Moving on.
May. 20th, 2005 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaAlex is six weeks old, and still showing no signs of improvement in terms of getting her nutrition from the breast. After a week on the special training bottle - not to mention all the suck training exercises, which have been going on since our second lactation consultant visit - her suck has not improved. She'll go to the breast, but before-and-after-nursing weight checks show that she's only taking in tiny quantities of food. She has never managed to gain weight from nursing alone.
It's time for us to move on.
It's not good for Alex to have a stressed-out Mama. It's not good for the majority of our interactions to be based around something we're failing at, and for me to spend most of my day trying to exact a certain standard of performance from her. For our relationship, for our family, that's just not healthy. We need to be able to relax and enjoy each other's company more than we need to spend an indefinite-but-probably-large additional amount of time and energy trying for a goal we may never reach.
I feel sad. This is not what I wanted or envisioned. I saw breastfeeding as the cornerstone of my parenting practice, and it's difficult to come to terms with our failure. It's still kind of hard to picture myself as a not-breastfeeding mother. But - after all that anguish - I don't feel guilty. I tried my utmost. I got every conceivable kind of help. It just didn't work out. Life is like that sometimes.
A friend told me last week that if I ever came to this point I shouldn't say anything about it. My friend was concerned that some people would post comments to make me feel awful - say, by comparing bottle-feeding to not using a carseat, to pick a not-very-random example. But to me, given the public nature of my other posts about parenting, not posting about this decision would feel too much like I was acting out of shame. And I'm not ashamed. I did my best, and that's all I can do.
It's time for us to move on.
It's not good for Alex to have a stressed-out Mama. It's not good for the majority of our interactions to be based around something we're failing at, and for me to spend most of my day trying to exact a certain standard of performance from her. For our relationship, for our family, that's just not healthy. We need to be able to relax and enjoy each other's company more than we need to spend an indefinite-but-probably-large additional amount of time and energy trying for a goal we may never reach.
I feel sad. This is not what I wanted or envisioned. I saw breastfeeding as the cornerstone of my parenting practice, and it's difficult to come to terms with our failure. It's still kind of hard to picture myself as a not-breastfeeding mother. But - after all that anguish - I don't feel guilty. I tried my utmost. I got every conceivable kind of help. It just didn't work out. Life is like that sometimes.
A friend told me last week that if I ever came to this point I shouldn't say anything about it. My friend was concerned that some people would post comments to make me feel awful - say, by comparing bottle-feeding to not using a carseat, to pick a not-very-random example. But to me, given the public nature of my other posts about parenting, not posting about this decision would feel too much like I was acting out of shame. And I'm not ashamed. I did my best, and that's all I can do.
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Date: 2005-05-20 02:15 pm (UTC)