AAB 006 Breastfeeding: Anastasia's journey

Anastasia had a planned homebirth with a midwife in attendance.  She gave birth to a beautiful daughter named Vivian.  She was awake and active and yet remained very uninterested in breastfeeding her first 24 hours of life.  Each time she was brought to the breast, she showed no interest in sucking. This began a very long journey with major breastfeeding struggles.  Poor feeds and several bouts of vomiting up any milk she had taken in from a bottle, sent Anastasia and her husband Matt to the hospital with Vivian.  This began what turned out to be quite a few months of pumping and bottlefeeding.  Anastasia spent quite a few months working with Vivian, trying to help her learn how to breastfeed. The night in the hospital and seeing her newborn with tubes and wires, Anastasia talks about feeling scared. She was traumatized and now lacked the confidence that her baby would get enough milk from breastfeeding.  She talks about how her emotional health was greatly affected by how hard breastfeeding was.  She shares some of her deepest and darkest feelings and how she finally overcame such a difficult start to new motherhood and early breastfeeding and how she came to enjoy breastfeeding.  Breastfeeding is so normal for us now and so easy.  Vivian is 17 months old now and  she nurses 3 or 4 times a day.  It is so completely normal and I don’t even think about it much anymore, in the sense of worrying and having it take over my day.