When you’re about to embark on the motherhood journey and you’re thinking you’ll give breastfeeding a try, you’ll likely stumble across the “You must nurse your baby within the first hour of their life” advice. The golden hour is highly advertised. It paints a masterpiece of this golden sunrise of new life, complete with heart exploding love that’ll make you move mountaintops if needed. During this first hour you’ll lay with your baby on your chest, kiss your partner, smile at the miracle of life, and you’ll be able to latch that baby and begin giving them that liquid gold. Life is perfect and easy, just the way everyone said it would be. 

What a bunch of perfectly curated content full of lies. 

Now, I’m not saying that the golden hour isn’t that magical for many people, what I am saying is there’s a good chance it will not work out the way we see on Instagram reels or read about in books. Not only did the golden hour with my daughter come after 4 1/2 hours of pushing (hello exhaustion), but it also came with the midwife getting a stitching lesson. That’s right, the lovely hour I should have had with my new little bundle of joy was filled with the directions of learning all about how to stitch the perineum after a tear. Ugh, I still cringe thinking about it so let’s move on to breastfeeding again.

So there I am, being stitched up, hearing all about how that’s done, being really gracious with my time, my body, and my remaining energy, and then a nurse tells me that I need to latch my daughter. I can clearly still see and hear that moment because it came with my first advocacy of parenthood in which I wasn’t going to follow the “standard course.” Rather than quietly oblige, I simply said I wanted to wait until we were in private. I think there may have been a slight mention of the importance of latching in the first hour, or maybe there wasn’t, but all I knew is I couldn’t do it right then and there. Luckily there was no pushing on the matter and eventually my daughter and I were able to have that first moment when we were mostly in private. What I didn’t know is that the magical moment of first latch wasn’t going to go to plan, and even if we had latched in the first hour it wouldn’t have changed the outcome or mattered for our journey to come. Thus starts the journey of this blog and the highs, the lows, and the “I can’t believe that happened” parts of breastfeeding.