This week is World Breastfeeding Week and the topic
for today has been breastfeeding and work.
Although the day is mostly over, I want to take a moment to
talk about my experiences with breastfeeding and working. For each of my 3
living children, the experience has been different.
My first child was born a week after school got out. I was a
high school math teacher at the time and chose to use summer break as my
recovery period, without taking any sort of maternity leave. I didn’t have an
insurance policy that would pay me for my time off, and taking 12 weeks of unpaid
leave would have been seriously detrimental to our financial situation.
My baby was 52 days old when I returned to work. We had
barely figured out nursing after a summer full of cracked and sometimes
bleeding nipples, a case of thrush, and persistent low supply. I supplemented a
few times, but seemed to manage to keep up barely.
I had only enough milk to get through the next day for daycare.
My daughter slept through the night for the first time the
night that I prepared to return to work. I pumped and felt immensely grateful
for the extra few ounces. That middle-of-the-night pumping session was the
first of a consistent pattern until I had to wean my daughter for medical
reasons when she was 8 months old.
As a school teacher, leaving my class to express milk wasn’t
an option and my state has no laws that protect a mother’s need to pump. I felt
lucky to have a principal who was a mother who had breastfed her babies and she
arranged for me to use a conference room in a building across campus that had a
lock. It took a full week to find that room, and my persistent asking before a location was found. My own room wasn't an option because the department printer was there.
A few times another teacher or aide would walk in to the conference room even though it was locked (how many keys were there?!?), but it was rare and I
think it was far more embarrassing for them than it was for me. I pumped during my planning period, which
turned out to be the second block of the day or roughly 3 hours since I had
nursed my baby.
Initially I pumped at the start of my planning period and
again near the end of lunch, which was about 2 hours later. It wasn’t ideal,
but it gave me enough milk to feed my baby and my body adapted fairly well. By
the time she was about 6 months old, I would just pump once during the day but
since I still had the night pumping, there was enough milk for my daycare
provider to feed her.
With my second baby, I didn’t start work until a week before
her first birthday. I opened my in-home daycare, a business I had been doing
since my first baby was 14 months old. The daycare was on hiatus for a year
while we lived with family but 48 hours after moving into our own home, I had
clients in my care. Because she was a year old, I rarely nursed her during the
day except to put her down for her naps. We were both too busy to sit and enjoy
a leisurely session in the rocking chair.
I almost never pumped with my second unless I knew I was
headed out of the house on an errand and thought she might want milk while we
were gone. I wasn’t comfortable nursing out in the open unless I had a cover
but even then everything felt awkward.
Sometimes while I was trying to nurse her to sleep, a child
would wake up on the main level of my home and I had to unlatch her and place
her in her crib and let her put herself to sleep. That meant she cried, but I
knew she was safe there while I attended to the care of another child.
I started working just 11 days after my 3rd baby
was born. We were still very much in the throws of cracked nipples and learning
to latch properly. She had been born with lip and tongue ties and her suck
pattern was painful. However, taking off additional time wasn’t an option so we
worked our way through it.
Dash is now 6 months old. We’ve done a much better job of
nursing on demand and I no longer worry about nursing in public. If my baby
wants to eat while we are out, I feed her: anytime, anywhere. In my home, work
actually prevents me from nursing her as often as she might like. Over a year
before her birth, I moved my rocking chair to the playroom so that I could
hold, rock, and soothe other babies. This has given me an easy way to nurse
Dash while still keeping careful watch and interacting with the children I care
for. However, I can’t jump up and catch a toddler as she loses her balance or
wipe away tears (or boogers) without first putting Dash down if she is nursing.
It is a balance and one that will continue to ebb and flow
as Dash grows older and the needs of the children I care for change. The safety
of every child in my home matters and sometimes that means that my own child
needs to wait a little longer than I’d like before she can nurse.
The more interesting aspect of working and nursing is my
parental interactions. Currently, all of my clients either were breastfed or
are currently breastfeeding. It isn’t at all awkward to have a mom come in and
have me walking around holding Dash as she’s latched on, but it feels quite odd
to me to do that with the dads! So if a father arrives, either to drop off or
pick up his child, I remain in my seat while I nurse the baby. The 24 feet
between my chair and the front door seems very long when trying to talk to a
dad about his child’s day, but for the last 6 months, that is how things have
been done.
My working and breastfeeding experiences aren’t typical
because of the kind of work I do. However, it is still a balancing act and one
that every working mom has to figure out on their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment