‘Like a cheese grater raking across my nipple’: why I kept trying to breastfeed for so long

My commitment to breastfeeding exclusively was related to shame. If I couldn’t do it, I felt I would be letting the baby down

The baby was born. I woke the next morning and felt an instant, brutal claw across the heart. I saw the baby in her little plastic cot, I saw the back of the baby’s head and thought at once: the baby is dead. The baby’s floss of hair was matted with blood. The baby had been crushed or gored by a forest predator.

I sat up. It wasn’t true, of course. The baby was fine, only sleeping stiffly with her gnome’s face tightly shut. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, still dopey and numb from the epidural. I looked at the baby evenly. A nurse swiped her head around one of the blue flannel curtains – it was still dark; the cubicle was lit cloudily by the lamp at the nurses’ station. In the ward a different person’s baby began crying, then another.

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