I'm a new mom. I have a three month old little girl who I love more than anything in the world! I had decided during my pregnancy that I was going to breastfeed. Right out of my uterus, my daughter was a nursing machine! She loved it and latched on right away. I thought to myself, yes! This is as easy as the lactation consultants, my mother-in-law and all the other breastfeeding moms that I knew had said it would be. And then reality hit. It turned out that my right nipple was flat. Flat? I didn't even know what that meant. What I did know was that after about 4 days, anytime my daughter had to eat on the right side, I wanted to run into the kitchen, crawl inside a cabinet and hide. My husband later told me that I would get this look of sheer terror on my face every time my daughter had to nurse on the right side. It was pure torture. In my opinion, if you want to get information out of a suspect, simulate breastfeeding on his or her nipples. They will tell you everything you want to know pretty damn fast!
For a few days, I was pretty certain my nipple was going to fall off. I kept asking my husband to look at it and reassure me that it didn't look as bad as it felt. Mostly I would get looks of pure horror - very reassuring.
The entire time this was happening, I was cursing every single person who told me that I would love breastfeeding and that it was the greatest thing they had ever done! Bull! Maybe at 6 months it will be great, but it sure as hell wasn't great then! If I thought voodoo dolls would work, I would have gotten one for each person who lied to me and stuck needles right where their nipples would be - see how they liked it!! I spent many nights crying and giving myself pep talks, trying to talk myself into not giving up - I mean, if other people were telling me it was the greatest thing they had ever done, it had to get better at some point - right? RIGHT??
Looking back to the beginning of my breastfeeding experience, I wish that someone had told me that it would totally suck. I would have been better prepared. Instead, I went in anticipating this wonderful experience that didn't materialize until weeks later (and I mean weeks later - at 16 weeks, I'm still not sure we are totally at the "wonderful experience" stage yet, but that is for another post). If someone had just told me that breastfeeding was going to hurt more than having a tooth pulled without any anesthetic (I should know, it has happened to me), I probably wouldn't have cried as much as I did or dreaded the nursing sessions as much as I did. At the very least, I would have known what to expect.
So here you have it. Breastfeeding isn't all roses. But that doesn't mean that it isn't worth doing. Knowing what happened, I would do it all over again - nipple falling off included.
