Can we talk about August for a second?
It’s basically over. The evenings are doing that weird pre-fall lighting thing, everyone’s frantically hunting for school supplies, and somewhere in the chaos, National Breastfeeding Month tiptoed in and back out like it was trying not to wake anyone.
Blink and you missed it. (Kind of like sleep, if you’re currently feeding a newborn every two hours. Hi. I see you.)
I spent this whole month elbow-deep in feeding questions with the families I work with, and here’s what I noticed: almost none of the questions were actually about milk.
They sounded like milk questions:
Is my supply enough? Is this latch right? Am I doing this whole thing “correctly”??
But underneath, what they were really asking was: Am I enough? Am I already failing at this?
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: somewhere along the way, feeding got treated less like a relationship and more like a pop quiz. Something you pass or fail, red pen and all.
It’s a relationship, built one feed at a time (some calm, some chaotic, most at 3 a.m.), between two people who are basically strangers figuring each other out in real time. There is no universal instruction manual. I promise you, I’ve looked. It does not exist.
Some days that relationship looks like a picture-perfect nursery photo. Other days it looks like cracked skin, a baby who will NOT settle, and a parent side-eyeing themselves in the mirror wondering what’s wrong with them.
(Nothing is wrong with you. I need you to hear that over the sound of your own internal screaming.)
What actually moved the needle for the families I worked with this month wasn’t grit or gritted teeth. It was support. Someone watching a feed and tweaking one small thing. Someone explaining the difference between a totally normal growth spurt and an actual supply issue. Someone giving permission to finally ask the question they’d been too embarrassed to say out loud.
That’s the whole reason lactation care exists, honestly. As a midwife and IBCLC, I spent this entire August in the trenches of both the “wow, we’ve got this!” feeds and the “why is everyone crying, including me” feeds.
So if you’re heading into feeding, currently drowning in it, or just bracing yourself for whatever’s coming for you your way, I’ve got you. I offer home and office lactation visits, a free support group the second Tuesday of every month, and everything I cover most with clients also lives inside my online course.
Come say hi and grab the details here 👋
National Breastfeeding Month is basically over.
But the relationship it’s named after doesn’t run on a calendar…It just runs on good support, showing up whenever you need it – August, December, or 3 a.m. on a random Tuesday.
