This is a re-post from Rixa's blog...


"My whole heart is in that incubator"

The Motherwear Breastfeeding blog recently featured a fantastic guest post by a woman whose son was born 3 months early and weighed less than 3 pounds. She writes about how breastfeeding was her and her son's lifeline. Here is an excerpt from her post, My whole heart is in that incubator:

I was 37 years old. I thought I knew what love was. I thought I knew. But I have never loved anyone, anything, so fiercely, so terribly, so wonderfully, so achingly, as I did my little son, my only child, struggling in that incubator....

I loved and still love that boy with all I have. Because I couldn't hold him much, and felt terrible guilt for not being able to 'hold him in' for the entire 9 months he deserved, I was determined to breastfeed. I pumped every 3 hours for weeks on end. That pump and the milk that came out of me was my lifeline. It was somehow the way I was going to make it up to him for giving him such a lousy start in this world. So when I read stuff like "The Case against Breastfeeding" I get so angry. I believe that my breastmilk, and the good care we got at BC Children's, saved my child's life. It saved my life. If there is anything in this crazy, crazy world that is really is a gift from God it is the babies we can create and the milk that comes from our bodies.

If anything is pure and natural, and real and true, it's breastmilk. It made me feel like a mother when my baby was all alone inside a machine when he should have been inside me.

Anyone who dismisses breastfeeding so casually, or by their attitude or indifference creates an environment that doesn't hold up and encourage and cheerlead a new mom into a successful breastfeeding relationship, has lost touch with something. They've lost touch with a sense of what it means to be a mother, what feeding a baby is all about, what it means to nurture, how significant that breastfeeding can be to both mother and child.



It wasn't my intention to upset anyone with this post.

When I read this woman's full story on the Motherwear blog, I was moved. I was moved and reminded so strongly of how I felt when my milk came in after Birdie died. My breasts were swollen,leaking and overflowing with milk. Despite best efforts to stop it, the very milk that was intended to nourish her newborn body came forth. So, in some ways I can relate to the passion that this woman had to breastfeed her very tiny infant. She could see her child's life hanging in the balance, and she was lucky enough to be able to pump her milk for her baby. By re-posting this, I was not intending to speak as if breastfeeding always is able to work for everyone, I know of Mama's who have struggled very hard to make it work, and I love and respect them for this.

I can only speak for myself, and my breastfeeding experience. That said, I have been blessed and fortunate in my breastfeeding experience thus far. Breastfeeding has been a gift for me to be able to nurture my miracle baby in this way. Of course this is only one of many ways to love and nurture my son. Breastfeeding is a source of comfort and healing, it is a second chance, to nourish and grow this child in the way I would have with Birdie. For me and my babe, it is a connecting experience, and I feel that it brings us closer together, skin to skin and heart to heart.

Again, I am speaking only for myself and from my experience as a breastfeeding mother. I can speak for knowone but myself.