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Home › Articles › The Working, Nursing Mother › Nursing Mother, Working Mother: The Essential Guide for Breastfeeding and Staying Close to Your Baby After You Return to Work

Nursing Mother, Working Mother: The Essential Guide for Breastfeeding and Staying Close to Your Baby After You Return to Work

By Gale Pryor

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

A book editor concurs. "I like that it keeps me feeling connected to him all day long. I'm forced to take 'baby time' when I'm at work, and I can even go see him and share our bond in the middle of a work day if I want. It helps ease the transition for me to nurse him when I drop him off and when I pick him up. I also feel like I'm still mothering him even when I'm not with him, by continuing to provide pumped breast milk for him."

A social worker who formula-fed her first baby and breastfed her second speaks poignantly of the difference: "Since my mother-in-law took care of my first child eight to ten hours a day and since she could feed him just as well as I could, sometimes I felt as though he was more hers than mine. Since I had to be away from him 40 hours a week, breastfeeding could have tied us back together at the end of the day. Not breastfeeding my son is one of the greatest regrets of my life. My experience with him made me determined to have a different experience when my daughter was born."

Breastfeeding after returning to work is a way to tie the two halves of your life together. It will help you to make sense of yourself in the challenging new role as mother while continuing your pre-baby work life. Learning the job of motherhood is hard enough without the distractions of responsibilities outside the home, but when you're trying to maintain your identity as a working woman you have an intensified need for the lessons taught by breastfeeding. You can rely on breastfeeding as a blueprint for the intuitiveness, nurturing, and empathy that comes with experienced mothering. Through breastfeeding, you can give your child the best possible beginning, and in return you will gain confidence in yourself as a mother.

Back to Part One here.

Pages:  1  2  3  4