Reflections on Breastfeeding, Part I: The Journey I Wasn’t Prepared For
I’m ready to be done breastfeeding.
Mostly.
I think.
I’d say I’m ninety-five percent done. I’m going out of town for a few days next week. When I scheduled the trip, I told myself it would be a good time to wean. Apollo will be about six weeks shy of two.
There have been more than a few moments in the past couple of months where I’ve gritted my teeth as he nursed — because he was tugging on some piece of my clothing or my skin; because his cold or some distraction caused an uncomfortable latch or an unexpected encounter with teeth. In those moments, I thought quite definitively, I want to be done NOW.
Then there was the realization a few weeks ago that I could count on one hand the number of times that I had not been the first one to get up with Apollo. To drag myself into the glider and pull out a boob. And then, because I was already there, to be the one to start the morning routine, which usually involves screaming. Because he doesn’t want to stop nursing. Because he’s done nursing, but he wants “pouch” or “bar” immediately. Because he doesn’t want his diaper changed. Because he’s indecisive about which socks to wear.
Essentially, I realized, I’ve spent the majority of the past twenty-one months, starting my day with someone touching me and then screaming, often while I’m still tired, usually before I’d had a sip of coffee, and sometimes before I’d even used the bathroom.
Yeah. Fuck that. I am ready for that to be done.
If I could spend the next twenty-one months not being the one responsible for starting my kid’s day — for handling those unpredictable first twenty minutes, that would be awesome. And though I’m sure some people would shame me for that, I don’t feel a lick of guilt saying it.
I’ve shouldered so much unexpected guilt and angst throughout my breastfeeding journey and I am done with that shit — which is really refreshing for someone who has spent her whole life wanting to be an A+ student at everything. Some combination of the exhaustion of parenthood, the Zoloft, and the approach of my fortieth birthday has brought me to that magical place where I am (mostly) done giving any shits or fucks.
(Also, I can say (mostly) and be ninety-five percent about things a lot more comfortably because I am finally getting that whole concept of it being okay to exist in gray areas, to have shifting feelings, to contain multitudes, etc.)
I did not really “prepare” for breastfeeding while I was pregnant. I also did not prepare or learn about things like infant sleep or what the first months/year would be like — not with the same intensity that I prepared for birth.
I have some sense of remorse about this. I also have a growing sense that when it comes to parenting, and well, life in general, you can’t really prepare, you just have to live into it. Again, A+ student mind both blown and devastated by this.
But I do wish I had had more real conversations about breastfeeding ahead of time. I had one. A friend and fellow sexual assault survivor warned me that it had been the hardest aspect of motherhood for her. That was the one thing that raised a flag for me and made me question my assumption of “breastfeeding will be fine and easy because it is natural.”
Shortly before I gave birth, I listened to a few podcast episodes about breastfeeding, quickly read Ina May Gaskin’s book about it, and watched a few videos. It was like cramming before a test. But it was also like taking the classroom portion of driver’s ed and never getting behind the wheel — or even sitting in the passenger’s seat while someone else drove. Since my closest friends and cousins did not live nearby when their babies were newborns — and since we live in a culture where nursing a baby in public is still treated as taboo — I was never up close and personal to a breastfeeding infant and parent until after I gave birth. That’s another thing I wish I had done or even been encouraged to do: visit a lactation group while pregnant. It still would not have been the same as actually doing it, but it might have normalized how challenging it can be.
Again pregnancy is an exhausting and busy time, so cramming one more thing into it may not have been possible. I don’t bring this up to shame myself — as I said, I am done with that shit — I bring it up to shame America for the systemic ways we fail, punish, and shame the people who give birth to and nourish our babies once they are born.
Shame on our lack of real parental leave.
Shame on our for-profit healthcare and insurance system.
Shame on our lack of free or affordable support resources for people who give birth and breast/chestfeed, such as access to doulas during birth and postpartum, home visits from midwives and lactation consultants, or at the very least, easily accessible and affordable lactation groups.
Shame on our “puritan roots” for creating such taboos about the female body and sex that feeding an infant in the way that biology designed is somehow taboo.
Shame on the corporate greed of formula companies for capitalizing on that shame around the female body and pushing their products so hard that breastfeeding advocates had to push back hard, which leaves a lot of us emotionally-drained, hormonally-ravaged, and sleep-deprived new parents caught in the crossfire between “breast is best” and “fed is best” instead of, oh I don’t know, being seen as individual people and babies and families and supported accordingly.
And with that impossibly long, run-on sentence, I will speak to my personal story and who I was before time and Zoloft allowed me to see that it was the above factors that failed me, not me who was actively failing.
I am the daughter of two nurses and the cousin that I am closest to is also a nurse and IBCLC (Internationally Board Certified Lactation Consultant). I struggled with infertility for almost two years before I got pregnant. I’ve been vegan for more than half my life, but would not self-describe as “crunchy.” I believe in evidence-based science. (I mean, hello, family of nurses. Also straight-A student.) I have the highest graduate degree in my field. I was raised in a middle-class suburb of Chicago. I live in Seattle. Though my family, both the one I grew up in and the one I made, was/is on the lower end of the middle-class scale for those areas, we were/are comfortably middle class. I am, as I mentioned briefly, a sexual assault survivor. I have struggled with depression for all of my life and was in therapy throughout my pregnancy. I work for private Jesuit university, and though I am not religious, its social justice mission resonates deeply with me. Also it provides pretty good health insurance, though I had to pay out of pocket for the aforementioned therapy.
I state all of this to make both my privilege and my vulnerabilities clear. I am an educated woman from an educated family that specializes in health care and I live in a progressive city that (in addition to tech and planes) is renowned for health care. I had access to a lot of innovative practices and support and I took advantage of all of them.
CenteringPregnancy prenatal care. Additional child birth classes. Our hospital has a doula program and since my insurance covered every other aspect of birth, we had the money to pay for it.
I planned an intervention-free birth. I ended up with a c-section. It was not, in medical terms, an emergency, but it was traumatic for me. I will save the details since I already wrote about them, but it certainly hampered my breastfeeding experience.
During my quick book/video/podcast binge to learn All The Breastfeeding Things in the last couple weeks of my pregnancy, I’d read, heard and watched videos about a newborn’s first latch. How they can move from where they are placed on the birthing parent’s belly up to the chest, finding their way to milk.
This is what I imagined during my visualization/hypnobirthing labor prep. My son, coming out of the birth canal, placed on my stomach, and squirming his way to my breast.
But then my son was cut out of me and I’d been so stressed about it that my doula told me later she’d never seen a blood pressure reading that high. The nurses gave him to me as they wheeled me out of the OR. I was dizzy, nauseous, and certain I would drop him. I begged someone to take him from me when we got to the room. I instructed my partner to do skin to skin with him instead and when he tried to seek out his nipple, I broke a little bit more inside. I probably cried. I definitely thought, I am already failing him.
Jessica, my serene goddess of a doula, took my hand and guided me through breathing exercises. Then she asked, “Would you like me to help you nurse your baby?”
I nodded weakly and she set him up. He latched.
Okay, I thought. Maybe things will be okay now.
I was buoyed by the nurse who helped me to hand-express colostrum. “You are getting a lot — he is getting a lot! This doesn’t always happen after a caesarean. You are doing really well!”
He pooped his first poop and I thought we were as golden as the liquid coming from my boobs.
But by the next day, something had changed. He’d lost weight. My partner and I both remembered something about this from childbirth class: I’d had drugs and fluids. It was normal for the fluids to inflate the birth weight, right?
This explanation was brushed off. My breasts, apparently, were no longer doing their job. I plummeted back into that black space, the one that would soon dominate my life for months, where I could not escape the echoing voice: You are failing him.
In addition to the doula program, the hospital where I gave birth has an amazing lactation center. During the course of my hospital stay, I was visited by three separate lactation consultants who gave me an array of tips and tricks. None of it made nursing in my sleep-deprived, cut-up-and-sewn-back-together-again body comfortable, and more important none of it magically brought my milk in — not even the hospital grade pump they brought into my room.
I was told that I would have to introduce formula. I could do this by bottle or with a tube taped to my breast.
I chose the latter. Because I planned to breastfeed. I was not going to let this be taken from me too.
We stayed an extra day in the hospital, but I left with formula, the tube, and the hospital grade pump. My partner was preparing a mixture of the meager colostrum I could now produce and the formula and using a syringe to drip it down the tube into our son’s eager mouth.
I don’t know how many times we did this. I hated it so much that I’ve blocked it out.
What I can’t unblock is the memory of the first doctor’s appointment, a day after leaving the hospital. While we were waiting for the doctor to come in, Apollo started to bawl.
“You should feed him,” the physician’s assistant said, like it was nothing.
I didn’t have the pillows that everyone had taught me to use as props. The chair didn’t even have arms. And most significant, my breasts still didn’t have milk. I put the screaming baby to my useless chest, crying silently but as hard as he was.
I’d hoped that the doctor, who was also my doctor and I adored, would tell us that we no longer had to do the tube and formula, but she insisted it was definitely necessary. She was against me too.
I texted Jessica and my nurse cousin, Becca, on the ride home while Apollo screamed in the back seat and I left someone else — my partner, or maybe my dad — to comfort him. (I am no good to him any way…)
I told them about the percentage of weight Apollo had lost, my lack of milk, everyone’s insistence on formula.
Both of them were angry on my behalf:
They don’t weigh babies like this in other countries, one of them told me.
That is not a risky amount of weight loss. It’s right at the threshold but it is still normal, said the other.
Your milk will come in. You are still within the range of normal, especially with a c-section, they both said.
I will come over today and help you, said Jessica, whose contract with us included two postpartum visits.
I will be there tomorrow, said Becca who had planned to come up from California after my due date to provide support.
Jessica was there within a couple hours. She gave me a massage. Helped me pump. Listened to me vent. Cheered and pointed when she saw milk spill into the bottles. “Use that in the tube rather than the formula,” she said.
When Becca arrived the next day, something else had happened. My breasts had swollen to twice their size and were hard as rocks.
“That would be your milk!” she told me triumphantly.
She helped manually express some of it and got me a bowl of warm water to stick my tits in. It was probably the first time I laughed since labor. The ridiculousness of this. I was so grateful she was there.
“It’s going to really hurt to use that tube — ” I started to say.
“Oh no, you are done with that tube.”
“But the doctor said — ”
“Trust me, your milk is here. Fuck that tube. You don’t need it. Well,” she corrected. “I can use it to finger-feed pumped milk to Apollo so you can get some sleep.”
That was a miracle — especially the sleep — but my struggle to breastfeed comfortably continued. There was no tongue tie and Apollo was gaining weight just fine from the feedings — many lactation consultant visits confirmed that. I had a strong letdown, which meant he was battling a firehose whenever he tried to drink and he compensated with a latching technique that destroyed my nipples. There were nipple shields and ointments, including a speciality one from a compound pharmacy that cost nearly a hundred bucks, and of course, insurance did not cover. I also could not seem to find a hold that worked for Apollo and my body, especially given the tenderness in my still-healing mid-section. Jessica came over more than she was obligated to. I re-upped my referrals to the lactation clinic. And eventually I posted on Facebook that breastfeeding fucking sucked most of the time.
To my shock, nearly all of my friends who had tried it agreed. This was not something that is widely talked about. I’m guessing that this goes back to the whole puritan thing and boobs being sexualized. Then of course, there is the desire, which I completely understand to defend breastfeeding from greed of formula companies and that critical puritan gaze. Essentially, we don’t talk about it being hard because it might discourage people from doing it.
The end result of that for me, however — and I’d venture for a lot of hormonally-wrecked and sleep-deprived parents — was to internalize a major sense of failure. I couldn’t do this thing that was sold to me as natural. That must mean something is wrong with me. I am flawed. I am a bad mother. That was the hole I fell down, and stayed down in for much of my breastfeeding journey. But it didn’t have to be that way.
If the main message I’d gotten had instead been, “Breastfeeding can be really hard. It is worth it for these reasons. Here are some resources,” my mentality would have been very different — and a lot less painful.
These are the types of stories that accrued on my Facebook page, that I wish I’d heard before I gave birth:
Moms who made it to two months, but couldn’t go further because it was painful. And that was okay.
Moms who pumped because the latching thing just never worked out with their babies. And that was okay.
Moms who pumped until 3 months or 6 months or 9 months and then stopped and switched to formula. And that was okay.
Moms who pumped and took herbs that made them smell like maple syrup and ate all the lactation cookies, but continued to have a low supply so they supplemented with or switched to formula. And that was okay.
Moms who cried, exhausted on the bathroom floor and switched to formula for the sake of their sanity. And that was okay.
One of my friends from my goth club days in my late teens/early twenties, who sent me gentle encouragement over Facebook (and one of the first babywearing set-ups to actually for me), told me that it had taken her about two or three months for nursing to feel right. I was all about those little messages of hope at that time, even though a lot of them felt untrue. This one did turn out about right. I had my expensive nipple cream. My c-section incision was less painful and so were the carpal tunnel symptoms that had started in the last month of pregnancy and was nearly unbearable in the first month of Apollo’s life. I was finally getting the hang of the holds that all the various consultants had shown me and was figuring out what worked best for us.
The first time that I managed to push the stroller around a two-mile loop at my favorite park with a fellow new-mom friend was also the first time I successfully nursed in public with no props. We were on a stretch where there were no benches and Apollo was screaming — his message very clear. So I took him out of the stroller, squatted down in the grass and unbuttoned my dress. It felt awkward and was a little bit painful, but at the end my friend high-fived me. “Holy shit, Steph! You are a rock star!”
I’d be lying if I said I felt like one, but I was proud in that moment. I felt like I was about to turn a corner… Of course, as it turned out, the road around that bend wasn’t the easiest either.
More on that next week…
