People assume that because I became an IBCLC, nursing must have come naturally to me from the start. It did not. With my first baby, we fought that latch for six weeks — cracked skin, a baby who screamed at the breast, a lactation consultant I could not afford to see more than once, and a pediatrician who told me, not unkindly but not helpfully either, that formula was always an option.
The lowest week
There was a night, around week four, when I sat on the bathroom floor at 3 a.m. because I did not want my husband to hear me cry. I remember thinking that if I could not do this one basic, animal thing that mothers had done forever, what did that say about me as a mother at all. That thought was a lie, but it did not feel like one at 3 a.m.
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted” (Psalm 34:18) is not a verse I understood intellectually until I lived a season where I genuinely felt broken by something as small and as enormous as breastfeeding. He was near in that bathroom. I did not feel dramatic light or clear answers. I felt, eventually, calm enough to try again in the morning.
What finally helped
It was not a technique that saved that nursing relationship, though a good lactation consultant eventually helped enormously. It was permission — from a wiser mother in our church — to stop treating my worth as a mother as identical to my success at one particular skill. Once I stopped white-knuckling it, my body and my daughter’s body found their rhythm within two more weeks.
That season is the entire reason Desafío Mamá exists. I do this work not because it came easily to me, but because it did not, and I know exactly how lonely that bathroom floor can feel.