My only DC was born prematurely and brain damaged at 28 weeks. He has cerebral palsy and severe learning difficulties. I wouldn't be without him now - but arguably the most traumatising aspect of the time on/after his birth (and the whole thing was traumatising) was the pressure to breastfeed.
Picture the scene: us watching our tiny little translucent scrap of life, 1 pound 12 oz on a ventilator. 'He will need nourishment to grow' I was told, 'and that's where you come in!'
Picture another scene, of a breast pump being wheeled onto my ward. 'We know it's hard in your circumstances, we accept that', I was told, 'but you need to start using the pump asap to try to get the flow established'. So I would be having to use the breast pump to try to get some milk for my desperately-ill baby who might never need it anyway. I recall that I did miraculously actually manage to get a few drops….had to decant it into test tubes and write my DC name on them (it is q a long name so I had to write small).
And oh the sense of failure, the feeling of not being a proper mother in any respect (can't produce a healthy baby, can't even feed the one I've got), when I took the test tube to the 'milk bank' and saw the large bottles of milk that other DMs had produced for their babies, and put my pathetic little test tube in amongst them.
DC was on the neonatal ward with other 'preemies' several of whom died. We had got to know their parents and saw their grief. One day my DC deteriorated very badly and for a few days we thought he would die too. That was the day I gave up trying to breastfeed - admitted failure - I just couldn't put myself through that any more.
As I say this has proved over time to be the most traumatising thing - the pressure to try hard, the feeling that I should have tried harder. I still don't know the rights or wrongs of it.