A mother's guilt ...

This is a hard post for me to write. It's something I have been thinking about for months, but have put off. But I have come to the point where I need to get it out, put it into words, and then maybe I will be able to see that it isn't so bad. Because for the last 16 months, I have carried around a lot of guilt about something that was totally out of my control.

They say that childbirth is a traumatic experience. But for me, the aftermath was what continues to haunt me. So I am choosing to write about this, not only for myself, but in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, I will be able to help someone else who has lived or is living what I went through.

To let them know that they aren't alone -- and to let myself heal.

I always knew that I wanted to breastfeed. It's better for the baby, it helps the two of you bond, it's cost-effective, etc. I did my research, I bought my swanky pump, I read up on latching methods and nursing holds ... and then Collin was born. After 17 hours of labor, he entered the world, and upon being cleaned off and wrapped up, was brought to me for a little delivery-room breakfast while I waited for my own cream of wheat to arrive. My wonderful L&D nurse helped get him latched on and he sucked a few times, his little jaw working as he took in his first colostrum. I was thrilled. We had succeeded.

And it all went downhill from there.

In the postpartum box that I called a room for the next 24 hours, all three of us slept. Or, more accurately, one of us slept and two of us tried to. So I chalked up his sleeping for most of the day to why he wasn't eating. But realistically, I knew that something was wrong when, every time I tried to nurse him, it wasn't working. What had happened between the fifth and fourth floor?

My extremely pushy nurse brought me a nipple shield and tried to basically push him onto my breast. He snoozed on, he wouldn't latch, and finally, in the middle of the night, he cried. And cried. And I cried, too. "You're hurting him!" I snapped at her, and she backed off. He finally seemed to latch with the shield and, as far as I could tell, took a couple of halfhearted sucks before going back to sleep. And it went on like this all night. She nagged, he cried and I got closer to falling over the edge from lack of sleep.

The lactation consultant who came to see me before my discharge was less than helpful (and the one major black mark against Swedish in my book). "The nurse said you can't nurse without her help," she announced within 15 seconds of coming into the room. I was ashamed. I should have been able to do this, I thought miserably. I had carried Collin for 38 weeks and three days all by myself, and now I couldn't feed him? No. That wasn't going to happen. I wasn't going to LET it happen. I assured her that I would be fine now that I had a few hours of experience under my belt, and she left without ever looking at my breasts. Remember that.

An hour and 40 miles later, our little family of three was home. For all my trying, Collin didn't seem particularly hungry and was far more interested in sleep. I didn't think anything of it. Surely not every newborn wanted to eat every two hours; some of them were tired after the (horrific) journey of being born. The books even said that every baby is different.

In the late evening, when I finally tore myself away from him long enough to take my first shower since before leaving for the hospital on Friday, Collin introduced the word (and eventual nickname) whambulance into our household. He was having none of it, and Chris finally got him settled down with a lot of pacing and a little gentle bouncing. So back to sleep he went.

Around 10 p.m., I actually got him to latch for a few minutes, and I was ecstatic. I could do it! I didn't need a pushy nurse or a mean lactation consultant! But my excitement was short lived as he lost the latch and lost his patience with the whole situation.

And by 10:15, an exhausted Chris was headed out the door to go do the one thing I had never wanted him to do: buy formula.

It wasn't that I was against formula by any means -- I was a Similac baby myself, and look how well I turned out! OK, maybe that's not the best example. First of all, since I planned to exclusively breastfeed, I hadn't done any formula research. I hastily told Chris to buy some Nestle GoodStart, having babysat for several families who used it in college, and prayed for the best.

It wasn't so much that I had an issue with giving Collin formula; it was that by doing it, I was conceding that I wasn't able to successfully breastfeed my son. I was admitting that I was a failure. And for someone who is used to success, that's a hard reality to swallow.

When Chris returned, I sat on the couch and cried while Collin inhaled a 2-ounce bottle like he'd never seen food before. And, essentially, he hadn't. I was nearly hysterical upon the realization that I had basically starved my baby since he was born because he couldn't latch. Never mind that he slept most of the first 24 hours; I was officially the worst mother ever. Or at least that's how it felt as I sat up half the night cradling my sleeping child in my arms and frantically Googling nursing tips between preparing bottles of formula.

Granted, we didn't know any better. No one had talked to us about what to do if breastfeeding wasn't going as planned. No one offered us any formula and NO ONE looked at my breasts. If they had, it would have taken all of two seconds to see that I have small, flat nipples. I feel so much closer to my readers now after sharing that little piece of information.

For the low price of several hundred dollars and a lot of tears, I was able to get some tips for boosting my extremely low milk supply (worsened by my slow start to nursing) and feeding Collin with a different type of nursing shield than I had been given in the hospital. Emily Pease, the outpatient lactation consultant at Swedish, was an angel in capri pants. I don't think I could have done it, or found the self-confidence to even try, without her. Picking up the phone to even schedule an appointment was hard for me. I didn't want to get my hopes up and then fail again.

My sessions with her -- and the endless bottles of Fenugreek -- made a world of difference, but I still had to supplement with formula. I hadn't been giving him much, but it became evident that he wasn't getting enough from me alone, so I had to increase the amount of formula. I would nurse first and then top him off with a bottle. Sometimes he would drink two ounces; sometimes, six. It was hard to not feel guilty, but the feeling of knowing I was giving my baby what he needed eventually won out.

And being able to breastfeed him at all was the greatest feeling of accomplishment. He may not have been getting much, but it was something. If he had two ounces, it was two more than he would have gotten had I not tried. I would stay up late pumping and in the time most women could fill five freezer storage bags, fill one, ounce by ounce; night after night.

And on we went with this little routine. Once Collin started eating solids, he drank less milk, so my supply started to decrease again. He nursed, on average, three times a day (morning, afternoon and night) and had bottles at other times. I watched him grow and thrive under the regime of formula, breastfeeding and pumped milk. I fed him on planes, in my car, in the women's lounge of every Nordstrom in the greater Puget Sound area.

I haven't worked so hard at something -- ever.

I cherished this special time between Collin and I, and vowed to continue as long as we could with the ultimate goal of making it to his first birthday. But I quietly hoped to surpass that and get to 15 months. Once an overachiever, always an overachiever.

And I would have, had my gallbladder not decided to revolt against my body on the morning after he turned one. I landed in the emergency room -- and Collin got his big introduction to whole milk. My surgeon mandated that I couldn't nurse him until the drugs were out of my system, and since I hadn't been able to feed him since the night before, I was already engorged -- and totally screwed. And thus began my immediate, against-my-own-will weaning.

I admit that it does bug me a little, but I am insanely proud that on the night of May 30, 2010, I was able to look down at my 1-year-old son and know that I had made it. That we had made it. That all of the pain, all of the tears were for the greater good.

But the tears have not dried completely. Once in a while, I have a good cry over the guilt I continue to feel over what I perceive as my inadvertent starving of my baby during the first 36 hours of his life. Rationally, I know that he was fine, that he wanted to sleep, that he would have made his displeasure known. But a mother's guilt is powerful, and the realization that Collin's late-evening meltdown was probably sparked by hunger -- and we didn't know it at the time, continues to eat at me. Shouldn't a mother have known better?

And then I see my happy, healthy child run by -- or better yet, run toward me with his arms open for a hug -- and I know that I did my best. For him. For us. And I also know that Collin will probably be a teenager and I'll still have that last frozen bag of breastmilk in my freezer. No joke.

It turns out that some things are worth more than a Pulitzer.