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Tounge Tied Daughter: Difficulties Breastfeeding Post Partum
by Nikki Y.
Before my daughter was born I made the decision that I wanted to breast feed. Not because it saved money, as some thought, or because it was the "natural" thing to do - I did it because I knew that it was the best thing that could be done for my daughter. In retrospect, I wish I would have gone into the whole after birth process with more information. Did you know that you're supposed to breast feed your baby within the first 30 minutes after birth? I didn't. I knew about skin to skin contact, but my daughter just stared at me with these grey brown eyes and the last thing on my mind was, "Hey, let's put a nipple in your mouth". Nobody even mentioned breastfeeding until hours after she was born and I was relaxing in the post-partum area with her. I was nervous; I had already been concerned that I wouldn’t produce milk even though I knew that was highly unlikely. Then I found out that there were going to be complications; ones I hadn’t even fathomed. The jokes about being tongue tied when you can’t talk? They weren’t so funny when I found out my daughter was born tongue tied. Tongue tied is a condition when your frenulum, the bit of skin under your tongue, is too long. This causes you to not be able to stick your tongue out and, according to some, can cause speech and swallowing problems in the future. Luckily, there is a solution. You can actually have your frenulum clipped. Our daughter wasn’t even a day old yet and we already had to make a decision that could impact her future. My husband and I both had speech issues when we were kids and so we decided, after some research about the safety of the process, to get our daughter’s tongue clipped. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t do it in the hospital. And so began one of the longest weeks of our lives. The hospital was a fiasco, refusing to feed my daughter formula because I had said I wanted to breastfeed but because of being tongue tied she couldn’t latch and, therefore, couldn’t eat. Finally, we were able to get some formula to her and she ate it happily. We continued to feed formula for a week, knowing that there was a risk that she wouldn’t take to breastfeeding. But once we had her tongue clipped by an ENT, things changed. I thought that clipping her frenulum would solve all our issues. I was sure that this was the magic key I was missing in the whole mother-daughter bonding experience. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my daughter; it was that I hated breastfeeding and I blamed it on her frenulum. My breastfeeding story does have a happy ending, but it took me a long time to find it. My daughter became, what we affectionately call, a “boob” addict. This caused raw and sore nipples. She wanted to be latched all the time and had difficulty latching correctly. I’d sit and cry while she ate, miserable at how the experience made me feel but feeling guilty if we fed her formula. I’ll be honest, she had formula supplement until she was 4 months old. It took 4 months for us to find our stride and get into the groove of feeding. She’s 7 months now and even though she gets to eat baby food, her favorite “meal” of the day is fresh breast milk. I’m not always enthusiastic about having to breastfeed, but I am happy I stuck with it. I look at other mothers who don’t even try and it baffles me. Why wouldn’t you try to give your baby the best possible? Why wouldn’t you sacrifice for them? It’s not like I don’t know the difficulties involved. Either way, I do think that breastfeeding is a personal choice and formula can provide the nourishment necessary to an infant. But I think bottle feeding strips away the bonding experience that breastfeeding brings. And despite all the struggles I’ve gone through, I’ll definitely be breastfeeding my next child as well. |
