06/08/2021
On World Breastfeeding Week, to the Mum who couldn't meet her breastfeeding goals.
I understand that this week can be really hard, and really painful. It's incredibly difficult to stand on the sidelines watching others celebrate something you desperately wanted for you and your baby.
I'm not going to minimise that. I'm not going to tell you that your feelings don't matter. Not only are your feelings valid, they are important. I would argue that those feelings of pain, loss and grief are one of the most important parts of World Breastfeeding Week.
It is nothing short of cruel that we, as a society, inform mothers of all the benefits of breastfeeding, and then fail to provide adequate help and support for mothers to meet their breastfeeding goals. 80% of mothers who stop breastfeeding in the early days say they would've liked to continue, and felt they could've continued with better support (according to Public Health England). It is nothing short of a travesty that hundreds of thousands of mothers are being let down. Given the very real grief many mothers feel at having to stop breastfeeding, and the fact that the leading cause of death in women in the first 12 months after giving birth is su***de I believe it is fair to say that it is a travesty that is harming, and possibly even killing women.
One of the most damaging results of a lack of breastfeeding support is that mothers are left with no emotional support when breastfeeding doesn't go to plan. There is no one there to give them a hug, a cup of tea, a piece of cake, to reassure them that they have nothing to feel guilty about. To tell them that they can look themselves in the eye and know they are doing the best they can with their circumstances. That is all anyone can ever do and that it makes them a truly wonderful mother. No-one is there to tell them to be kind to themselves, to give themselves time to grieve. To tell them that if they want to curl up on the sofa with chocolate and Netflix for a few days they should do that. They are expected to just move on, get over it, it's not like it mattered anyway. So that pain, and that loss, and that grief never truly gets a chance to heal.
And that's exactly why this week is important. Because every mother who ever wanted to breastfeed her baby, for an hour, a week, a month, a year or longer deserves adequate help and support to meet that goal. And for the mothers who don't meet that goal for whatever reason, they have the right to adequate emotional support to heal from that. And I know it hurts this week when you didn't get the support that you deserved, but the aim of this week, the reason we bang our drums, and get on our soap boxes is so every mother gets the practical end emotional support she deserves. So no other mother ever has to go through this pain.