1. You have to want to breastfeed. You can’t put your fingers in your ears (or your hands over your nipples) when it comes to preparation for breastfeeding. You have to learn about it while you’re still pregnant. You can’t assume that it will come naturally. You need to read the boobie bible, join breastfeeding groups, and learn about all the benefits of it, so that when you have the baby in your arms and he’s chewing the tits off you and you’re seriously considering chucking him out the window, you don’t. Because you have the knowledge and the desire to actually want to get through it.
2. You need the silver nipple things. Use them from day one in the hospital, even if one of them drops out of your bra and falls onto the floor and you’ve got a broken wrist and a baby on your boob so you ask the cleaner to pick it up and she gives you a really strange look as she hands you back what she no doubt assumes is your weirdy fetish nipple jewellery. Get them anyway. Who knows, you might prevent some of the cracks and bleeding that make those first few days so horrendous. Just spend the money, cheapskate. They’re cheaper than a month’s worth of formula.
3. Two weeks is the charm. Yes really. That’s assuming there are no other issues (like tongue tie etc), so if you can just hang in there, wincing and curling your toes and possibly dealing with the shitbag that is mastitis or blocked ducts, in fourteen days time it will, most likely, get easier. The pain diminishes, you’ll be able to spot a bad latch, you’ll start believing that you can make it to six weeks, six months, six YEARS. Can someone pick my mother up off the floor? Thanks.
4. You will come to believe that breastmilk fixes everything. Baby has a gunky eye? Spray it in his face. Baby has acne? Again, in his face. Baby has a cold? Up his nose. Older child has a cold? Into her smoothie. Husband has a cold? Into his tea. Only joking, honey. (OR AM I?) You start freezing vast quantities of milk, not for your children, but for yourself as some sort of insurance policy because you’ve started to believe that it may in fact allow you to live forever. Similarly, you start lamenting your discarded placentas.
5. You will become one of those boring people who spouts facts (haha, pun) about how amazing the female body is. Like, did you know that your nipples create a vacuum when the baby is feeding and they suck in a bit of the baby’s spit (ew, gross) into a weird little mammary computer which analyses it and then customises your milk in response? IT’S CRAZY, but kind of amazing, yeah?
6. And here’s another one: your boobs will fill up like mad when the baby lies on them. Which means that after your morning walk with baby in the sling you could almost certainly shoot milk ten feet across the room. Sometimes I exaggerate. Not sorry.
7. You will come to love and dread the evening cluster feed (which in our house is affectionally known as the clusterfuck), which will see you pinned to the couch under an irritable and seemingly insatiable baby who will go from boob to boob, non-stop, for hours until there is nothing left. Regardless, he’ll keep on going at you (and God forbid you try to take him off before he’s finished because you’ll pay the price with his screams) until he falls into his tiny little milk coma and you get all gooey and start taking photos of him looking cute. On the plus side, you won’t have to do the washing up for MONTHS.
Awhh.
8. You’ll feel smug. Because of all the nutrition, yo. On the other hand, you’ll realise how badly you cling on to that rapidly-fading smugness when all the formula fed babies are sleeping through the night and you’re still waking up every two fucking hours to tend to Hungry Joe beside you.
9. You’ll have an excuse to eat all the biscuits. And you will. Mama needs the calories. Or that’s what she tells herself. And guess what? You can go one better and eat biscuits under the guise of increasing your supply by making lactation cookies. No, Brendan, that doesn’t mean they’re made out of breastmilk. Jesus. They’re biscuits that contain galactagogues (isn’t that a wonderful word? It’s like something the BFG would say), such as oats and flaxseed and brewer’s yeast. You’ll whip up a batch and feed them to your family and no, they won’t start lactating (more’s the pity), until you’re forced to admit that brewer’s yeast does indeed taste like fart.
Vom.
10. Breastfeeding will conveniently provide you with a plethora of ways to make your husband feel guilty because you are the sleep-deprived feeder, the lactater, the one and only nipple sacrificer, the nourisher, the martyr, the mother. He just makes the tea.
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