Alan Talaga with his wife, Mallory Saurer, and son, Max.
As 2014 drew to a close, my wife, Mallory Saurer, was very pregnant, with a due date at the beginning of January. We were prepping our soon-to-arrive son’s room, arranging our leaves from work and reading every book and website about parenting we could find. Okay, we were freaking out a little.
One thing we took for granted was that Mallory was going to breastfeed. We were both big proponents of the health benefits and didn’t want to spend the money on formula. Breastfeeding is natural, so we assumed it was going to be easy.
And we live in Dane County, a place where breastfeeding is embraced. There’s even a Community Breastfeeding Awards program sponsored by the Breastfeeding Coalition of Southern Wisconsin that rewards businesses and individuals that champion breastfeeding.
But it turned out that it was difficult for my wife to produce enough milk. We soon learned this was not uncommon.
“Eighty-five percent of mothers in Wisconsin say they plan to breastfeed for at least six months. But that percentage drops off quickly once the baby is born. There are a lot of challenges for moms to face,” says Hershey Barnett-Bridges, head of the African American Breastfeeding Alliance of Dane County and a retired nurse with Public Health Madison and Dane County.
As we struggled to get our new son the nutrition he needed, we met other families who were facing their own challenges. We became connected with amazing resources and helpful people, including the Le Leche League of Madison, which is a very active local chapter of the international breastfeeding advocacy organization. They offer free discussion groups, phone consultations and informational resources.
“Le Leche League has a long history here,” says leader Laurel Franczek. “It’s based around mother-to-mother support. Sometimes, what mothers need most is encouragement for breastfeeding success.”
Franczek is also the self-described “triage coordinator and freezer hostess” for the Mothers’ Milk Alliance, a unique milk-sharing resource for Madison-area families. Through this group, our son ended up getting donor milk from local moms we’ve never met.
Sound a little strange? Think of it as another example of the sharing economy.
No doubt those early months as new parents were challenging. But there was one big upside: We’ve seen the best of what the greater Madison community has to offer.
Mallory had a traumatic experience giving birth. She lost a lot of blood and spent time in the ICU. Still, even when her own health was in question, she was intent on breastfeeding our son.
A newborn has a teeny, tiny stomach and needs to be fed frequently. So every three hours, a nurse escorted my son, Maxwell, and me up to see Mallory so she could feed him.
Little Max latched on like a champ. But the milk wasn’t coming. We knew the blood loss could lead to a delay in Mallory’s milk coming in, but Maxwell was losing weight and we were getting scared.
Unfortunately, our experience is not unique. Breastfeeding, billed as a bonding experience, is stressful when things don’t go smoothly.
“When my daughter was five days old, I knew something wasn’t right,” says Kathryn Kuehn, who lives in Madison. “My milk hadn’t come in, nursing was not going well. I found myself constantly in tears.”
After consulting with a doctor who specializes in breastfeeding, Kuehn learned that a medical condition was preventing her from producing enough milk for her daughter. “With all the planning I did during my pregnancy, never once did it occur to me that I wouldn’t be able to breastfeed,” Kuehn says.
When my wife had trouble breastfeeding, we also turned to a medical professional — a lactation consultant.
Because of all the recent attention directed towards the health benefits of breastfeeding, it’s easier than ever to get access to a lactation consultant. Many local health providers have staff lactation consultants on site, which is how we found our first one. Others, like Adria Cannon, offer home visits for a fee.
“Breastfeeding is almost a microcosm of parenting. It’s about learning to meet your child’s needs,” says Cannon. “Sometimes, it’s learning how to make the hard choices you need to make to meet those needs.”
Before my family needed assistance, I thought lactation consultants mostly just helped with latching and finding comfortable holds. But, says Cannon, they do much more. “A lactation consultant helps problem-solve, provides emotional support and gives information to help families meet their breastfeeding goals.”
Even if a mother initially has success breastfeeding, there’s no guarantee that the process will continue to be fruitful. An interruption in breastfeeding due to illness could mean starting over again.
Some people are lucky enough to need just a little bit of help. Sometimes it’s as simple as giving mothers a new piece of equipment, like a nipple shield, a silicon cover that goes over the nipple that can help babies latch.
“I’ve seen nipple shields work miracles. Those visits are always fun because it is really easy and you make people happy,” says Cannon. But most of the time challenges related to milk supply or latching issues require ongoing work.
Lactation consultants also help moms learn how to pump breast milk.
“Adria came to our home and helped me figure out how to use a breast pump so that I could build up the amount of milk I was producing,” says Madison mother Amanda Struckmeyer. The idea was that Struckmeyer could breastfeed her daughter and then feed her pumped milk to help her gain weight.
The newest of the newborns struggle to switch between mom’s nipple and the bottle. Newborns are lazy, and eating from a bottle is usually easier than from the breast. If you want a newborn to still latch onto the breast, you avoid using a bottle whenever possible. To best simulate breastfeeding, some moms feed their newborns through a tube that runs right next to their nipple. (I ended up doing something called “finger feeding,” where I fed Max pumped milk through a syringe while he sucked on my pinky.)
By the time babies are a few months old, most can easily bounce between human nipples and their plastic equivalent.
Mallory and I met with Lisa Hansen, our first lactation consultant, to see if there were ways to improve Mallory’s milk supply. After numerous appointments, our consultant told Mallory that her milk supply would probably never be sufficient for Maxwell’s needs.
“I felt like I had failed my son,” says Mallory. To reach maximum maudlin, Mallory learned this on her birthday.
As a man, there was little to nothing I could do to console her. I tried to say lots of nice things, and they were dumb at best, insulting at worst.
So Mallory joined a mom’s group at Happy Bambino, a baby gear and breastfeeding supply store that has survived the age of Amazon in part by hosting classes and support groups.
There she met moms who were having an easy time breastfeeding but also mothers who had struggled to breastfeed.
“Everyone understood what I was going through,” says Mallory. “Even if breastfeeding was going well, they had their own challenges.”
Through the Happy Bambino group, Mallory found the support she needed. She also learned about a milk-sharing group in town called the Mothers’ Milk Alliance.
Lea Wolf
Adria Cannon (seated), one of the Madison area’s many lactation consultants, calls breastfeeding “almost a microcosm of parenting.”
The Mothers’ Milk Alliance formed in 2011 as a volunteer-based milk-sharing network. Many of their volunteers also do work with the La Leche League of Madison, but Mother’s Milk Alliance goes beyond offering advice and support. Mothers who produce more milk than they can use donate the milk for free, and mothers in need get the milk — also for free. Other milk banks often sell donor milk, although that milk goes through a pasteurization process. Mothers’ Milk Alliance offers nonpasteurized milk.
Volunteers store the milk in big chest freezers in their home. It’s probably the most Madison-ish thing I have ever seen in my decade-plus time living here. The only way they could make it more Madison is if kombucha or a microbrewed pale ale were incorporated somehow.
It’s an impressively DIY approach to milk banking. Formal milk banking is often reserved for premature babies and babies in NICUs. The low costs that the Mothers’ Milk Alliance incurs mean recipients can donate what they can afford for milk.
“Our goal is that the milk is always free,” says Franczek, who is officially a volunteer and board member with the group. “We have very low costs compared to formal milk banking, where milk can cost four to five dollars an ounce. Our main costs are testing the donors and any promotion that we do in the community.”
Donors must disclose any medications they are on and have their milk screened for diseases by a licensed midwife. But it is still raw milk from another human being. There are risks, and both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Food and Drug Administration discourage milk sharing. Potential recipients have to decide if the benefits of donated breastmilk outweigh the risks. (Recipients can pasteurize donor milk themselves on the stove with directions found on the Mothers’ Milk Alliance website.)
“My husband and I weighed the pros and cons,” says Kathryn Kuehn. “I felt comfortable that it was the right decision for my family. Milk sharing is not a new practice.” Moreover, she notes that the women “are donating the same milk they feed their own child.”
Even for those who decide milk sharing is worth the risks, asking for help can be difficult.
“I still remember the first teary email I sent to the Mothers’ Milk Alliance, requesting milk. I felt like I was admitting defeat and asking for something I shouldn’t need. But the volunteers were amazing. We had milk in our hands three hours after sending that initial email. They never treated me like I was an inferior mother,” says Amanda Struckmeyer.
We decided to get donor milk. For all the stress and agony that went into the decision, the actual process of procuring the milk was painless. Picking up milk is about the most casual handoff of a third party’s bodily fluids that I could ever imagine. I’d make an appointment with Franczek, show up at her house, play with her dog a bit, make some small talk and leave with a grocery bag or two full of frozen breast milk.
One of the highlights for Mallory and me is learning about the diet and medical history of the donors.
“This mom is gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian,” Mallory says as she looks over the milk in our freezer. “I’m grateful for the donation, but what does she eat? Oh, but she takes an allergy medication. Scandalous!”
Milk is available first-come, first-served, though infants younger than three months take priority. While the milk is free, contributions are appreciated.
Even though it’s breast milk, we had to feed our son from a bottle. We noticed this drew a few disapproving looks around town.
This can make mothers who can’t breastfeed feel even worse, as if they are doing something wrong.
“Madison is very much a ‘breast is best’ community. I’ve sometimes felt that when I’m bottle feeding in public, I need to tell people, ‘Don’t worry, it’s breast milk!’ even though it’s really none of their business,” says Struckmeyer.
“Bottlefeeding can feel very conspicuous,” agrees Cynthia Bachhuber, a milk recipient and donor. “When I bottle-fed our first child, I felt the need to defend why she was getting a bottle instead of being nursed.”
Donors come to Mothers’ Milk Alliance for a variety of reasons. Some, like Bachhuber, are former recipients. She and her wife turned to the group after her wife had trouble producing milk for their first child. When Bachhuber became pregnant with the family’s second child, donation was on her mind.
“I was hoping to donate ever since getting pregnant,” says Bachhuber. “Since we received donor milk with our first child, I hoped that I could give something back.”
Other donors come to Mothers’ Milk Alliance following tragedies.
In 2012, Tanya Mudrick’s son was stillborn at 38 weeks. “It was an absolutely devastating loss,” Mudrick says. “I was producing breast milk.” Mudrick knew someone involved with Mothers’ Milk Alliance. “I debated donating. What would it mean to give away my son’s milk?” Mudrick says. “I ultimately decided to give.”
Mudrick pumped for three months, producing more than 2,000 ounces. Her milk went to many families, but it was particularly meaningful to her that two of the recipients had previously lost children.
“Being able to give that gift was tremendously healing,” says Mudrick. “My son hadn’t died in vain.”
Mudrick now sits on the Mothers’ Milk Alliance board, where she provides peer support to other mothers.
“I tell the other bereaved moms that donation isn’t for everyone. It’s a big commitment, and there are other ways they can honor their child. But for those who do decide to donate, they are providing a tremendous gift to other families,” she says.
Mothers’ Milk Alliance currently has no plans to expand beyond Dane County, according to Franczek.
“Our motto is local wealth for local health,” says Franczek. “We want to focus on reaching more people in our area.”
While Mothers’ Milk Alliance is growing, board members acknowledge that they need to reach broader segments of the county. Many of their recipients are referred by midwives or places like Happy Bambino, both services that cater to a mostly middle-class, white client base.
Hershey Barnett-Bridges of the African American Breastfeeding Alliance of Dane County says local black and Latina mothers often face more challenges than white mothers. They often work at jobs where it is harder to find a space to pump, and many come from families where no one has breastfed, so they can’t get advice from relatives.
“That’s why my group is here. We offer that community support, we let people share ideas,” says Barnett-Bridges. “Some mothers who work cleaning hotel rooms shared how they made breastfeeding work for them. They had someone from home bring the baby to them.” Ultimately, “it takes community, creativity and confidence,” she says.
Her group also refers donors and recipients to the Mothers’ Milk Alliance.
Franczek acknowledges the disparities, but thinks that things are slowly progressing. Dean Clinic just had its pediatric clinics complete a program called Breastfeeding Champion training.
“They invested a lot of time and money teaching staff how to support lactation for all their patients. They offer assistance at well-child visits versus making patients go out and find it themselves,” says Franczek.
Barnett-Bridges agrees this is a good step but also suggests that clinics bring in peer mentors, trained workers and volunteers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who might better understand a patient’s home life and community.
Maxwell is now fed with a mixture of formula and donor milk from the Mothers’ Milk Alliance. He’s even being introduced to an exciting new culinary frontier: oatmeal. We’re happy these days, but Mallory still gets sad when her breasts leak a little. “It feels like my body is teasing me,” she says. But we’re comfortable with the choices we made and so thankful for the support that was out there.
It was a struggle that initially felt so isolating, as if we were the only parents who had ever had this problem. But we found communities that openly embraced us, gave us wonderful donations and, most importantly, told us everything was going to be okay.
On to the next challenge: teething. Someone please tell us how to deal with teething.
