Tongue-Tie, Our story of dealing with the effects of undiagnosed tongue-tie in our first born.
By: Hannah Maynard
Tags: New Baby, Tongue Tie, Children Tongue Tie, Children, Breastfeeding

For anyone who may be interested. Mums and Dads to be, new parents, family of new parents. Anyone who hasn’t heard of this very simple-to-fix condition and how it affected the early weeks of our parenting journey.

My name is Hannah, I am a mum of one and soon to be two. This is a cathartic exploration of how our experience of Sonny (our two year old) having tongue-tie had a profound effect on the early days and weeks of our relationship.

I feel like I have recently experienced quite a profound moment of epiphany relating to my experiences in the months after the birth of my fist child Sonny.

I am currently 29 weeks pregnant with my second child and am predictably dealing with a fairly hefty amount of varied emotions and concerns. Some are easier to work out and come to terms with than others. Some feel like seemingly inconsequential little bubbles, bubbles I know are actually bobbing up from the depths where something pretty black and sinister is lying. Bubbles that are my mind’s way of saying “hoo hoooo! You know there’s something down here! You’d better come and check it out and see if you can’t get this beast tamed before all hell breaks loose when that baby new comes!!”

Urgh. I know it too. I know there’s shit down there in the depths of my mind that I really should be dealing with yet am too busy, too proud, too positive, too bloody scared to address. I also know somewhere a little closer to the surface, that actually dealing with it is going to reap far more benefits than suppressing it and trying to struggle through with the weight regardless.

The moment of epiphany came this weekend when asked how I am feeling about the prospect of attempting breast-feeding second time round.

I was relaxed, comfortable and feeling safe enough amongst the company of my wonderful friends to openly admit to them and myself that I am actually completely terrified at the idea of trying to breast-feed my second baby.

I’m terrified for so many reasons.

I so so so want to experience the beautifully natural bond with my newborn baby that it feels only breast-feeding can bring.

I am so scared of being able to breast-feed my second child and the feelings of guilt that this will almost certainly encourage at not having been able to connect in that way with my beautiful, beautiful boy.

I so desperately wanted to be able to provide that natural nourishment for my son and hate myself, and my failings as a mother for not being capable of that despite my overwhelming love for him.

I am terrified that even if I am able to breastfeed my second child, that I will be too tired, too depressed, too busy, too anything other than ‘good enough’ to continue for long enough.

And those are all just the things that are currently present in my consciousness. I’m sure there’d be more the longer I thought about it!

I think that all of these fears are born out of the experiences I had when Sonny was brand new and tiny and helpless and so, so hungry.

I was a new mother, shattered, shocked, excited, mesmerised, totally overwhelmed and helpless. Despite my antenatal classes and wonderful advice from friends and family as well as the support of my gorgeous husband, I felt almost totally clueless when it came to feeding my son.

No, that’s not true. I put him to my breast, I followed the instructions I’d been given by the very lovely lady who’d done my one to one breast-feeding tuition session and he latched on and sucked. I can so vividly see and feel him. I can look down on him in my mind’s eye, sitting in the hospital bed surrounded by the noises of the ward but totally absorbed in him and how he was feeding so beautifully from me. I can remember feeling so wonderfully proud that he seemed to have a “good latch” and that he was happy to feed for ages, I imagined because he was getting the good stuff and doing really well. I remember being told by staff on the ward that he looked like a “good little feeder” and we’d have no problems from here on in!

I felt happy, safe, reassured and almost confident.

I could cope with the blinding fatigue. I somehow got over the humiliation of being told to just “go in the bed” when my epidural began to wear off and the chronic cocktail of infections developing behind my episiotomy scars were rapidly turning my bowls to water. I got up and I made it to the toilet and that felt like an achievement. I endured sitting down again as what felt like a golf ball of a haematoma grew in my wounded vagina.

I WAS A MOTHER AND I WAS FEEDING MY SON!!!

What I didn’t realise was that I actually wasn’t.

Although yes, he had a good latch, Sonny was born with a severe tongue-tie and as much as he sucked he was getting little or nothing of my milk.

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know and nobody told me.

Nobody mentioned it. None of the friendly, reassuring, kind staff said anything about it. We were packed off home with our beautiful boy and I didn’t know.

I cry so hard from the depths of my soul with the guilt of starving my son through ignorance. And not just for hours or days but for weeks and weeks.

I had never heard of tongue-tie. Nothing in any of the preparatory material that was piled on me in the months leading up to his birth mentioned it once. There was endless information on breastfeeding. Techniques, regimes, routines, support groups, everything you could ever need to know. But NOTHING ABOUT TONGUE-TIE. Nothing.

It is SO COMMON! I’ve even heard rumours that scientists are making links between taking folic acid supplements in pregnancy (as recommended) and increased instances of tongue-tie. The number of people I have spoken to about my son and our experiences who have had similar stories of their own has astounded me. I don’t profess to have done any research but purely from first hand experience, it is SO COMMON!

The simplicity of the condition (the tongue being too closely attached to the bottom of the mouth to enable the baby to suckle efficiently at the breast), the simplicity of the procedure to rectify the condition, taken along with the frequency with which it seems to occur makes the infectious feelings of betrayal I feel, totally overwhelming.

My son was starving. He was starving and so he cried. He screamed for hours at a time. He cried, I cried, my husband cried. He’d sleep a bit and then he’d cry some more. I would sit in the middle of freezing cold winter nights for hours at a time practically wrestling him to my breast so that he might try again for some milk. He fought it and I hated it. I didn’t know.

I didn’t know what I was doing wrong and despite asking many different healthcare professional on a very regular basis, nobody told me. We just cried and then tried again.

I hated it. I hated myself. I hated being a mother. I hated what had happened to my life and I hated being around my son. The only thing that stopped me from getting in my car in the middle of the night and driving away was the fact that I couldn’t abandon my husband who I love so much. Not my son. I felt completely ready to abandon my son.

When six weeks of crying had come and gone and I truly feel like I was asking for help for the absolute last time before I left, someone told me. A health visitor whom I’d not met before told me. He watched me feed, watched me cry. He looked in Sonny’s mouth and he told me, very casually, “he’s got tongue-tie”. So casually as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

It took me a while to realise that he’d told me there was a reason for the nightmare we’d been living.

In those moments of realisation so many things started to change. I was aware. I suddenly had knowledge of something that would enable me to more adequately care for my son, and perhaps start to become the mother I had thought I was in those first moments of pride when I was so convinced I was doing things right.

I was finally given the information and the first glimpses of help I so desperately needed so that I could try and perform the most natural motherly duty of all!

I was and I wasn’t.

Yes I was given an answer. But that was the end of the help.

Nearly two months of many levels of turmoil for all of us, especially myself and Sonny, had already meant that negativity was engrained in our relationship with feeding. To this day, more than two years later, my boy won’t lie in my arms. He resists the position I would have laid him in to feed from me and I truly believe that is because he has negative mental and emotional associations with that position and feelings of discomfort and maybe more.

We were told that there was a possibility we might be able to have him operated on within six weeks but that this was unlikely. The hopes that were so casually given to us were just as flippantly dashed because “it’s just not something we do”.

I don’t think I am capable of adequately describing the incandescent rage that fills me at the hypocrisy of this situation. Aside from the ever-increasing social pressures (from endless platforms) placed on new mothers to breast feed, the “breast is best” slogan so emphatically forced on expectant mothers at the time of my pregnancy suffocated me with feelings of inadequacy and feelings of indescribable uselessness.

The epiphany I mentioned at the very beginning of this history came in the revelation and acceptance of the intense feelings of complete and uninhibited betrayal that I have as a result of these experiences.

I feel betrayed.

“Breast is best” was rammed down my throat so frequently from so many directions that I had no other possible feelings left to me other than inadequacy, intense guilt and sadness at the very real occurrence of my failing to breast feed my son.

Simultaneously, the simplicity of the condition that stood as a physical barrier between my son and my breast milk was hidden from me. This infuriatingly common and utterly rectifiable condition was hidden from me like some in-joke amongst the healthcare professionals whose role it was meant to be, to guide and encourage me as a new mother.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I hold no individuals to blame and think I understand enough of the financial pressures put on the NHS to realise that there just isn’t any funding to make this particular condition a priority. I don’t wish any ill will to any of the wonderful maternity staff that we came into contact with throughout our times in and out of hospital. I believe it is the system to blame (or more to the point, the lack of any system regarding this issue).

I do however have extremely strong feelings of frustration at the hypocrisy.

How dare you tell me again and again in so many ways that I must breast feed my child, yet keep from me the knowledge and opportunity to fix a well known and simple, potential hindrance to me doing so effectively.

I feel betrayed because I feel like I was lied to. Because every time I asked for help in those first weeks, there were people who knew that this could well be the answer to resolving our nightmare. But because “it’s just not something we do” nobody told me.

Nobody told me so I didn’t know.

Those times we spent back in hospital because Sonny had lost so much weight. When I felt safe and secure surrounded by lovely midwives who helped me pump relentlessly, who took him away when I couldn’t stand any more, who reassured me and made me feel a tiny bit better. I now can’t remember those feelings of security without feeling that betrayal. As though somehow the whole system was keeping the answer from me.

I now can’t experience those memories of looking down at my newborn suckling at my breast without feeling lied to and deserted.

I know that these are my issues and mine alone to come to terms with. Writing this feels like an integral part of that process and I am hopeful that I will find some peace and some space in which to forgive myself for not knowing.

I will hopefully come to accept that perhaps I didn’t fail but that due to an unfortunate mix of circumstances, the system failed my son and me, and that this is sometimes just an unhappy reality of life.

Sonny is now two and a half and totally, completely perfectly wonderful. Despite resorting to paying privately for treatment for Sonny’s tongue-tie, the moment for success was long passed and our breast-feeding journey came to an abrupt end. We bottle fed successfully for the time that he needed and he flourished. He slept, we slept, we recovered and we healed as best we could. We have a beautiful family full of love and happiness and are grateful everyday for the bonds that we have.

As I endeavour to release myself from guilt and inadequacy, I can’t help but want to encourage more knowledge of this infuriatingly simple to fix, but potentially devastating condition.

I have heard tell that in times passed, midwives kept a long sharp pinky fingernail with which they nipped the tiny length of flesh under the newborn infants tongue to release the tie and enable the baby to suckle effectively.

Seriously, it’s that simple.

Ok nowadays it’s a pair of clinical scissors but the principle remains the same.

It certainly shouldn’t be as traumatic and lasting as our experience has been.

I didn’t know.

But now I do, and I want anyone whom it might help to know so that they don’t potentially have to face the feelings of guilt and sadness that I have done.

I love my son. I love myself. I love the universe for giving me the wonderful opportunity to be a mother. But I don’t want to go through that again!

Please please PLEASE check newborns for tongue-tie and help floundering new parents with this simple thing that can have such an unnecessarily devastating effect on those precious first days and weeks.

Xxxx