by Carolyn Robertson posted in Mom Stories

Breastfeeding isn't always easy.
I learned this first-hand when my daughter was just hours old. During my pregnancy, I'd thought a lot about childbirth, about taking care of a newborn, about lack of sleep and diaper changes. I'd thought about breastfeeding, too, but in a broad sense. I guess I figured we'd both just know what to do. After all, I'd seen videos of newborns crawling to their mothers' breasts to nurse all on their own. How hard could it be"
As it turns out, pretty hard.
She wailed as she struggled to latch, and I fumbled awkwardly as I tried to help her. We were both in tears by the time the lactation consultant arrived at our hospital room door.
Armed with a syringe and a tiny plastic cup, she showed me how to manually express colostrum and feed it to my baby girl, drop by drop. It was a painstakingly slow process, and at the time seemed sort of ridiculous. I had seen all the images of new moms peacefully nursing their sleepy babies, and none of them looked like this. That was so long ago, and so much of motherhood has happened since - first solids, first steps, first days of school. Those early hours on the maternity ward seem like a lifetime ago. They rushed back to me, though, thanks to this beautiful portrait I saw posted on Instagram by @carriagehousebirth.

The mother in this photo is Rebecca McKeever, a birth and postpartum doula from Brooklyn, New York who welcomed her first child, a girl named Andeomeda...