Essential Baby blogger Amity Dry
I’m thrilled to be back blogging with you after the birth of my precious daughter Poppy Lucinda, on June 3rd. I am still pinching myself that I have a gorgeous girl, with the old wives tales and most of your predictions proving to be correct.
Poppy is an absolute angel, a very contented baby who looks exactly like her brother as a newborn (except I get to dress her in pink, hooray!) I will be posting more of her birth story and photos in the coming weeks, but suffice to say it was all over very quickly with a 90 minute labour and she surprised us all with her size (8 pounds 15.) So I feel I was justified in complaining so much leading up to the birth!
But while I could easily devote an entire blog to how beautiful she is and how in love with her I am, what I’d like to talk about this week is something that all us mums have stories to tell about, some good and some bad – midwives. In my experience midwives really do make or break your new baby experience. And they can have a huge impact on how you feel about yourself as a mother in those first few days in hospital and sometimes even the weeks and months following.
When I had Jamison I had a real mix of midwives, some I looked forward to seeing and some I hoped not to run into again. Mostly they were great but, like many new mums, I did get the occasional one who was bossy and scary in a headmaster kind of way, leaving me feeling like a chastised student who had got the answers wrong.
And what is it with some of them and their rough handling of your boobs? I know they must do it a million times over but there really is no reason to be as forceful with the latching on assistance as some of them are. I guess they forget that, especially for first time mums, up until now our boobs have been private property and the idea of a middle aged woman manhandling them was kind of weird and scary. So a little sensitivity wouldn’t go astray. However, I was lucky that both Jamison and I took to breastfeeding really easily so I managed to evade too much boob squeezing before we both got the hang of it.
This time around I was fortunate to find that every single midwife I dealt with, aside from one, was an absolute dream. Starting with the labour, where a gorgeous girl called Carli (not too far from having her second child herself) obviously still remembered her labour enough to give me the perfect amount of assistance and comfort. She rubbed my back non stop from the moment my contractions got too intense to when I started to push (ok, for me that wasn’t a long time, but still!) At one stage she tried to move to do something else and all I had to do was grunt a firm “don’t stop” and she was straight back there, understanding perfectly that the back rubbing was more important that any other thing possibly could have been in that moment. After the labour she was gentle and kind, finding the right balance between being there and giving us space. I will always remember how wonderful she was and how she helped to make Poppy’s arrival so special.
In the days following the birth I also had some lovely kind ladies take care of me, however being a second time mum mostly they left me to my own devices unless I called for their help. Which was really only to request more drugs every four hours on the dot!
However, on day three things turned a little stressful when Poppy became quite jaundiced and therefore too sleepy to feed properly, meaning she dropped too much weight. At first I wasn’t overly concerned, after all, Jamison was slightly jaundiced and never needed any extra care. He was also a sleepy feeder in the early days but we went on to successfully breastfeed for 12 months so I knew what I was doing.
However that didn’t stop one midwife from insisting that I sit in the nursery while she watched me feed and then, when Poppy was uninterested in latching on, forcefully trying to wrangle her little mouth open and shove it in my over-engorged breast, making her scream for the first time since she was born. Ouch and back off lady are two things that spring to mind. Luckily I had the confidence to tell her, slightly more politely, to do exactly that. I knew that latching on wasn’t the problem and that she was just sleepy from the jaundice, but a first time mum could have been seriously affected by a moment like that and have it negatively impact her breastfeeding ability.
And I know that many of you will have stories where exactly that has happened. A friend of mine had the heartbreaking experience of finding that her milk never properly came in with her first baby. She tried everything, including medication, but nothing worked, so she went to her follow up appointment at the hospital stressed and looking for answers. The midwife on duty weighed her baby and when she found his weight had dropped too much exclaimed angrily, “You are starving your baby!” My friend went home devastated and immediately put her son on the bottle, abandoning breastfeeding entirely. That experience still haunts her and has shaken her confidence to try and breastfeed her second child, due in a few months. I just hope this time she gets a gentle and caring midwife who will encourage her to try again and lead her through it patiently and with compassion.
Which leads me to my final midwife story, the lovely Clare. Clare was the Mary Poppins of midwives, I wanted to take her home with me and have her look after all of us. She sat and chatted with me when I was feeling down because Poppy had to go into the nursery and under the heat lights for a few days. She looked at baby photos of Jamison and didn’t act like they were the millionth baby photos she’d ever seen. She made me feel like I was special, like my baby was special, like we were her only patients, when I knew the rooms were full and she was run off her feet. She was the midwife you dream about having and she helped to make Poppy’s first few days as precious as they should have been.
So, a big thank you to my wonderful midwives and to all those kind and gentle midwives out there. And to the overly aggressive boob-wrangling ones who make us feel bad and insecure, ouch and back off.
What were your experiences with midwives like? Were they positive or negative? I'd love to hear your stories... Comment on Amity's blog.
