The breastfeeding thing was a total nightmare for me – there I've said it (let the berating in the comments begin!), and so when a close friend recently had her first baby, I struggled to decide on the best things to say to her during those occasionally difficult early days of breastfeeding.
I didn't want to sound like some irritating know-it-all, or to sound patronising, but I also didn't want to truth-bomb her with the extent of what I ended up going through in my personal breast quest in case she found it majorly off-putting. I tried to think back on what really helped me during that time and here's what I came up with.
The BEST Things To Tell a Mum Who Is Finding Breastfeeding Hard:
1. "Every breastfeed counts."
Of the breastfeeding mantras that we hear so often, I personally found the "Every breastfeed counts" to be the most encouraging. Taking things one feed at a time can be really hard when you are absolutely exhausted, feeling like you are failing at something that should be coming naturally and wondering if this will ever come right. However, when I stopped thinking about the big picture and just concentrated on one feed at a time, I found it really helped me hang in there through the difficult early weeks.
2. "You are doing AMAZING."
This is a pretty generic one, but I think we all feel at one time or another (hourly if you're me) that we are not "doing amazing" when it comes to our babies. And for mums who were totally committed to breastfeeding who then find themselves seriously struggling it can feel like a failure. It's not. You are doing amazing.
3. "It's not easy, but it will work out and if it doesn't that's okay too."
Breastfeeding is absolutely brilliant but it's also a small part of the parenting journey, it's taken me a few years to finally accept this. I ultimately combination fed my son for six months and I am really happy that I got to do that but also I wish I could go back to my new mum self and say "Stop being such a bitch to yourself because the breastfeeding isn't going to plan, you're doing your best and this is not going to define you as a mother."
4. "I found it hard too."
Sometimes I feel like there's a real lack of honesty around the breastfeeding experience. In the past, I've been accused by other mothers of being anti-breastfeeding merely for describing my own breastfeeding journey but I think it's positive to hear all kinds of perspectives on breastfeeding to give new mums a real sense of what it can be like. Being categorically pro-breastfeeding to the point of denying the negative experiences of some women is not to my mind that helpful in promoting breastfeeding. Our low breastfeeding rate is not the fault of women saying "I found it hard." I think the low breastfeeding rate is largely caused by a lack of practical education in pregnancy around breastfeeding. As new mothers, our expectations of the journey post baby can be WILDLY different from what we eventually experience and a bit of honesty is not about scaremongering or horror stories, it's about giving other new mothers more realistic expectations.
5. "This too shall pass."
One way or another, whether the breastfeeding comes good (often the help of a good
lactation consultant can be a lifesaver) or if you introduce a bottle. Eventually, the child will eat their dinner with a knife and fork and whatever heartache you might have felt at one point about the breastfeeding will be a memory. As a new mum, I beat myself up mercilessly about my breastfeeding difficulties, and now I regret that I wasted so much of his precious early days fixated on this one aspect of motherhood, with my second baby I'm hoping to be a touch more philosophical about the whole business, check out my
10 Things I'm going To Do Differently When Breastfeeding My Second Child. 
