To say that it’s a journey
would be an understatement. It’s been an adventure, an expedition, an odyssey,
a pilgrimage.
It all started with my first
babe, Stella Jane. She was born and had
latched on within the first 5 minutes.
She was, for all I knew, a pro from the start. I’d worried about being able to breastfeed;
my mother had been told she didn’t make enough milk, and as probably every new
mother does, I worried I might not either.
But Stella seemed to have no trouble getting what she needed and had
more than doubled her birth weight by 8 weeks old.
At 10 months old, as her
front teeth erupted, I discovered some weak, hypo plastic spots where the
enamel hadn’t properly formed, and these spots promptly succumbed to
decay. This led me to start researching,
and I soon discovered that she had a severe upper lip tie. We had it revised by
cold laser, easy peasy. After researching
ties, I saw, in hindsight, that some of our “struggles,” like her extreme
gassiness early on, my oversupply and forceful letdown, were probably due to
her tie. But, we’d moved beyond those
and were still successfully breastfeeding and continued to do so. She loved to nurse.
Fast forward to around her
second birthday. I found out I was
pregnant with my next little love.
Stella wasn’t done nursing. I’d
decided somewhere along the way that I wanted to let her decide when she was
done. So began our tandem odyssey
(Odyssey defined as “a long series of wanderings or adventures, especially
when filled with notable experiences, hardships, etc.). I read Adventures in Tandem Nursing. I powered
through the aversions. We crossed the rocky
path that was night weaning. We walked the road of diminishing and eventually
non-existent supply. She nursed on. We
climbed the hill of colostrum returning.
Then finally, her brother was born.
He arrived calmly in the water, at home, on a Wednesday
evening. Stella had nursed for the last
time as an only child just a couple hours before he emerged. They both latched on together for the first
time in the postpartum herbal bath. It
was picturesque, almost idyllic. But he didn’t seem to quite know what he was
doing around the breast. It didn’t seem
as instinctual for him as it had for his sister.
During the newborn exam an hour or so later, we found out
why. I knew to look for a lip tie this
time around, and sure enough, he had a severe one. But my midwife broke the news that he also
had a pretty significant posterior tongue tie.
Being a doula and having a passion for breastfeeding, I knew what that
could mean. It was not good news. But we were discovering it early, and I was
hopeful that with timely intervention, we’d be fine.
At nine days old, Jude had his lip and tongue tie revised with a
cold laser by a well-known provider here in the DFW metroplex. He handled it pretty well (other than the
post-op stretching exercises, which were torturous for everyone), but I really
couldn’t tell too much of a difference in the way he was nursing. He kept gaining weight thanks to my tendency
towards oversupply, but I soon started struggling with clogged ducts and
mastitis. I’d never once dealt with those struggles while nursing Stella, and
that was a major cue to me that he was not properly draining the breast and was
still indeed struggling. He nursed very
often, every hour and a half or so, around.the.clock.
I went to see an IBCLC who confirmed that either a) his tongue
tie had been incompletely revised or b) it had reattached. We went back to the same provider who
re-lasered it when he was a little over a month old. I saw very little, if any, improvement after. And the post-op stretching had become beyond
traumatic. It felt like Jude was
dreading anything coming near his mouth, and I could understand why, poor baby.
We continued seeing an IBCLC who was very experienced in working
with restricted and tied babies. We saw
a chiropractor. I did baby massage every night and tried to nurse him while he
was completely relaxed. We started OMT
(Osteopathic Manipulative Therapy), driving an hour each way once a week to try
and address underlying tensions and restrictions that were possibly preventing
his revisions from being as productive as they should have been. I stopped
doing the stretches on his tongue after significant scar tissue became
apparent. The mechanics of his breastfeeding weren’t improving. He didn’t want to nurse unless he was asleep
or just waking up. I had to go to great
lengths to get him to sleep since he often was not satiated and was tense. His
latch was shallow. He swallowed lots of air. His tongue clicked as he wasn’t
able to maintain suction. I continued to struggle with clogged ducts and bouts
of mastitis.
I sought the opinion of another dentist who thought that Jude
needed yet another revision. So between
3-4 months old, his tongue was cut again.
This time, I noticed slight improvement.
We decided not to do any stretches after this procedure. They hadn’t helped with the previous ones,
and it seemed like anything that was going to make Jude more averse to or
traumatized by things in his mouth was not a good idea. We continued seeing lactation specialists and
going for bodywork. The improvement
wasn’t enough though. I felt like our
entire day, every day, revolved around creating the perfect environment to coax
Jude to nurse. I was pumping multiple times a day to cue my body to keep making
the milk he wasn’t strong enough to tell it to continue making himself. He wouldn’t and couldn’t take a bottle. Formula
was not an option, for many reasons; for us personal conviction, cost, food
allergies. I knew this was not how it was supposed to be. It HAD to get better. I had come to terms with the fact that it
would never be easy; heck, it might always be a struggle! But, it had to get
better; it had to become functional so I could function.
I sought out one more provider in a last ditch attempt to attain
some improvement. We drove over an hour
to him and spent pretty much every last dime of our savings to have a final
procedure done. When he was just 5 months and one week old, his tongue was
lasered for the fourth time. I was
desperately hoping for hope and praying that, if there was none, God would give
me the strength to keep on keeping on as we were.
One week later, Jude nursed to sleep. I cried. Breastfeeding had been a tense, anxious
struggle for so long, and at last, he relaxed.
He fell asleep nursing. It wasn’t
instant and dramatic improvement after that, but he slowly but surely grew more
efficient and more relaxed; the rest of us followed. He started gaining weight again. I gradually weaned him off the complicated
routine of wrapping him and bouncing him on an exercise ball then rocking him
while he nursed, and I was able to lay with him or just sit still and feed
him. We finished a few weeks of gentle
stretches. We spaced out his OMT visits and were eventually able to stop. We found our normal.
With Jude, it was a pilgrimage, “a journey, especially a long
one, made to some sacred place as an act of devotion.” The breastfeeding relationship between a
mother and child is more than a physical one; it’s emotional and spiritual. We found our normal, for us, our sacred
place. I had mourned the relationship I
expected, the “normals” I had with his sister.
I had grieved what I hoped for and thought it “should” be. But we found our sacred space. And to this day, going strong at 16 months, I
celebrate the quiet, still, relaxed moments where he smiles at me while he
nurses just as I do the wiggly, uncomfortable moments where he paws at me for a
quick drink or runs to me for comfort at the breast after falling down. I
treasure his growth because it has been such a journey to sustain him. His latch still looks less than ideal. It’s
not textbook perfect, but it’s functional. And it’s sacred.
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