“This is a column about breastfeeding” is a sentence I never thought I’d write. All those “Put a sheet over your tits, woman, says Claridges” stories happened in the write-off months when I’d recently given birth, when the baby was leeched to my chest for 20 out of every 24 hours, and it felt like everybody had an opinion about breastfeeding. Except me. Except me, down there in the milky trenches, as far from an opinion as I was from eight hours’ sleep, ie very far away indeed.
Today I am saner. I have yet to sleep for longer than an episode of House of Cards, but I can nod in the right bits of a conversation and smile at certain jokes. And as I digest the new study on the benefits of breastfeeding (one of the first, I think, to rule out the variable factors that can skew results, like class and income), I feel an opinion about to land. Except then it floats away again.
The study suggests that the longer a baby is breastfed, the more successful and intelligent they become. Which is great news for those of us who spent a month blindly spearing our swollen breasts into the mouth of a tiny stranger, those of us who felt the fear of flashing our father-in-laws and did it anyway, whose nipples were briefly no longer nipples but kosher sausages. Those of us who bled through our new white M&S nursing bras and opened the door to postmen with one tit swinging free. Great news. But for the mothers who didn’t breastfeed, reports that she’s screwed up her baby’s chance of a decent life before they’ve even learned to burp by themselves must smart, to say the least.
The thing is, breastfeeding is hard. Despite eventually getting the hang of it weeks after leaving hospital, I’ve seen the way it could have gone. The agony of trying and trying to feed a screaming baby with your aching empty body, and then the agony of the guilt when at dawn you resort to formula. The agony of having to go back to work after a couple of months and leaving the baby at home with a bottle, and the agony of being in a group where sad smiles are exchanged as you mix the baby’s powdered lunch. The agony of a health worker telling you you’re just not working hard enough. The agony. Those first few weeks, last summer, my God, I see them so clearly now, from this distance. From the beach of here, I see what a hell it was. Our flat a sauna, our relationship a sauna. And all the time her primal hunger filling the rooms like the hum of a fridge.
There’s a reason so many women stop breastfeeding after six weeks. It’s not just because that’s when the official help dwindles, it’s because that’s when we go outside alone. Most mothers have got the message about the benefits of breast milk, but it can be hard to reconcile that with the feeling like you’re going to die, again. And when you’re out in the world for the first time, limping, your hair having plaited itself in its own filth, and you have to feed in the face of hard-eyed strangers, even the most well-meaning new mother might think twice. Formula milk is not purely, as a recent Guardian writer implied, a marketing scam – it is a life raft for many women. Rather than an ignorant choice, a selfish choice, it is often the choice of a good mother just trying to keep everyone alive. Without belittling an important study, research like this is delivered heavy with spin and expectation, and when it concerns women who are at their most vulnerable, we should be mindful of its impact.
Should these studies be stopped? God no. Should mothers avoid them? No. But with these matters of babying, and the wild darkness of birth, it seems things are never as simple as do or don’t, except in the matter of making a judgment on someone else’s experience. There it is, a butterfly opinion. I caught it in my hand.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman
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