I had just turned 20 when I had my first baby. I went into labour the night before my own birthday, which is on November 1st, and my baby was finally born on November 3rd.
I lived with my mom for the last two months of pregnancy. I was born in Birmingham. My mom’s background is Pakistani, and she came to England in the late 1960s. She didn’t know anyone else in the Asian community who had had their children here – she was the first of the bunch. She lived with her in-laws who did not encourage her with breastfeeding.
Even so, my mom did try to breastfeed my older brother at home. In hospital she was given formula and some pills to dry up her milk – something she never forgot. She told me she winced whenever she tried to feed him. She thought he was never full, and never enjoyed a minute of it. She was sharing a house with five other adults from her husband’s family, most of them male. She had to live by their rules, to keep the peace. My siblings and I all shared one room with my parents until I was eight or nine years old, so I can understand how hard it must have been for her.
My mom was traumatised by her breastfeeding experience. She kept telling me not to do it, as she didn’t want to see me in pain. She told me that back in India, colostrum was considered to be dirty. Women were told to feed the baby instead with a special concoction of cooled boiled water with fennel and other seeds, that would help clear meconium out of their bowels in the first few days. She could not understand my need or passion to feed my newborn.
Maybe because I was so young, no one in the hospital explained anything to me or gave me any choices. My baby was taken away and put in the special nursery, where she was fed formula by tube. I was put in a room by myself. I hadn’t seen anyone around me breastfeeding. I didn’t know anything about colostrum or expressing. I could have hand expressed and fed her colostrum, if I’d been helped to do it. I was scared even to hold her. My mom just kept telling me not to ask questions, saying, “They know what they’re doing”, expecting me to trust them like she had. Next day, I was told that my baby was so tiny (4 lbs 13 oz) because my placenta had not worked well to nourish her, but no one explained why. These memories stay with me until this day.
When my daughter finally came to me on day three, I was really engorged. My mom told me to ask for pills to dry up my milk, but I didn’t want to. My daughter was searching for the breast but wasn’t managing to attach well. She was so small, and my breasts were big and hard, and felt heavy like bricks! I didn’t know what to do. A midwife grasped my breast and forced my baby onto me. It was really horrible and I was crying my eyes out. My mom was telling me to stop and give her a bottle. She didn’t want me to suffer.
I did manage to breastfeed my baby, though it was a huge struggle. We came home around day five or six. By then, my nipples were sore, cracked, and bleeding. The first night home, we all cried. My husband is from London and was used to shops being open at night, but they weren’t in Birmingham back then! He managed to get a hand pump from the chemist (it didn’t work), and found a dummy that was about as big as my baby’s whole face. We just wanted to stop her crying.
Since our marriage, we had been living with my husband’s Pakistani family: his aunt, uncle, and grandparents. After our daughter was born I stayed at my mom’s for about two weeks, until mom went abroad, then my husband and I were able to move to our own flat in London. It was lovely, but I felt embarrassed to breastfeed outside, so I stayed home all the time. And we’d always have somebody staying. My husband remembered what it was like to move here from abroad, and was always ready to offer a place to stay for anyone who had just arrived in the UK! So I was very busy cooking and cleaning. It was hard to fit breastfeeding in. I didn’t know about responsive feeding; my mom had always fed formula on a schedule, so I tried to feed my baby every three hours. I assumed I’d breastfeed my daughter until I went back to work at six months, and then someone else would look after her and feed her formula.
My in-laws in London, even my mother-in-law who had breastfed all her sons, couldn’t understand why I wanted to breastfeed. She compared me with her other daughter-in-law, who was obsessed with cleaning and had chosen not to breastfeed. Having a spotless house and contributing to the family seemed to be the highest priority in our community. They wanted me to be up and about doing housework, rather than sitting down feeding my baby. They saw sitting to feed as laziness. I was very instinctive, understanding that my baby needed touch and closeness. If she cried, I’d pick her up. I also had pressure from my husband, who felt that my children were too skinny and needed feeding up with “bottle milk”. My babies were compared with other children in the family, who were huge. I am about five feet tall and all my babies were small, except for the fourth, who was about 7 lbs – it felt strange to hold such a large newborn!
By the time I had my third child, my husband’s mother and two brothers were living with us as well. I don’t know how I found the strength to do what I did, when I had to fight the whole system to be able to breastfeed. There was something inside me that just knew what to do. I only discovered The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding when I was expecting my third baby. I borrowed it from the library and read it intensively for the whole nine months. I learned so much: colostrum is not dirty, if you lose your milk, you can relactate… I felt that now I had all this information, no one was going to mess with me! I fed that baby for two whole years, despite many critical comments.
When my third baby was a few weeks old, I got mastitis. I contacted an LLL Leader and went to an LLL group in Wimbledon. I was the only woman wearing shalwar kameez, the traditional long tunic and trousers worn by South Asian women. I wore it mainly to fit in with the in-laws so I had less grief to deal with. It was tricky to feed in a longer top and I felt awkward and embarrassed. It took me years to go back to a breastfeeding group.
Even from when I had my first child, I already had in my mind that I might be able to become a breastfeeding peer supporter. Just four weeks after I became a mother, my husband’s aunt came home from hospital with her new baby, crying just like I had. I helped her with her engorged breasts. Like me, she arrived into a house full of in-laws and non-breastfeeding people who had no idea what to do. At least with her I felt less awkward, because we both wanted to feed our babies and knew it was normal. I also supported my sister, who is four years younger than me, to breastfeed all her children. Seeing all her big, happy babies eventually normalised breastfeeding for my mom. She grew to love it and was really supportive when I breastfed my last two children.
I was at last able to follow my wish of becoming a breastfeeding peer supporter after I had my fifth child. I had a better birth with her, but had a hard time breastfeeding, because she was born at 35 weeks and had awful reflux. I saw a breastfeeding counsellor, but unfortunately the advice was really poor. I then went to a local breastfeeding café. It had been years since I’d had the courage to go to a group like this. There was a sign there, advertising La Leche League’s 12-week peer supporter training course, which the NHS was running in my area. When I saw it, I thought, “thank God I came today!” I felt determined to help other moms properly. I felt so special when we had our little graduation at the end of the course! I still have the pink knitted boob they gave us. These days I also have brown ones – knitted for me by a complete stranger I met on a train! – but this one has a special meaning for me.
I was a peer supporter for two or three years. Back then, I was the only Muslim peer supporter. We very rarely saw any Asian women at the group we ran. It’s easier to relate to people who look like you, even when there isn’t a language barrier. I didn’t only support Asian women, though. A lot of the mothers I helped with breastfeeding wanted to take me home with them!
I work as a Doula now, supporting mothers during birth and the postnatal period. It’s much easier now that my children are older. There is some excellent work going on to support Asian and other ethnic minority families. For example, Last year The Raham Project in Peterborough invited me to take part in a project with them and the charity BLISS about neonatal intensive care units and premature babies. We were interviewed about our experiences. I cried a lot, sharing all of my birth stories. It still feels really painful when I talk about my first baby.
My children are all grown up now, aged 34, 33, 30, 23, and 18. My daughters just live down the road. One daughter has three children aged under four. She breastfed the first for two years, tandem fed the first two, and her youngest is still going strong at eight months. She has a very different story from mine. Even though her husband’s family were not initially comfortable with breastfeeding, he has been very supportive.
I supported her sister-in-law as well, and she has done brilliantly with her breastfeeding journey.
There is still a lot of shame surrounding breastfeeding in the Asian community. Many families are still quite prudish. Ours is probably a very unusual Pakistani household. My husband has learned to talk openly about breastfeeding, periods, and so on – this has been normalised in our family. Our influence has spread to my children’s spouses and friends, thanks to me forever talking about it! My other girls are also keen to explore home births when they are ready, which is a huge miracle in our community.
I want more South Asian women to be open about their experiences. It’s easier now, but they’re still not accessing breastfeeding support as much as other women. They would not feel comfortable lifting up their tops in a room full of other people, even women. It’s not religious shame and fear, it’s the culture that has been confused with religion. The Muslim faith teaches that the baby has a right to be breastfeed for however long they wish, although many of them think it should only be for two years. By building up relationships of trust, breastfeeding supporters can help address those fears and normalise breastfeeding. It is not something to be embarrassed about, it’s a normal and natural process that is so beneficial for your baby and your own health, too. Let’s all work together to make it the very natural and normal way of life that it surely is.
Zarina Ayyub
Tooting, London
Breastfeeding Matters LLLGB Podcast
In January 2025 Zarina spoke to our volunteer breastfeeding counsellors Maria Yasnova and Sarah Fletcher. They discuss the need to create a safe and supportive environment around new mothers right from the start, tapping into the ancient tradition of the first 40 days or the ‘fourth trimester’ practiced by many cultures around the world to this day. Available on Apple and Spotify.