An Ode to Breastfeeding

Over the Easter weekend, when we had driven nine hours south to sunny Gloucestershire, I had the serious misfortune of getting a double whammy of Mastitis (my third episode in the short 13 weeks of Lucy's life).  Getting it in both sides truly made me feel like a double masectomy would be preferable to the pain I was in.  The pain is so severe even bending over or leaning to one side would cause tears, breast feeding was conducted with me kneeling on all fours over my baby, begging her to empty to boob and hoping that gravity would help drain the blocked ducts.  Most of Easter was spent in the shower feverishly combing the underside of both boobs with a hairbrush (a mumsnet tip) (didn't work) hugging heat packs and desperately trying to hand massage the blockage away, all the time muttering that if anyone so much as touched my boob I would kill them.  It is like having fire in your breasts.  It is like having fire in your breasts whilst someone is simultaneously slicing you up and down with a knife and when the 'let down' reflex happens, you may as well shoot yourself because we're adding about 60 seconds of even more intense pain than that to the mix.
So, given this uncomfortable situation, why am I sad about the reality that I should give up breastfeeding?  Clearly it's no good for the baby to be taking flucloxacilin every 4 weeks through my milk, and nor is it good for me to feel like I've been hit by a car and my boobs are on fire every four weeks.  It just feels too early at 13 weeks to wean Lucy onto a bottle, I am going to miss those early morning and late evening cuddles with her suckling away, her hands grasping my finger, sweet little sucky noises, pure contentment and satisfaction in the milk that I am providing her.  It will feel so detached giving her a bottle, so far away.  And so, with less than 2 weeks before I start work again, I am battling with the insane guilt that I've not managed the breastfeeding very well and it's all my fault, and that the poor baby is going to have to have repetitively tasteless formula for the next 9 months until she can move onto cows milk.  And as for my Health Visitor who has been insisting babies need to be breasfted until they are ONE, she will cross her head sadly and tick a box on some nameless piece of paper documenting my lack of ability of continue breastfeeding, and it will be nothing other than a boring statistic.  There will not be a box to say 'mother gave up due to repeated mastitis', so it will look like I just gave up for no good reason.

And all of this almost makes me want to write an ode to breastfeeding, to capture in some sense that gorgeous moment, just between mother and baby that no-one else is part of, that no-one else can do.  But seeing how completely shit I am at poetry, I think I will save myself the trouble, and I'll go and console myself with some easter eggs instead.