08/07/2021
Why isn’t there a week for people who couldn’t breastfeed?
There is. It’s World Breastfeeding Week.
World breastfeeding week starts tomorrow so I’m posting this today to preemptively make my point, before the flood of critical posts starts.
World Breastfeeding Week is not just for mothers who met their breastfeeding goals. It is also for every mother who ever wanted to breastfeed for a day, a week, a month, a year and wasn’t able to do so.
I know this week is incredibly painful if you weren’t able to meet your breastfeeding goals. I know it feels like the universe is conspiring against you to re-open old wounds and pour salt into them. I’m not going to minimize that. I’m not going to tell you to get over it. I’m not going to tell you that your feelings don’t matter.
You matter. Your feelings matter.
Not only are your feelings valid, they are important. I would argue that those feelings of pain, and 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 if they can look themselves in the eye and know they are doing the best they can with their circumstances, then that is all anyone can ever do and it 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 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.
