People ask me all the time about my logo so here ya go.

I had a hard enough time settling on a business name let alone trying to decide how I wanted to represent my practice in visual form.   I knew I didn't want a milk drop or a line drawing of a mother nursing a baby since those are already used in abundance. I also intentionally wanted the image to feel inclusive of all family designs and feeding choices.

Fortunately a good graphic designer knows to ask the right questions and after really digging into the profession, the work that I specifically do, my personal and professional philosophies and how I want those around me to feel- she came up with this.  It is perfection to me.  

The designer knows I love quantum physics and sacred geometry.  To me, this logo is connection.  It is the fabric, the tapestry that binds us together.  It is the weaving of different people, different family dynamics, different goals and different outcomes all together to create a beautiful and rich community of nursing parents who simply want to feed their babies well.  The more we let go of preconceived ideas and dogma and the more we hold on to each other, then the more room there is for ALL of us.  And the more of us there are supporting each other, the stronger we become.  There is room for everyone here.  And the rainbow colors just drive it home a bit more.  I hope you like the logo as much as I do.

Most new parents I meet initially resist my suggestion that they come to group, "oh, I'm not a support group type of person!" or  "I'm really introverted and don't like to talk about my feelings."

The thing is, being a human who birthed a human is HARD.  Those little ones eat all the time, they sleep at the most inopportune times, they wait for you to finally grab a sandwich and put your feet up for a blessed twenty minutes before they scream like you've never fed them before in their entire lives.  The sad little baby cries that they make get you right in your gut and your heart and rattle your brain just enough that you put down you sandwich and grab that little human and sniff his butt and then try to figure out if he needs to eat again OR SOMETHING!  And don't forget you!  While you are trying to learn your baby and figure out how to keep him alive, you are also bleeding, dealing with inflammation in tender lady-bit places that have never been swollen before, or learning how to stand up straight after a cesarean birth and feeling helpless that you can't even bend over to pick your baby up.  You feel more tired than you ever have, more inside out than you ever have, more alone than you ever have- even though your family and friends are there to congratulate you.  It's like being in a fishbowl.  Alone.  With everyone staring at you and no one really able to help you, understand you or help you figure out how to make it easier.

Enter support group.  Once you feel human-ish enough to put on pants then come to group.  Throw that mop of hair up on top, put on a fresh pad and slide your swollen ankles into slippers or birks and get yourself to group.  Here you will meet your new best friends.  Here you WILL NOT feel like you are in a fishbowl.  Here you will feel seen.  Cuz everyone here is going through it or recently did. It's fresh for everyone.  Those feelings of annihilation, surrender, fear, anxiety, and that pendulum swinging of amazement, wonder, curiosity is a lot to carry all by yourself.  Those thoughts of "how am I supposed to keep waking up thirteen times overnight?" "is it normal that my baby grunts all night long?" "Why am I waking up in a panic?" "how does everyone else make it look so easy?" will begin to take shape in your mind's eye as rhetorical questions that no-one has the answers to.  But that is only because you will begin to hear all the other more experienced moms NOT have the answers.  You'll hear the moms ask the questions that you didn't even know you had.  You'll hear someone bring up a topic you didn't even know you should be concerned about.  You'll hear words and expressions and concepts that are foreign and then one day they will start to make sense.  It's like learning a new language through deep immersion.  It won't make sense at all, then bits will start making sense and before you know it you are fluent enough to make your way around and point another mom in the right direction.  And you can still feel lost at times.  But at least you know you aren't alone.

Are you struggling with the thousands of decisions and logistics that go into feeding your baby?  Did you ever feel guilt about not wanting to breastfeed because it hurt too much?  Or guilt about not being able to make enough milk?  Do you feel guilty every time you walk past your pump and think, "I should pump or else I'm not going to keep making milk for my little one" but then thirteen thousand other things come between you and the pump and another 6 hours go by?  Maybe you feel guilty that it seems everyone else can get their shit together and somehow manage the massive responsibility of keeping small humans alive with their boobs and you don't seem to be able to do it.

Guilt. Everyone talks about it, we've all felt it and most moms know guilt way too personally.  But what exactly is it?  One definition I found online from the Oxford Dictionary says guilt is "the fact of having committed a specified or implied offense or crime." Or from Merrian Webster: feelings of deserving blame especially for imagined offenses or from a sense of inadequacy.  I think most of us think of it as more of a feeling in relation to our ideas of what we thing we are supposed to do.  But I'm gonna tell you a secret.  Those pesky feelings are tricky!  A therapist once told me that feelings aren't facts.  Feelings are simply messengers to help us get past the emotionality of something to the actual issue.  But when we give those feelings more power than they deserve, we can get stuck.

When you are struggling to breastfeed because of pain have you committed an offense or are you inadequate?!?  No, it can really hurt, dang it!  If you are taking care of a small person all day with their twenty thousand feeds and diaper changes and crying and finding it difficult to pee yourself, feed yourself, wash the sleeps out of our eyes, ( LET ALONE PUMP!), are you inadequate because there's not enough time in the day?!?  Hell no!  Your value has NOTHING to do with the number of hours in the day.  When your goal was to exclusively breastfeed and you are offering formula and you feel guilty about it, have you committed a crime?  No!  YOU ARE FEEDING YOUR BABY!!!  You've simply deviated from what you thought you were going to do.  

Course correction is necessary in life.  Its what keeps us safe and helps us continue moving forward.  It's not the end of the world when we end up doing things differently than the way we envisioned. It may feel like we have failed, like we aren't good enough or that we didn't try hard enough but feelings rarely are facts.  The truth is that if you didn't care you wouldn't even be feeling these things.  The fact that you care and are allowing yourself to feel all the things means you are cutting yourself some slack.  Feel the feelings but then STOP.  Sift through and allow the actual STORY to unfold.  Ask yourself, "Is what I am doing today helping me get my needs met for rest, connection, peace of mind, a little breathing room, etc?  How am I being a great (or even a totally good-enough!) mom to my little one RIGHT NOW?"

Life is too hard, parenthood is too hard, BABIES are too hard, it can all be too hard.  There is NO ROOM for unnecessary guilt. The next time you find guilt knocking on your new mom heart, tell  guilt "thank you for reminding me of my original goal, and today I am doing _____ because it is working for me now and goals are constantly changing."

What decisions were made harder for you because of guilt?  Were you able to move past the guilt to allow other feelings and thoughts to take priority?  How so?  Share your #milkwellbewell experiences in the comments or on social media so other new parents like you can feel the #milkwelllactation community.  Post your photos of how you feed well (bottle, pump, human milk, formula milk, at breast supplementer etc with #howimilkwell and/or #milkwellorbust.