should have.

And as I said, I would feed him and just sort of be like, 'Hurry up, hurry up'. And it just became a very unenjoyable experience. So when I look back on that I think that breastfeeding was probably more of a hindrance for me than a help because I just needed rest so bad and I know that certain organisations push breastfeeding but I don't know if they take everything into account about where a mother might be at and whatnot. And I look back on that and I think if I had have - I breastfed for six months and I think if I had have put him on the bottle, even just a night feed, a lot sooner and got some rest and my partner could have fed him and - we even spoke about it and I was very against it and, 'No, no, you know, this is what I need to do' and - and all that. And, but when I look back if I had have probably done that it would have probably helped our bonding a lot - a lot more.

I didn't really think a lot about what would after the baby came. I did the usual sort of hospital classes about breastfeeding and caring for a baby but I was like, 'Oh yeah, it can't be that hard'. But yeah, I got a bit of a shock when the baby actually arrived.

So most of my issues initially that caused me so much grief were around breastfeeding and the difficulties that I had in just getting it together somehow there. Just nothing seemed to work quite right. And my son was enthusiastic about feeding but perhaps too enthusiastic and maybe I Ieft him on the breast too long, I don't know. I don't know why it happened but in the end my nipples were sort of hanging off and it was enormously painful and I was totally unprepared for anything except breastfeeding. I had assumed that breastfeeding was natural and that that was the thing I was going to do, all of my family and friends had breastfed and, I had some views in my head that anything other than breastfeeding was sort of for people over there, not for people like me.

And, so I had enormous trouble coming to terms with the fact that my baby was wanting to be fed and I just couldn't feed him properly. And yeah, there was a midnight run to the service station from my husband to buy a bottle and formula.

We started to feed him both breast milk - expressed breastmilk and formula and transitioned through to feeding him just formula over probably a month and during that time I used to lie to the child and maternal health nurses and tell them I was still breastfeeding him or still feeding him the majority expressed breastmilk but really I just didn't want to admit to them that he was basically being formula fed by the end of that period.

There was pressure on from them and I saw it as pressure. It was probably really encouragement but, being hyper-sensitive to it, the littlest thing would upset me. No matter what someone said if they tried to make me feel better by saying, 'You know, formula these days is fine, we've got very clean water supply', you know, all the things to try and make me feel better about formula feeding then I would still just be as angry as someone who also encouraged me to sort of keep trying and that, 'It will work out and there's nothing wrong with you or your baby'. So either way it was wrong, nothing seemed to be right and I was sort of so angry and disappointed in myself, that I couldn't seem to get something which is supposed to be so natural and come naturally to women right.

And I had a lot of difficulty in the first six weeks with breastfeeding. I got it established okay, but what happened was that instead of having low supply, I had Dolly Parton boobs and masses of milk and my mum said that the same thing had happened to her. She had bought me this bra, which was like a 12H, and she brought it for me before the birth, and I just went, "Why would you buy that for me? That's just - that's ridiculous!" That was the only one that fit me. It was massive, and my boobs were massive.

And I had a lactation consultant come out a couple of times, and she diagnosed oversupply. So I had way too much milk. My baby was only getting the foremilk, which is the high-sugary milk. So then she would be full, so she would never get to the fatty milk behind it that actually has all the sort of goodness bit in it. So she was just getting all sort of terrible stomach pain and screaming. And that was really, really hard. And we had to, we were just beside ourselves. We didn't know what to do. And we took her to a paediatrician, who just said, "She's fine", you know, and one night we were supposed to videotape her to sort of, because of course she wouldn't scream for doctors or anything. She just screamed. And we knew, in my head, I knew babies aren't supposed to scream. Crying is the last thing they do. They show you in lots of little nibbling, sucking ways that they were hungry, but she would scream after I'd fed her.

So I went off dairy, and that helped a bit. But she was, we still had the oversupply issues. And we went to emergency one time, because we were really distressed. And she was so tiny, and we had no experience of babies. And I forgot to do the thing that I had always read about is when you turn up at emergency, you should always say, "Oh this is my third child', and then they take you seriously. But of course we just turned up and said, "This is our first child", and they were just like, "Agh". So we saw this doctor and he just said, "Put her on lactose-free formula", and I was just, my partner was just arguing with him. And he was just a horrible doctor who just had this sort of god complex. And he was just saying, "You just need lactose-free formula with a bottle". And I was just like, "Oh, we have to go". And we left, and we went upstairs to the birthing centre where she had been born, and saw the midwives, and they were horrified that he had suggested this. And they gave me a list of quite a few numbers of different people to try.

But I kept doing research, and ended up block feeding her, where I just kept her on one side, every time I fed her, which was every two hours or whatever. One side, all the time, until that breast was drained. So she would finally get to the back of it. And I did that for pretty much the whole time that I breastfed her, and that's what, yeah, she sort of settled with that.

I'm taking both kids, even when he's eight weeks old, I'm taking both kids for a day now. Bottle feeding - we express milk and bottle feed. So that gives me a really good sense of wellbeing, the fact that I can look after both kids. It's a real tick in the box there. It gives my partner time on her own to do what she wants to do, go and hang out with her mates or whatever. Helps the relationship - she values that I'm chipping in. Because it can really feel like I go off to work and I've got the easy life. And it's not really like that but it's really good to have those skills and just have the trust that I can do it. My own trust and her trust that I can do that.

She was small, she wasn't a premmie, but she was small, and it was very hard, it was very exhausting for her to feed. So what we had to do was give her a bottle. So I would have to express, I'd feed her with - I think I'd express first, feed her with a bottle. And when you're on a three hour cycle, take an hour to express, a good hour by the time you're changing newborn's nappy to feeding, and then I have an hour rest.

And that was my three hour life, and I thought, 'Oh my God'. At first it was okay, but over weeks it was getting harder and harder. I'm thinking, I'm not existing here. And every three hours, night, day, it was just like, 'Oh my God, I've only got an hour to sleep or an hour to do something'. And it was just, it was getting harder, and I didn't want my partner to go back to work. But obviously he had to go back to work. So I was really, really, really scared the day sort of he went back to work. I was always calling him and stuff. And my mum came up and spent a lot of time with me when he was at work, certainly early on.

And then somebody sort of suggested at four months, you know, "What's the big...?" - I said, "There's just no time out there. I just have no time, no mental time. Just no time. I have no time. I'm so exhausted that if I have any time away from it I need to sleep, because I'm just so tired". And they said, "Well why don't you stop breastfeeding"? And I said, "No, no, no, no. No I want to do this as long as possible". I said, "At least I had six months with my first one, I'd like to hit six months with the second". Saying, "Look how hard it is for you". I'm saying, "Yeah it is". And you know I sort of thought about it three, four days and I came to the conclusion. I thought, 'You know what? I need to be mentally better and also just happier as a person and I think I might be better off for this child than her having milk from somebody who's so tense and stressed and not well'.

And I'm thinking, 'Maybe that is the thing to do'. So within four, five days, I decided, 'You know what? I am going to stop'. And that was huge for me to decide, 'I am not going to make six months', because I knew I'd never make a year. I thought and I always had this six month thing. I thought, 'I'm not going to make six months'. And you know I did. I stopped. We started the formula, and you know I thought, 'Well, I gave her four months'. I was happy with that in the end. I thought, you know. It took me a while to get my head around that as well.

I think that that's another example, breastfeeding is another example of the fact that we have a lot of information about it, but is the support there? I think most women would know that it's the best thing to do, and want to do it I think. But, when that's hard or not possible, you know, where do you go for help? Where do you find the right help?

And I mean, I was fortunate enough to be able to afford to go a see a lactation consultant, but it's really expensive and it took me two months to get in to see her. You know, like if that was another issue in relation to let's say a sportsman that had had an injury, you know, it's about where our resources are placed as well. And I think, goodness, like so many people I know have had difficulties with breastfeeding.

And there's a lot of guilt. I know from friends that haven't been able to continue. One of the pieces that came out in our exhibition that I loved the most that someone did, was she glued together and did a sculpture of formula tins and she just wrote all over it, you know, "Guilty. Bad mother". And it was full-on seeing it, because you're just like, that's - must have been really hard for her. Because all she wanted to was breastfeed and she wasn't able to and then there's this judgment as well on top of that.

I think support, we have to unpack that. What does that mean, support to a woman to breastfeed? It's like, well I think there does need to be information out there. There needs to be more resources for people to be able to access that help. Because I think, surprisingly, the maternal child and health nurses that I came across, weren't that helpful. And I think, isn't this your everyday work? They weren't that helpful. But also for partners to realise.

And they didn't really offer to assist with breast feeding. It was really hard to get lactation help from them. And when we came home - I couldn't move while we were in the hospital [because of post-partum surgery]. So they would pass her to me and walk out, so I had to try and feed her while lying down. And that was really hard and when we came home I ended up with cracked nipples and she was vomiting blood and it was horrible. And I rang them up and I said, "Oh, can I speak to the lactation consultant?" And they asked me where I lived and then they said, "Oh, sorry, we can't help you. Bye". And hung up. And I was really shocked by that. I was really shocked that they would say that they just weren't going to do it.

I ended up ringing the family health nurse that works out of the town - next town across. And she came to our house and was really, really good. She was really helpful. But it was hard to find someone who would actually be willing to help, which is really odd.

I know that the hospital were expecting us to formula feed with both of them, with my son. They wanted us to formula feed with both kids. With my son, they were like, "Where are your bottles? It's time to give him a bottle". And we went, "We're not going to".

And that seems to be - not just from that hospital, but also from the [second hospital name] - that seems to be the experience for that. I know a girl, she was asleep and she woke up and her baby was gone and the nurse was giving it a bottle. She didn't even get a chance to breastfeed it. I guess they expect [bottle feeding] and then you don't get the support to breastfeed.

Surprisingly, the hospital's been the place where I've actually been criticised for breast feeding in public. There was a pregnant lady there and she asked me if I couldn't afford a bottle. And I was like, "What?" [laughs].

In the hospital there's posters [supporting breastfeeding], so it's really odd. And people are always surprised that we breastfeed - it's like it's generally expected that you'll formula feed.

My daughter was a great feeder, she was doing all the right things, wasn't a problem with her latching on or her, not knowing what to do. I think babies generally know what to do and there was no cleft palate thing - there was nothing like that. I just didn't have milk to give her. So, the hospital stay was pretty much an obsessive experience about trying to extract milk from me and she was getting a little bit but not enough so she'd be feeding for hours on end.

And so and then my nipples were just brutalised [laughs] so I felt - bleeding and what have you. So we did everything we could, I took the pharmaceutical drugs, took the herbal stuff, did the pumping, had a lactation consultant come and see us a few times. But I got to about six weeks, you know, it was 24/7 around the clock trying to get milk coming and it just wasn't happening. So at about the six week mark I decided that - well, we decided, [partner's name] and I as a family that we'd be okay to just go exclusively formula. Thought six weeks is a fair enough timeframe to try and get milk coming. I think you know, perhaps - I don't know how I felt about that. I think probably because breastfeeding just wasn't an enjoyable experience, it was a huge relief not to have to in the early throes of a newborn experience. [sigh]

Hormonally, I think the fact that I didn't feed meant that I got my period at about the three-month mark and that was just the most intense PMS experience I've had in a long time. I was actually suicidal, I was feeling really helpless and distraught and [sigh] you know just I guess caught up in the sweep of hormonal fluctuation, it was quite a dramatic change I think for my body to try to negotiate. And in the meantime, I [sigh] I think the sleep deprivation and the [sigh] over-vigilance that I guess a lot of mothers would have was also simmering.

And just, you know, watching her even grow in that first week, just from feeding to feeding and stuff. She was just a really easy, easy-going baby. So - slept, and hardly ever cried. Started sleeping. One of my goals was to get her to go to sleep 12 hours straight, through the night, as soon as possible. She did it by, I think, nine weeks. I think [laughs]. And when I announced that at new parents' group I wasn't very popular [laughs].

Because I knew doing it on my own that sleep was such an important thing to how I was going to feel about things that I just want to - just not going to have that.

She wouldn't sleep on me, she wouldn't sleep next to me. She would only sleep if I was carrying her in this carrier. So I'd sort of sleep for four hours and then we'd be up for the day and I'd have to have her attached to me in this carrier the whole day. And again I just thought, 'You know, is this my life now?' [Laughs] And I guess my partner couldn't really understand how I was feeling because he would just look at it all really logically and think, 'You know, well she's healthy and she's happy and, you know, what's the problem?' Whereas to me it was this giant big ball of emotion and upset and I just couldn't see my way through it at all.

And you know I was trying to get my baby to sleep right next to me and she still wouldn't do it. So it just continued for a really long time and I just find it really difficult now to remember what it was like because it was just this fog of not sleeping, arguing, crying, you know, like wondering what had happened to my life, wondering why I'd ever had a baby in the first place and wanting my life back. And then, like it gradually got better. She started sleeping better and I guess we just sort of found our way. But she's nine months old now and throughout her life, there's been a lot of segments of similar episodes where something happens where she doesn't do what I expect or think she should be doing.

And I just find it very difficult to deal with it. Most recently it was that she decided 4:00 am was the time she wanted to get up for the day. And I've never been much of a morning person, but you know, I'd be in the kitchen just sobbing because I just couldn't deal with being up at that time. And when I sort of come through it in the end and look back and I think, 'Well it's not that - you know, it's not so bad. What was I so upset about?' But I just find it sometimes just so overwhelming dealing with her. And you know, she can't tell me what's going on and I have no idea what to do.

There was a point [oldest son's] sleep got really bad at four months and I booked in for sleep school. But in the interim then my friend's child who was 2½ died and her funeral was the day before I went to sleep school. And so I went to the funeral and the next day I was at sleep school and they don't do controlled crying but you leave your baby to cry for a long period of time. Because he never cried much except when I was trying to do sleep training. I found that really distressing. They say, "Oh you just leave him for 10 minutes and then you go back in". And I just couldn't - I know other people can do it but I found it personally incredibly difficult.

And I couldn't do it. So in the end after about an hour-and-a-half of my poor little baby screaming his head off, just wanting to be fed to sleep, I picked him up and I fed him and he fell straight asleep. And the routine that we had - we had a sort of routine by that point. And a structure to the day. The sleep school totally disrupted it. It didn't actually get us any further and when I was sitting there after I'd failed to get him to sleep in sleep school strategy - so when I'd failed to do these sort of normative things I just did the thing that felt right for me.

So I guess I've been thinking a lot about this need to find an authentic way of parenting which is a way of parenting that resonates with your personality and your values. And for some people that is using crying techniques and for other people it's not. And for me, it just wasn't. [Just] because the Maternal Child Health nurse tells us and all the people in my mums' group are following Save our Sleep which is what the big thing was at that time.

So I finally picked him up and I fed him and he fell asleep in about two seconds. And I just was sitting there in this sort of institution room with the baby asleep on my lap and it was quiet. And I just was reflecting and thinking, 'There are so many worse things in life than a baby that doesn't sleep very well'. And it wasn't that he was difficult to get to sleep. He just woke a lot and would want a little - a comfort feed or a proper feed and then would just go straight back to sleep.

And at that point I just totally made peace with the fact that I've got a wakeful baby but he's healthy and he's alive. And I'd just seen this like a year of agony that my friend had been through with - constantly with hopes and then ultimately losing the baby and completely devastated. And I just decided that this is not so bad, this is what's happening.

And I think that was really at the point when I think all that maternal identity stuff came together for me. I think it was at that point when I just sat there and I thought, 'Well, obviously my parenting involves different things to what the Maternal Child Health nurse is telling'. And I found that at that point the whole parenting experience got a lot easier.

So anyway now when I talk to people who are having babies, I just say I really think that the biggest challenge of the early parenting is not related to the baby. That's physically demanding but I think the emotional stuff is all around identity. And then I noticed with my second baby, I think I'd dealt with all that identity stuff. And so nothing was such a problem.

I know my wife struggled with breastfeeding. And the whole stigma of, 'You're only a good mother if you breastfeed.' And she stuck it out for quite a while. A good six months of twins with different cycles of their own. So no sooner than feeding one and getting it off to sleep, then the other one would wake up and you'd feed that one, and then the next one's woken up again.

So she had about six months of pretty much zero sleep before it started getting a bit dire at home. And she actually checked into a maternity psychiatric ward. And we got some help there.

So it wasn't really until, that she made the decision to start bottle-feeding the kids, which was something that I encouraged her to do, because, you know, it was obviously something that I could do as a father to share the workload and make it easier. So it certainly improved after the stint in, in the maternal psych ward.

And then bottle-feeding them, obviously bottle-feeding fills them up a lot more and they sleep a lot better. So it was only a matter of, I think six weeks after we got back from the ward, that the kids were sleeping through the night and everything was pretty much hunky-dory again.

It was such a difficult experience breastfeeding both of them. That's why I I felt that then was the time I could actually do something physical to help out.

And it was a struggle with the whole wanting to breastfeed and be a good parent, and not wanting to disappoint the Breastfeeding Mothers Association, and the maternal child health nurses and stuff. So there was a lot of pressure on that, and obviously it is better for breastfeeding, but it's not the be-all and end-all. Like if you're not with the plot mentally, if you can't function to actually help your child in other ways, if you're just this non-sleeping milking machine, it's not an existence either, so you've got to go for a bit of quality of life and, and accept the fact that you tried really hard, and stuff what everyone else thinks. Do what's right for you.