This Mom’s Hard Truths About Breastfeeding Will Hit So Close To Home

We live in a time of unprecedented resources to help new parents learn the ropes, but there’s still so much nobody tells you before you have a baby.

One person who’s been sharing that experience on TikTok is Dana Schwartz, host of the (fantastic) podcast Noble Blood, who is on maternity leave with her first child.

Earlier this month, Schwartz (with her wee boy in her arms) shared a few musings about early motherhood, specifically about the things nobody really tells you about breastfeeding and, even though it’s been about 8 years since I nursed a child, I felt all of this deep in my bones.

No one tells you how often you have to breastfeed really

OK, I know what you’re thinking: it’s common knowledge, at least among parents-to-be, that newborns generally have to eat every two to three hours. You’re right, and Schwartz knew that as well. And, like many of us, she approached it with the same self-assured confidence that many of us probably did.

“I was like, great! I’ll breastfeed and then I’ll have two to three hours to be a person! To shower ... nap or eat food.”

Sounds reasonable. Except...

“They start the clock from when the baby starts eating! Not when they finish eating.”

And considering a baby can nurse for 30 to 40 minutes, and then they need to be burped and changed, suddenly your two to three hours can easily turn into one to two hours.

“If you’re lucky!” Schwartz says before continuing. “It’s crazy. I do nothing else. This is like a full-time job.

Breastfeeding is inescapable for those who choose to do it

OK, so we’ve established that babies need to eat every two to three hours (only, really, it’s more like every one to two hours for all intents and purposes). And for very young babies, if they don’t wake up to eat you need to wake them up to make sure they eat so they can gain weight appropriately.

In and of itself this feels incredibly bold of your infant to demand. (How dare they?) But hey! Breast pumps exist! Babies can drink breast milk from a bottle! So, what if your partner takes a night feed so that you can get some extra sleep?

“Wouldn’t that be great? ... That sounds nice!’” Schwartz says blithely. “No. Here’s the crazy thing: even if your baby is being fed in a bottle, if you want to also breastfeed you have to also pump at that time to keep up your milk supply so your body knows that we’re feeding a baby. So even if your non-breastfeeding partner is nice enough to want to wake up and feed the baby with a bottle in the middle of the night you also need to wake up to pump. It’s a scam. It’s awful.”

Not to mention even if you throw caution to the wind and skip a session, you will wake up with rock-hard, enormous, painful boobs and risk a nasty case of mastitis.

OK, but actually breastfeeding bodies are super cool

“You know that the milk you make at night is different from the milk you make during the day? It’s true! The milk you produce at night has melatonin in it, which naturally helps the baby go to sleep and stay asleep for longer stretches of time.”

Schwartz said she was initially skeptical of this claim, thinking it sounded a bit “conspiracy theory.” But (pop) historian that she is, she decided to research it herself, checking out studies in scientific journals (so did we), and lo and behold...

“It turns out it’s 100% true! ... And it showed that melatonin in your breast milk peaks around 3 a.m. Like, the body is actually magic!”

It’s true. I don’t know if the magic counterbalances all the annoyances all the time for everyone, but it’s a nice reminder that breastfeeding can be actually very cool.