BREAST STORIES
How Breastfeeding Helped Me Appreciate Breast Men
The second biggest surprise in having a baby
Why, yes, I did write this while pumping, breastfeeding, eating, and/or watching YouTubes.
I need to add the context that I gave birth in another country (that’s also why all my articles are free) and I don’t have the same native language as my husband. My doctors usually speak to me in English, but the video about breastfeeding that the main doctor sent me was in the local language. I hubristically believed I would understand. I then proceeded to fail.
I was distracted by all the new verbs introduced. See, if your hand takes a slightly different shape or makes a slightly different motion, there’s a separate verb for that. I first learned this when being a nasty ear-picker and being told not to do three or four different verbs depending on where I was digging. There are just as many verbs for how to press on my sore milk glands.
Sure, I turned to my extensive Pinterest boards and the general internet search to review all those tips I collected during the pregnancy. None of them seemed to advise “roll, squeeze, massage, push.”
Maybe I’ve been dumb and somehow missed the point in every postpartum I’ve witnessed where my friends or relatives did more than carefully scrunch around their areolae and magically get milk.
I had noticed that my armpits were sore and warm, but I rolled that thought into the list of sore and inflamed-feeling body parts. I wondered if maybe I had COVID because it was the same all-over soreness.
So then I did try rolling my breasts like in the video. Now, the great misfortune of the internet is that even the balloon being used in the video to demonstrate the wondrous new verbs had to be censored, so while I could tell kinda where the symbolic nipple was and kinda what I was supposed to be doing with my fingers, I wasn’t getting it, and I was angry at society in general.
I was so angry that we built the internet and the laws of our nations around a massive contradiction about our fun, sexy bits. As mammals who reproduce sexually, and get a little busted up in the process, it’s a shame we can’t just see other relatable broken bodies because, “Well, someone could be titillated by those images.” I guess. My stitched-up frankengina and crosseyed breasts are surely someone’s kink. Same way I can’t complain about the shape of my feet with pictures because that’s also someone’s kink.
I fell back on memories of my own naked relatives and the help of a handful of medical professionals coming and looking at my nakedness to reassure me that I would not succumb to a Game of Thrones death. (Remember that show? If not, it’s the one where every character’s backstory is that their mothers all died in childbirth.) Also, that my perineum wasn’t going to shrivel up and fall off…or rip open if I sat on the wrong kind of toilet. Finally, that my breasts were sore because I needed to squeeze them harder.
They had to show me just how hard. So, some very nice, hard-working nurses and doctors had to huddle around me and demonstrate how and where to press. The sore spots under my armpits were full of milk and stuck. Like, clogged, maybe. For some cruel quirk of fate, I had heavy reverse cleavage, so that the portion of each breast facing outside from the nipple seemed twice as big as the portion facing inward from the nipple. If it had gone the other way, I could have thrown on a v-neck and proclaimed, “Taa-daa, super cleavage!”
Now, I saw revealed the mystery of my breast men and my originally small breasts. They weren’t show-ers, but they turned out to be growers! I have been a lifelong member of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee. I have been relentlessly mocked by some awful large-breasted friends for my inferior breasts, and then those terrible friends tried excuse themselves by saying, “I’m just jealous, because your little mosquito bites are so perky, and your back doesn’t hurt, and you can go without a bra.”
I don’t talk to those terrible friends anymore, but I was able to understand why my back and neck started hurting like never before during my second trimester when my little, tubular breasts — that are placed too far apart on my huge ribcage — expanded three- or four-fold into monstrous goldfish eye globes.
The congested pockets of milk felt like little bones or pebbles. When my husband tried to help, he agreed, saying in his own language that it felt like bones. And here was his moment.
I had always wondered why all of my partners have been breast men. My breasts were a flat handful and not at all sensitive, so I would get so annoyed by cuddling that was really just breast-holding. In addition to being enlarged during pregnancy, they also became sensitive enough that I finally understood why someone would want to have their breasts touched.
Now, full of lumpy milk bones, any kind of squeeze or massage brought relief. My husband had just the right talent, interest and motivation to learn the proper technique with those verbs. Patience, too. The first two days with the breast pump, it took both of us pressing the hardest pebbles and squeezing until all of the milk was out and I was back to my small, soft, original flavor breasts. Four hours later, they were refilled. He was happy to help again.
I used to dismiss breast men as unrepentant mama’s boys. In truth, some of them are devoted Dads and husbands waiting for their moment to shine.
