Tiny victories

I still very much feel like I’m in new mama land, but today is a big day for me. Not only is Pia, my sweet firstborn, 7 months old (oh my, how did that happen?), but it also marks month 7 of nursing her. I am positive some of you can relate, but breastfeeding was a huge, huge issue for me at first – I had wanted to do it and thought it was important, but was completely shocked at how difficult (and painful) it was for me. Wasn’t it supposed to “just work” after all? Why wasn’t the pain going away “after a couple of weeks”? Most of the time I felt like I was just complaining, which continuously made me question myself, especially as many well meaning seasoned veterans concluded that maybe I simply had a low pain threshold! In the end, we went through multiple lactation consultants, antibiotics for an infection, ultrasounds to see if they could find anything else, a few days of thinking tongue tie was an issue, and then finally discovering both a circulation condition and overproduction issue that were playing off each other. This took four months, and honestly there were many times when I was a hair away from quitting.

And yet, in the beginning, my goal was to get to three months at all costs. But then as we turned some sort of pain corner around week 15 or 16, it was time to start dreamin’ big…let’s get to six. Now I am a whole whopping month after that and feeling this tiny mom victory…and feeling that all of it is manageable.  Most importantly, Pia is growing and is well. It was an unexpected challenge to tack on to her first year, but it has also been such a good reminder for me to take rough patches of any sort day by day (or feeding by feeding in this case!). Something good to file away for future mothering challenges!