New mum Emily Atack has revealed the ‘t*ts that got her through life’ ironically let her down when she struggled with breastfeeding her baby son.
The Inbetweeners and Rivals star said she became desperate and was screaming when her now five-month-old son Barney wasn’t latching after she gave birth.
Atack, 34, had her first child with her partner scientist Alistair Garner, who she has known for over 30 years, in June.
The actress, who found fame as Charlotte Hinchcliffe – the stunning crush of schoolboys in the comedy The Inbetweeners – said: ‘I know for a fact, even saying this now, I’ll get backlash going ‘breast is best’.
‘But the irony that my t*ts have got me through my life and now they’re not f***ing working for me. Yeah, cheers.
New mum Emily Atack has revealed the ‘t*ts that got her through life’ ironically let her down when she struggled with breastfeeding her baby son
The Inbetweeners and Rivals star said she became desperate and was screaming when her now five-month-old son Barney wasn’t latching after she gave birth
‘When I really needed you. When I really f***ing needed you. The breastfeeding thing for me was very, very difficult.
‘I tried everything I could. I couldn’t breastfeed. That has been a really, really difficult process.
‘The baby just would not latch. He did it first, and then he stopped, and he was getting thinner and thinner by the day.
‘And I just thought ‘I’ve got to feed my baby, got to feed my child’.
‘I got very ill. I got so, so ill with something called mastitis, which happens when the milk gets all kind of blocked up.
‘I was lying there, my baby was not being fed.
‘So moments like that, it is so difficult because I’m going ‘yeah, but everyone’s going to think I’m a shit mum because I can’t breastfeed. I failed at the first hurdle. First thing that I was meant to do was breastfeed my child, and I can’t even do it’.
She added: ‘I was trying so hard to get him to latch. I couldn’t do it. And he was just screaming. He was trying. I literally had my mum, my partner, my cousin squeezing.
‘You have to get like a certain angle for the nipple to go in the mouth. And at one point I had six people on my boob, like squeezing it in a certain angle.
Atack, 34, had her first child with her partner scientist Alistair Garner, who she has known for over 30 years, in June
The actress, who found fame as Charlotte Hinchcliffe – the stunning crush of schoolboys in the comedy The Inbetweeners – said: ‘But the irony that my t*ts have got me through my life and now they’re not f***ing working for me. Yeah, cheers’
She explained: ‘The baby just would not latch. He did it first, and then he stopped, and he was getting thinner and thinner by the day’
She said on the Great Company podcast: ‘I got very ill. I got so, so ill with something called mastitis, which happens when the milk gets all kind of blocked up’
‘I was screaming in pain, like trying to get just one tiny bit of milk out in the baby’s mouth.
‘And everyone was like discussing, going, ‘right, you hold that end, you hold this end’. ‘And at the time they were like massive.’
Atack, who is in a nude tennis scene in the new Disney+ adaptation of the Dame Jilly Cooper novel Rivals, added on the Great Company podcast: ‘Took an army. I had my partner squeezing my nipple like that, had my cousin squeezing the side of my boob.
‘My mum, my mum hasn’t touched my body like that since I was a baby.
‘And yet all of a sudden people are there trying to get you to, you know, trying to feed this baby.
‘They were all sort of discussing like, ‘right, how should we make this work? You try that end, you try that end’.
Atack, who is in a nude tennis scene in the new Disney+ adaptation of the Dame Jilly Cooper novel Rivals, added on the Great Company podcast: ‘Took an army. I had my partner squeezing my nipple like that, had my cousin squeezing the side of my boob’
She is seen with her baby son Barney earlier this year
‘And I just thought, ‘wow, how lucky am I that I’ve got a family like this and a partner like this and all this help around me’.
‘But I still felt like I was failing. I couldn’t feed my baby. And it’s just horrific.’
Atack has previously told how she does not regret posing for sexy photo shoots for magazines in her younger days, but she became the subject of vile sexual internet messages from men.
She said she only stripped for Rivals because it was an integral part of Cooper’s story and the character, but was not doing it to flaunt her body.
