Dear Autumn,
Firstly, you’ve grown so much more hair over the last couple of weeks! Where has it all come from all of a sudden? I love stroking it, it’s so soft. We can definitely see that it’s blonde now, the same colour as your beautiful long eyelashes.
I haven’t written a poem for about a decade, possibly longer. However, I have some pretty strong views on women insulting people for bottle feeding their babies and I thought I’d try to express it through poetry. Even just a mention of breastfeeding or seeing someone breastfeeding hurts someone like me. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking people to not mention breastfeeding around me, or to not breastfeed around me or others. I’m fully supportive of breastfeeding, I just think there needs to be some more sensitivity to women who formula feed their babies.
I absolutely loved breastfeeding, I’ve mentioned it in a previous post about My Breastfeeding Journey. I tried my hardest with all the odds against me to keep going as long as I could and felt like I had the experience stolen from me by a cruel turn of events. I felt very down after I had to stop as I felt a massive sense of disappointment and failure.
***Warning: This post is emotional, discusses mental health issues and may be a trigger to some***
If you’re reading this post, you may have read last Saturday’s post about when Autumn was ill and in hospital. This post is about how I was feeling when she was in hospital, as I was not well myself and it had a terrible effect on my mental health.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about baby Autumn and I playing in the sensory room for the first time. Today we went back to have some more fun and do some more learning. Autumn had her jabs this morning, so the poor little thing has been grumpy all day and almost constantly grizzling. The sensory room seemed to help distract her to some extent for a while though.
This post is going to be very difficult to write, but I feel like it’s something I need to do. I have written a short version of this story as a guest post for Rachel Bustin‘s New Mums Series about how it’s never too early to trust your instincts as a mum, but I’m going to go into more detail here. To begin with, repeating this story felt like it hurt me deeper and deeper each time. However, I’ve now had to repeat it so many times that I think it’s now getting easier each time and possibly helping me to heal and come to terms with what happened. Perhaps one day, someone else will read this who is going through the same or a similar situation (thankfully, this is EXTREMELY rare) and can live in hope knowing it gets better.
***Warning: This post is emotional and may be a trigger to some***