My breastfeeding journey: A bond beyond the womb

What you need to know:

We bring you a personal breastfeeding journey of a working mother on World Breastfeeding Week.

Inadequate breastfeeding therefore leads to unfavourable impact on neonatal, infant and young child health and development according to the World Breastfeeding Trends initiative. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has also outlined how breastfeeding provides major benefits to women health and is valuable to national productivity and economy. Due to information gap on breastfeeding benefits, there are women out there who have been body shamed because of their postpartum weight therefore they abandon breastfeeding and embark on slimming diet and products putting their babies’ health at risk. I simply ignore when someone tries to either body shame me or tell me to stop breastfeeding and embark on a slimming journey. And for these reasons, I have decided to share my breastfeeding experience to inspire other women on their journey

Related story: Just give them breast milk Many years ago, I would never have imagined that I would be able to breastfeed in public. But here I am, exclusively breastfeeding and pumping breast milk for the baby’s use when I am at work. I remember four years ago when I had my first baby, through caesarian section (CS). He made his way to the world at 35 weeks so I was advised that exclusive breastfeeding was the best for the baby to grow healthy. I managed to exclusively breastfeed for six months as per the WHO recommendation though it was not easy. Here I was, with fresh CS wound and nothing had prepared me for this, let alone breastfeeding. The following morning during ward rounds, Dr Kaguta Munawar, a senior gynaecologist and obstetrician at Aga Khan Hospital (AKH) comes with his team and finds me struggling to force the baby’s mouth to my breast. He then instructed the nurses to teach me how to breastfeed, which they did for the better part of the day. By the time I was leaving the hospital, I was trying my best. As a new mother, I had challenges with positioning the baby, had issues with getting him to latch on as sometimes I would wake up with engorged breasts, which are rock hard. At times he would breastfeed well and for long but another time, he would just snack on the breast milk and leave it. It was also a learning experience as I noticed that babies are born with a suckling reflex because the moment they latch on well, they just suckle. And nothing is more fulfilling than your little baby looking into your eyes for assurance that you will give them the best – it creates a lasting bond between the mother and the baby.

There was also a day I got a call from the nanny that the stock had run dry so I had to pump at work and send milk home. At work, there was no space to pump so would squat under my desk or use a hidden corner in the library where I would cover myself and pump. A tip I would give to any mum to overcome this challenge is to either express or pump and do a few trials giving it to the baby through the bottle during maternity leave so that the baby gets used to this feeding method as well as to reduce many episodes of crying when one resumes work. It is noteworthy to mention that one should have enough feeding bottles to take the baby throughout the time one is at work. And ensure that you emphasise the issue of hygiene to the person taking care of the baby so that they constantly wash their hands and ensure all is clean before each feed. In as much as you may have a trusted nanny, it always make a difference when you wash and sterilise the bottles and the pump by yourself.

Then comes another challenge in the name of erratic power supply for those of us this sides of the Sahara. For instance, there was a day power was cut for 72 hours in our area so some milk got spoilt while I managed to save a few which I took to a friend who had a standby generator at least 22 kilometers away (Goba to Mikocheni) for safe storage until the power in our area was restored. So this journey of exclusive breastfeeding is not a walk in the park. Another major challenge, which I think many working mothers also experience, is that the workload remains the same even while you exclusively breastfeed. For instance, I mostly work until 3.30pm before leaving to go and breastfeed as the supply I leave in the morning usually runs dry by this time. By the time I reach home, it is already 5.00pm. Some of my colleagues are very supportive though to some male colleagues, it doesn’t make sense why I have to leave to go and either pump or breastfeed. They wonder why I don’t give the baby cow milk.