Confessions of a Babywearer: Nursing Troubles

This is the second post in our series of anonymous posts.  Sometimes after baby is born everything doesn't go as perfectly as we hoped, and we need to adjust our world view.  And sometimes, babywearing helps us find our way to the parent we want to be.

I just had my second baby in June. I wore my first baby, my son, a little bit with the Moby and had started to get involved in the babywearing group but it took me a long time of borrowing a couple times to buy a carrier I knew we would both like. This was a whole new world to me because I didn't know anyone who did it. I ended up with the a Mei Tai wrap conversion and love it! Then I got pregnant with my second baby and just didn't have time to make it to a meeting to figure out how to wear my son while pregnant.  But I knew that I loved babywearing and the whole concept of it and that I had to learn more.

In June I had my beautiful daughter. I identified myself as a sort of a natural mom...a nursing mom, a babywearing mom, a part time cloth diaperer. When my daughter was born we had trouble with nursing. I had trouble with my son as well but we worked through it and I nursed him till he weaned himself at 18 months. My daughter ended up having a lip tie, a tongue tie, and a high pallet. Some well-meaning but not so great advice from an LC resulted in our nursing getting way off track and she started to prefer the bottle after 1 month.

I'm exclusively pumping breast milk for her and have felt like I lost my natural mom/nursing mom "card". I felt like a huge failure, like I failed her. She is two and a half months old now and I continue to try to get her back to nursing but I have also accepted the fact that exclusive pumping might be our journey and I need to be proud that I can still provide her 100% my milk. Babywearing comes into this equation by being one of the ways I remain bonded with her and in tune with her. We do skin to skin baby wearing in the house and I try to baby wear whenever we're out and about to get better at it and to encourage her to love it. When she falls asleep against my chest I feel so connected to her and proud of myself for learning this method to care for and be close to my baby. While I still feel saddness about our nursing troubles, I don't feel as much in despair as I did in those early days and I look to baby wearing as one of the ways to bring my confidence back as a loving mama to my beautiful girl.
I'm looking into a second carrier so I can tandem wear with my toddler as well! Thank you to all of the leaders for volunteering your time to share baby wearing with all of us!