What's not natural about the boob?

I really am a supporter of breastfeeding. Not only does it provide your child with all the essential nutrients, anti-bodies, and all that other jazz (you can actually find all that information in the aforementioned books) but it is also extremely portable, doesn’t take up a lot of space (unless of course you are talking about the enormous rack you have to cart around throughout the process) and you don’t have to sterilize a thing. But…for something that is such a natural process, it certainly did not come naturally to me at all.

When the boy was first born, the nurses put him on my chest with the hopes that he would latch on. I thought he would just crawl right up there, shove the nipple in his mouth and start sucking the milk down like I do when I get a frappachino. Instead, the nurse put his little (if you call a 9lb baby little) body on my chest and ripped open my gown to expose my still rather small and rather modest boobs, with her ice cold hands she grabbed my boob…hello…squeezed it with her vice clamp hands and shoved the thing into my sleeping baby’s mouth. Ughh…I don’t know about the rest of you, but that didn’t seem natural to me at all. This whole process kept repeating itself as the nurses and the lactation consultant (I didn’t see this option on my Myer’s Briggs results) came to check to see if he was latching on correctly. And apparently, it isn’t a good latch unless the child has your entire nipple in his mouth and not that I have the biggest nipples in the world, but that is a lot for an infant to swallow so to speak.

So once you and your team of dozens of boob grabbers decide that the baby is latching on properly, the next thing that you wait for is for your milk to come in. The way the books that I read during my pregnancy described it was that when your milk comes in your boobs will become engorged, they will hurt and they will practically burst with milk. I do know that this happens to some women, but if you are at all like me you might still be wondering at your child’s fifth birthday if your milk ever came in. After the 2 days in the hospital with the nurses asking me if my milk came in, I started to feel like they wouldn’t let me go home with out my milk. And, with a desire to please and have the right answer I eventually started to say yes, even though I was never entirely sure.