My Family and Other Globalizers | Baby, breast, bottle

Instruction manuals on breastfeeding techniques often list advice like the ten commandments: full of thou shalts and thou shalt nots. (Representational image: Wes Hicks via Unsplash)

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.

There are few things about having a baby that can be predicted with much certainty. But if I had to pick one, it would be this: your boobs as you knew them – private and pert – are consigned to the dustbin of pre-motherhood. Nothing is more in the firing line of expectations and culpability, than a mother’s breasts.

This was quickly clear after Ishaan was born in a private hospital in the Chinese capital, Beijing. Two days post-partum, the Australian gynecologist with a folksy turn of phrase who’d delivered my son, strode into the hospital room where I lay supine and without so much as an if-you-please, copped a feel of my breasts. “Good! Nice and firm,” he’d said approvingly, “the milk’s coming along well.”

Except it wasn’t. I watched in misery as women around me pumped bottles full of milk, while all the squeezing in the world produced nothing but sore nipples from mine. Through the fug of my post-labour exhaustion, I remembered warnings about the cavalier attitude towards formula milk in hospitals. “Resist all efforts to give your baby formula,” my birthing consultant – yes there is such a thing – had told me.

I’d paid only peripheral attention since I’d already made up my mind to exclusively breastfeed for a few months. Who wouldn’t? The health benefits of breastfeeding were the sacred truth of our times. There was rare scientific consensus on the fact that mother’s milk made children smarter and healthier and better.

And so, my antennae were raised when the hospital nurses repeatedly insisted that the baby was hungry, which made him fussy. “No formula,” I roared at them and stuck the babe to my boob for what felt like the trillionth time in the day. I desperately devoured instruction manuals on breastfeeding techniques, becoming an expert on different nursing holds.

The advice was listed like the ten-commandments full of thou shalts and thou shalt nots.

“Don’t stuff the nipple into an unwilling mouth; let your baby take the initiative.”

“Nurse on demand, for as long as the baby wants. But be sure to get in at least 8-12 feedings a day.”

“Make sure your baby’s appetite is not sabotaged between feedings.”

I would get nauseatingly familiar with the theory that the female body always generates enough milk to feed a child. And yet, every woman I met in those first few days after giving birth asked me precisely whether I had “enough” milk, from aunts in New Delhi calling to congratulate us, to Auntie Li, our cook.

Nurses stared at my breasts with furrowed brows, as I sat with a suction cup attached to a breast, pumping away to try and extract something to prove once and for all that I did indeed have enough milk. But even five days post-partum, I was barely able to produce a tiny 10ml of this maternal manna, despite having suffered the indignity of being mechanically milked for over half an hour. The instructions that came along with the hospital-supplied breast pump cheerily stated that “most women” filled 100-110 ml bottles within 10-15 minutes of pumping.

In the event, I breastfed Ishaan for three months. During this time period I became a full-time milk supply-booster. I consumed fenugreek, drank chicken bone soup (a traditional Chinese remedy for my sub-optimally milky condition) and even took medications like motilium, which ostensibly stimulate milk production as a side effect. I nursed through the night.

I attended a La Leche League meeting. The League is a breastfeeding support group, and the meeting was led by a diminutive American expat, out of whose lap an enormous child hopped on and off through the session, at one point nuzzling up to her breast for a quick drink.

Upshot of the meeting? “Believe in your breasts.”

Dear Reader, up to this point in my life, I had never imagined my breasts were things to believe in. I believed in science, and on the eve of an exam, summoned up belief in God, but in breasts?

Let me fast-forward to the present day. Ishaan is 13 years old. He drinks a lot of (cow) milk, is ridiculously tall, and devastatingly handsome. OK, I am biased, but the bit about him being tall and drinking (cow) milk is fact. I switched him from my breast to bottles of formula when he was three months old. It made everyone happier, although - because it’s part of the texture of motherhood - I was consumed by guilt for a while. My exhausted mammaries exulted in their freedom – until Nico came along, that is.

Breastfeeding was a lesson in humility for me. I was used to getting my way. Hard work and discipline, combined with a handle on “the facts”, had always yielded the desired results. Until I had a baby and my breasts refused to obey. In hindsight, my failure at breastfeeding was the prologue to one of the most recurred lessons of parenthood: there is much beyond your control; accept it. Lesson number two: when wondering what to buy your expectant young mother friend, always plump for a jar of nipple cream.