By Jennette Turner

Before we get started, for the record, I am pro-breastfeeding. Yet, no matter how badly she wants to, not every woman can breastfeed. Take me for example: I am a mostly healthy woman, I’ve been eating well for most of my life, and I teach classes on nutrition for breastfeeding. I expected breastfeeding to go well and anticipated the joy that was promised to come from being that close to my baby. But that’s not what happened.

The first time the hospital nurse helped me bring my daughter, Jane, to my breast I screamed out loud from the pain. The nurse assured me it would get better, that I wasn’t used to it. Yet every time it was the same. I fought back tears as best I could so as not to upset Jane, but often I cried out from the pain. My doctor thought that maybe a yeast infection was causing the problem, and so I washed every article of clothing and all our bedding in hot water as per the protocol.

I tried a remedy that had worked for a friend and painted my nipples purple with gentian violet. They were pretty, but it didn’t help.  I then tried taking Nystatin, agonizing over how the drug might contaminate my milk, but that didn’t work either.

Next, I went to La Leche League meetings, but no one there could speak to my experience. The leaders tried to help. They told me Jane was latched properly and that I was doing it “right.” I learned several different positions to use holding Jane and bought a special pillow to help with in-bed nursing, but it was all pain.

I started to feel like people didn’t believe me when I told them how it felt. A cousin of my husband’s told me: “You shouldn’t have a problem. It’s not hard, just put the baby up to the breast and let her drink. It’s natural.” Naturally, I wanted to kick her.

Throughout all of this, my breasts hurt so much I had to tape bandages over them because I couldn’t stand anything touching them — even soft t-shirt material. I was still trying to nurse, but it felt like someone was grinding broken glass into my nipples. It hurt to hold my baby up to my chest, to wear the baby sling, to sleep. Water falling on my breasts in the shower hurt; I had to take baths.

One of my doulas (yes, I had two) suggested pumping instead of trying to nurse. Pumping hurt, but it didn’t make me grit my teeth and sob the way nursing did. By this time my milk supply was diminished from not nursing consistently. I would only get an ounce or two of milk from one pumping session.

I took fenugreek, ate nutritional yeast flakes, drank milk by the quart and enjoyed small servings of Guinness to boost my production. At my peak, I was pumping several hours a day. My husband would read books to me to help distract me from the physical pain. And thank goodness for DVDs.

Soon I became depressed about what I saw as my body betraying me. This was definitely not the experience I wanted. I wanted so badly to give my daughter the best nourishment possible — that golden ring of perfect nutrition: breast milk. Nutrition is, after all, my thing. It’s my passion and my livelihood.

Finally, I saw a lactation consultant who told me that I really needed to stop the pumping and bottle feed my baby. She diagnosed my condition correctly, catching what everyone else had missed: a white, diamond shape on the tip of my nipple that appeared when I pumped or nursed.

It was Reynaud’s Syndrome of the nipple, an uncommon condition where small arteries in the nipple constrict causing intense physical pain.  She was honest: breastfeeding would not work for me and trying to force it to work was negatively impacting my relationship with my daughter. And she was kind, telling me she’d never met anyone who had tried so hard. With enormous grief, I came to accept the fact that I would be only bottle feeding my baby.

My pain, however, didn’t stop there. The worst aspect of my situation was that every parenting book and every mothering magazine I read made me feel like a horrible mother whose child would no doubt turn out to be sickly and deficient because I did not breast feed.

Frustrated, I paper clipped closed the section on breastfeeding in my Dr. Sears book, but soon found that even the bottle-feeding section starts out with, “You really shouldn’t bottle feed.” I threw the book in the street. My husband found it when he came home from work: “Bad day?”

Oddly enough and quite on the other side of things, two months before I had my daughter a good friend of mine very prematurely gave birth. In order to keep her milk supply up for when her baby would be able to nurse, she pumped and pumped every day. Her supply was bountiful; she was a veritable cow.

By the time her daughter was able to nurse, she had much more than she could use. She had frozen her milk at home, not following the kind of strict protocols one would need to in order to donate it to a milk bank, and so she gave her surplus to me.

I am still grateful for my friend’s gift. For the first four months of her life, the whole time I was unsuccessfully trying to make nursing and pumping work, my daughter was fed my friend’s breast milk including what little of my own I was able to make.

From four months on, I continued to use my friend’s breast milk in combination with homemade formula until the milk ran out when Jane was just over six months. It was homemade formula from then on out.

I chose to make my own formula in order to avoid ingredients in commercial formula, even the organic varieties, I did not find wholesome. Corn syrup in organic formula? To make my own formula, I used the recipe from Sally Fallon’s book Nourishing Traditions (see below), and made adjustments as my daughter got older. As another bonus, I figured out that the homemade formula was more economical in the long run than organic commercial formula.

Each ingredient in the formula (all food, not supplements) provides the components to make it as similar nutritionally to breast milk as possible. For example, human milk contains vitamin C, but cow milk does not so the formula calls for acerola powder, made from high vitamin C acerola cherries, to make up the difference.

One tricky aspect is that the recipe calls for raw milk, but I was able to find a source. In Minnesota it is illegal to sell raw milk in stores, but legal to sell it on the farm. Raw milk contains enzymes and beneficial microflora that protect it from bacterial contamination and make it more digestible for a baby. Pasteurization destroys these enzymes and microflora, and much of milk’s nutrient content, too.

If I had been unable to obtain raw milk, Fallon recommends using the best quality whole milk available and culturing it before use to restore some of raw milk’s benefits.

It may sound like a lot of work, but making homemade formula was simple. It took about 20 minutes to make Jane’s daily 36 oz. batch. My husband and I took turns. He was glad for the opportunity to be part of Jane’s nourishment, and appreciated the bond that developed between the two of them through him feeding her.

And Jane loved her homemade formula. We kept it up until she was almost two years old. It became her “milky” even after she had transitioned to solid food because she liked it so much, and I felt so good about how nourishing it was. Three years later and I am happy to report that Jane has never been sickly or deficient.

Nourishing Traditions’ Homemade Formula

2 c. whole raw milk

¼ c. liquid whey

4 T. lactose

¼ tsp. bifidobacterium infantis

2 T. cream, preferably raw

1 tsp. cod liver oil or ½ tsp. high-vitamin cod liver oil

1 tsp. unrefined sunflower oil

2 tsp. coconut oil

2 tsp. nutritional yeast flakes, preferably Frontier brand

2 tsp. gelatin

1⅞ c. filtered water

¼ tsp. acerola powder

 

Add gelatin to water and heat gently until gelatin is dissolved. Transfer the gelatin water to a very clean glass or stainless steel container and mix well. I used a blender. Serve the formula, gently heated, in a glass bottle.

Many of these ingredients are available from a company called Radiant Life (888-593-8333/www.radiantlifecatalog.com). They have a package you can buy with everything but the milk and cream. It’s expensive, but many of the ingredients last a long time.

Recipe ©1995, Sally Fallon