The Latch That Took Six Weeks

In the hospital, the nurse placed my daughter on my chest and said, "Don't worry, she knows what to do." She did not. I did not either. We lay there, both of us crying, while I waited for the instinct everyone promised would arrive. It never came that night, or the next.

By day three my nipples were cracked and bleeding. Every time she rooted toward me my whole body went tense with dread. I would count to three and brace myself the way you brace for an injection. My mother-in-law kept saying it would settle, that all the women in our family fed easily. I felt like I was failing at the one job a mother is supposed to know in her bones.

We tried everything. Different holds, the football hold, lying down, pillows stacked like a fort around me. I watched YouTube videos at 2 a.m. with the sound off so I wouldn't wake my husband. My baby would latch, slip, scream, and I would cry along with her. I started dreading feeds so much that I would delay them, which only made everything worse.

What finally turned it around was asking for help out loud. A lactation consultant came home, watched one feed, and gently said my daughter had a shallow latch and a slight tongue restriction. She showed me how to wait for the wide-open mouth, how to bring baby to breast and not breast to baby. It was not magic. But it was a beginning.

For the next few weeks I practised like it was an exam. Some feeds were good, some were still painful, and I kept a tube of nipple cream in every room of the house. Slowly the cracks healed. Slowly the dread faded. One ordinary afternoon I realised she had fed for twenty minutes and I had not flinched once.

It took six weeks. Six weeks of doubting myself, of strangers' advice, of wondering if I was broken. If you are in week one or two right now, please hear me: it is allowed to be hard. Natural does not mean easy. Ask for help early, and be as gentle with yourself as you are with your baby.

She is two now and remembers none of it. But I do. I remember the morning it stopped hurting and I cried, this time out of relief, into her soft little head.