It’s a year since I took my first breastfeeding class. I came home buzzing that night, and very highly motivated to finish my training so that I could start teaching on a regular basis. I qualified as a Breastfeeding Counsellor back in June, and since then I’ve been teaching two or three classes a week. Last week, there were four.
I still come home buzzing, almost every time. There are some classes that leave me feeling dissatisfied, but my feedback tends to be positive, so hopefully the clients didn’t feel the same way. I love a group that is reasonably well-informed, interested in the science, and laughs at my jokes.
I would never have imagined that I would enjoy standing up in front of a group of strangers for two hours, and talking. Actually I do try not to do all the talking; I am supposed to facilitate discussion. I have been getting better at doing that, to the extent that I now find we’re still yapping one hour into the session, and I have to shoehorn anything we haven’t covered into the bit after the Positioning & Attachment segment, which is long.
I have said that the clients seem to be satisfied, but I know that in fact they would like more time. They want to cover topics that I can’t fit into my slot. Breastfeeding is too big a subject to do justice in two hours. I should do an activity that helps them to identify sources of support; this is usually the first one I drop when we start running over time. And as for problem-solving, I don’t even plan that in anymore, unless I’m lucky and I’ve got a rare three-hour class. Surely those are two things that people want to get out of the breastfeeding class?
In fact they don’t really know they need to think about support. And I do at least give out contact information, lists of helplines and drop-in groups. Do they absorb it? Do they even remember where the leaflet is, after they’ve had their babies? I tell them to stick it to the fridge, but I can’t make them – they get handed so many leaflets during the months of pregnancy that I don’t blame them at all for bunging them all in the recycling.
And we do cover problem solving as part of the discussion, but when it is woven into the general chit-chat, they don’t know we’ve done it. They can’t look back and remember a specific activity covering that subject, so they think it didn’t happen. Yet pain is one of the first things they mention when I ask what they know about breastfeeding, and we talk about what sort of pain you might experience, why, what it means, what you can do about it, and where you can get help. But you can’t please all of the people all of the time: last week’s feedback asked why we had to assume things would go wrong.
A year ago I was a little overwhelmed by the massive ignorance of the group about what life with a baby would be like. I knew that I was once in their shoes, but I felt daunted that my task was somehow to transcend the birth barrier and help them to get their heads round what to expect when you’re no longer expecting. I don’t feel that anymore. We have good discussions about it, and I try not to answer all their questions. I sometimes think that a good prop would be a ball of string and a pair of scissors.
My knowledge has grown so much since I started teaching, and my confidence, and the fluidity of my performance. It does feel like performing, and I love an appreciative audience. There are nights when they just don’t bounce, they don’t give it back to me, and that can be much more of a struggle. I know I still have a lot to learn. By the end of February, I will have completed the number of teaching hours that BFCs are normally expected to reach in five years. The most important thing I have learned in this time is how much I still have to learn.