It’s a Girl

Should you be considering parenthood, there are plenty of classes, books, and how-to DVDs for you. Nervous about labor and delivery? Take a childbirth class. Concerned about maintaining your adult relationships post-baby? Get a self-help book on the topic.

Everybody’s an expert, and everybody’s got an opinion. And none of them match up. We had 18 nurses tending to us over the course of our three days in the hospital, and each had her own take on parenting, breastfeeding, changing diapers, and the like.

The cumulative effect of all this conflicting information is, naturally, overload. It’s hard not to conclude that the maternity world is just like Hollywood: Nobody knows anything.

Including us. We took a childbirth class because, well, aren’t you supposed to? Then, of course, we skipped labor entirely and went straight to the scheduled delivery of a C-section. And we ignored our hospital’s classes on breastfeeding because, well, who needs them? Us, apparently.

We assumed labor and delivery would be hard and breastfeeding would be easy. Instead, it was the other way round.

We shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, neither mom nor baby knows how to breastfeed at the start. But we’ve had to make appointments with six lactation consultants over Delphine’s first month. In addition to those 18 nurses, that means we’ve been given 24 different techniques for breastfeeding — some bad, some good, some so-so. Figuring out which is which has been up to us three.

There’s been a lot of angry online chatter recently over breastfeeding, spurred by a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore and an Atlantic article by Hanna Rosin. (Not to mention the Baader-Meinhof effect of hearing repeatedly about moms caught breastfeeding their babies while driving.) But the articles (and the anger) focused on the context around breastfeeding in contemporary America — the bigger issues of how we think about moms, working moms, child nutrition, and the like — and not breastfeeding itself. Which, it turns out, is dang hard.

Not that labor and delivery isn’t hard, too. But, gee, all those books and classes about pregnancy and childbirth? They kinda didn’t mention the whole breastfeeding thing, which is awkward, uncomfortable, and can be downright painful, producing serious crying jags on the part of both mother and child.

Books about breastfeeding, of course, have the same if-everybody-has-a-different-take-then-who’s-right? problem as getting 24 different “expert” techniques on the matter. Your baby should be lying on her side. No, it’s OK if she’s lying sort of on her back, so long as she’s comfortable. You should use a nipple shield. No, you shouldn’t use a nipple shield. Underwire bras will give you clogged ducts. Underwire bras are just fine. And so forth.

Then there are the consultants who look at how well the baby is gaining weight — Delphine had snacked back up to her birth weight within 10 days of birth and topped 8 pounds in her third week of post-utero life — and basically say, “What’s the problem? Your baby is doing just fine.”

Hm.