I wanted to breastfeed for many reasons, even though it was a
minority choice in 1965 America. First, I’d heard horror stories from one of my
aunts whose babies were allergic to all
but the most exotic formulas. Second, it was an “old-fashioned” choice,
and my love of all things “historical” was in this case a powerful motivator.
Moreover, my husband and I—both of us 19-- were receiving grudging charity from
relatives. Money was in short supply, and so breastfeeding also seemed a
practical notion, a cost-saver and proof of commitment.
Fortunately, a lovely lady Chris had baby-sat for let me
borrow her copy of the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, from the La Leche League, or my knowledge, when
my son was born, would have been just what I could glean from reading the few
pages devoted to it in Dr. Spock’s Baby & Child Care. There was a
battlefield aspect to a decision to breast feed back then, which started on the
delivery table where, as soon as my baby delivered, a nurse came at me with a
needle.
“What’s that for?”
“To dry up your milk,
honey.”
“No thank-you. I’m going to breast feed.”
Long pause, hostile
glare. “You wait! You’ll be sorry.”
You probably won’t get this out-front negativity from a
delivery room nurse today, but there remain plenty of obstacles to nursing. First
and foremost, I think, is the easy availability of formula. Formula is much
improved over fifty years back, when they were just beginning to pre-package it.
The hospital sent me home with twenty-four 4 ounce bottles—just in case. As I’d never
even held a baby before I took this one home, I was understandably unsure about
my ability to handle the job.
I’d had my baby in a Boston Woman’s clinic and roomed with
seven other women who’d also just given birth. We had curtains which could be
pulled for privacy. Nurses brought me my baby at the appointed time—every four
hours--and I’d stare at him, wondering
when the milk would come. Poor guy—he lived on sugar water for a couple of days.
Finally, as both baby and I wept, an elderly nurse came in to ask me what was
wrong. I was afraid my milk would never come, I said—this with boobs like rocks
and a steady leaking of something creamy. The nurse said, “That’s it, honey. The
colostrum! Here, do this...” and she helped me get my boy latched on.
When we left the rigid routine of the hospital—five days,
back then--things got easier. I could pick my son up whenever he cried, and as
feeding was about all I knew to comfort him, he was fed. My husband still had a
scale on which he’d weighed his model airplanes, and this was now pressed into
service for the baby. We still had a bottle bred fear that he wasn’t getting
enough, simply because we couldn’t see milk going in. The scale, my husband
reasoned, would solve this. We would weigh him before,
and again after, he nursed. It didn’t take long to lose our fear that we might
starve him. Sometimes he would gain as little as three ounces, but more
usually, he’d gain five or six.
Early on I had a cracked nipple, but I used a salve made of sheep’s
lanolin, and, as La Leche League instructed, carried on through the pain. A public health nurse
who came for the first couple of weeks was encouraging and helped me through
that. Our apartment—this was during the
hottest summer in Boston in 90 years—was crisscrossed with laundry line, on
which I dried one or the other of my two nursing bras and a host of pocket
handkerchiefs which were doing duty as nursing pads. (You could find pads back
in 1965, but again, they were expensive.) We were saving Chris’ small salary—he
was in charge of a mini-computer at a bank--to help him get back to college,
and also paying our apartment and food expenses.
How proud I felt the day I gave my bottles of formula to the
gal across the street for her baby! It may seem like a small thing now, but, despite
the cloud of cultural doubt which surrounded women who nursed in those days,
successful breastfeeding represented a big step toward self-reliance in my new
role as a mother.
