Hard things.
Being a baby in the 70s was a risky endeavor. It was accepted and commonplace for expecting mothers to drink and smoke during pregnancy. C-sections were scheduled even when unnecessary. New moms were encouraged to give their babies formula without even trying to breastfeed, and were advised to let the baby sleep in a bedroom separate from her. Soft grain purees were recommended as first foods, and sometimes administered as early as 3 months of age. A deviation from this behavior was considered low class, anti-science, hippie or weird.
Today, a mom that does some (let alone all) of these things is considered dysfunctional. Drinking and smoking during pregnancy are correlated with birth defects including brain damage, and can lead to miscarriage. New moms are encouraged to at least try to breastfeed their babies, and it’s advised to breastfeed until 12 months of age (the WHO advises to breastfeed until 24 months of age). Babies sleeping in a separate bedroom away from mom is correlated with SIDS. Instead, it’s recommended that mother and child sleep in the same room until the baby is at least 6 months old. The best science we have advises that we also wait until the baby is at least 6 months old to eat their first foods, and that those foods be high in protein and iron, and known allergens (like chicken, beef, or fish).
The choice of what kind of mom I wanted to be was clear to me when the faint idea of maybe marrying and having babies at some point in my life came to my mind for the first time in 2009, nine years before I even had my first kid. Because I had a strange, traumatic, magical, neglectful, untethered childhood, I wanted to offer the opposite to my kids. I wanted to offer them The Best. I wanted to be a Perfect Mom. Of course, this mindset led to a raging, debilitating postpartum depression, but hindsight is 20/20, and that’s a story for another day. Today we’ll talk about my breastfeeding journey, and how it forever changed the way I see people, entrepreneurship, wealth, and the world.
I had my first child, my daughter, on a Sunday night. Three days later, Wednesday night, my milk still hadn’t come down. The nurses insisted that I don’t give her formula, and that I keep trying to breastfeed. All I remember about that Wednesday night is watching my daughter desperately trying to latch to my small, dry breasts, and watching her cry a tearless, hungry, dehydrated cry. I remember screaming a piercing, haunting scream — a scream that sounded like powerlessness and like heartbreak. I remember nothing more, maybe because I passed out. I fell asleep, or I lost consciousness, I don’t know. All I know is that Thursday morning, when I woke up, my breasts were full and I could finally feed my baby.
This was only the beginning of a harrowing breastfeeding journey. For two months, we drove one hour once a week to see the best lactation consultant at UCSF. I rented an ugly, enormous, hospital-grade breast pump that I used every two hours, after breastfeeding. I would wake up at 3am every night to pump, even if my daughter was sleeping, to make sure the breasts were stimulated and the flow of milk kept going. I gave up coffee, tea, mate, just any infusion really, for two years. I gave up parsley, sage, oregano, thyme, mint and other favorite herbs that are thought to interfere with milk production. I gave up perfumes, fragrances, and scented soaps and lotions (they can mess with the baby’s ability to recognize and connect with your personal scent). I gave up makeup and any cosmetics altogether (some chemicals in it have been shown to have a negative impact on an infant’s development). And, of course, I gave up alcohol.
Early on, we realized my daughter’s latch was being affected by a tongue tie, mostly because I kept getting plugged ducts and mastitis, so we had her tongue released. Mastitis was brutal, and I had it quite often. My temperature would climb north of 105 degrees, but even in my feverish state, I would soldier on. Mastitis hurts as if someone was poking your breasts’ pores with thick needles. The only way to really make it better is to have the baby breastfeed from the affected areas, so they suck out the clogged bits. You read that right: baby’s latch giveth (mastitis), baby’s latch taketh away. I endured this with the help of patience, warm compresses, and Ibuprofen. After a lot of research, I finally found a recipe that helped completely unclog the ducts: vinegar would dissolve the calcium clogs, oil would keep the skin from drying too much. So I basically placed cotton rounds soaked in salad dressing on my sore, cracked, sometimes bleeding nipples, for up to twenty minutes every time. The vinegar burned my irritated skin, I was in so much pain! But the remedy worked, and the mastitis bouts subsided. My nipple pores, however, had become so enlarged by the clogs, they stayed open as much as one millimeter for almost a year, which made the milk flow almost too strong for my daughter to be able to eat.
I could never be away from my daughter for more than two hours, because she could be hungry (after getting used to my boobs, neither of my kids wanted anything to do with a bottle — we tried all kinds) and because I would start leaking profusely. If I got stressed out, my milk would suddenly stop flowing, and I would get even more stressed out, which would make things worse. And I gained so much weight!
All this happened while I was frantically researching infant neuroscience and trying to get my daughter seen by the best specialists in the world. She was born with brain abnormalities, many of which the doctors didn’t understand. So when I wasn’t pumping, or taking her to daily playdates, baby classes, and therapies, I was reading every book and every study I could find about brain development and infant development. By the time she was three years old, side to side MRI scans showed that her brain had grown and healed in ways that were inexplicable for her neurologist. All the hard work paid off, but I was completely burned out.
Maybe you are thinking that with my second kid, things were easier, but things were just as hard the second time around. I did give him formula as a newborn: I didn’t want him to be hungry for days waiting for my milk to show up. I had the milk let down two days after his birth and he got to breastfeeding right away. He did have a tongue tie, just like his sister, which we released. He also had tummy pains, which impacted his feeding. Remember the unclogged, monster pores? The flow of milk on that breast was too much for him and for his tummy, so he gave up breastfeeding from that side altogether. As a result, for two years I had mismatched breasts and continuous infections. I gave up Ibuprofen because it’s not safe to take it nonstop. So for the two years I breastfed him, I was in constant fever and pain.
Getting them to stop breastfeeding was a challenge too. The resources and groups that support you in your breastfeeding journey turn silent, and even belligerent, when you bring up the desire to wean your two-year-old toddler. Everyone’s advice was that it is the child who should decide when the breastfeeding journey ends. Becoming a mom in the US is a surreal, depersonalizing, denigrating experience, but few things were as humiliating as the antagonism I faced in mom groups when I asked for help weaning my children.
Breastfeeding has unforeseen consequences to this day. My kids often request to touch me. They holler “boobies!” and then lift my clothes, even in public. They are also uncomfortably interested in other women’s breasts, especially if they are large. They want me to have another baby just so they can eat booby. When I kiss my daughter’s forehead at night, as soon as I’m close enough for her to sense me, her mouth starts doing the breastfeeding motions in her sleep.
For all these reasons, for the longest time, my biggest pet peeve would be other moms saying things like “you are so lucky, my milk ran out by the time my baby was three months!” “It comes so naturally to you, my breasts are too small/ too big/ too something.” Ay, sisisi, mami. A litany of excuses, usually accompanied with comments on my good fortune, because breastfeeding came so easily to me. I didn’t mind that these moms decided to wean when they did. I resented that they said that it was anything but a decision. They made a parenting decision to wean, to stop trying to make it work, to stop trying to make breastfeeding happen. And I get it. It’s fucking hard. It’s painful. It’s exhausting. It ravages your body. It affects your bond with your child, who sees boobs first, and mom second. Weaning early, or even skipping breastfeeding altogether, is a completely valid decision. But it’s a decision, not something that “happens” to you.
My breastfeeding journey, and the frequent comments about how easy it was for me, about how lucky I was, about how naturally it came to me, profoundly changed the way I feel about personal responsibility. It’s not an opinion, or a superficial thought. It’s a profound feeling, a heartfelt conviction. As long as you don’t commit any crimes, as long as you don’t intentionally harm anyone, all decisions are good decisions and all lives are worth living. There are so many ways of living beautifully. If you reside in the USA, whatever your life looks like today, whether you accept it or not, is the direct result of a decision you made at some point, and it’s a direct result of a decision you are making today. Things don’t “come easily and naturally” to the people whose wealth, health, beauty and love you covet. Sure, they might have inherited money, or good genes, or intelligence. But if an immigrant can cross the desert on foot, arrive in the US facing the worst odds, and still make it, you can too. Immigrants build wealth, communities and relationships. They raise children, instilling in them hope even through trauma and hardship. Because this is The Empire, and everything is possible here.
A couple of weeks ago, an interview with Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, was published by the podcast Acquired. In it, Jensen says that all the money he has made (his net worth oscillated between 35 and 42 billion dollars in the last few weeks) wasn’t worth the sacrifices that founding and growing his company entailed. He was asked: “If you were magically 30 years old, again, today, in 2023, and you were going to Denny’s with your two best friends who are the two smartest people you know, and you’re talking about starting a company, what are you talking about starting?” He replied “I wouldn’t do it,” which induced laughter from his interviewers. “I know.” He talked about how building Nvidia was harder than he expected it would be. “At that time, if we realized the pain and suffering and just how vulnerable you’re gonna feel and the challenges that you’re gonna endure — the embarrassment and the shame, and you know, the list of all the things that go wrong — I don’t think anybody would start a company,” Huang explained. “Nobody in their right mind would do it.”
Huang is speaking very candidly about aspects of entrepreneurship and wealth that are seldom mentioned. Having thousands of families’ financial wellbeing depending on your every decision is mortifying. Raising kids who might both miss so many moments with you, and also over-identify with an immense wealth they didn’t build is desolating. The safety issues that you and your loved ones are exposed to limit your freedom to extremes. You always doubt the intentions of the people who try to get close to you or your family: are they really interested in you, or are they trying to obtain something through you? These are only some of the complexities that are added to your life once you pass a certain threshold of wealth.
I first found out about the interview on social media. The backlash the interview faced was surprising to me. I would say that if you look into my ideals, issue by issue, I fall to the left of most Americans. But the self-identified “left” has become so mindless and reactive. The snarky remarks so many people made on X and on Facebook are telling. I’m going to focus on this particular post on Facebook by SFGate. The comments on it are so vicious. There are also some nice ones, but it’s mostly snark, disdain, slander and abuse. “I’ll be glad to alleviate his guilt for a fair sum.” “Maybe now his parents will finally love him.” “Thoughts and prayers.” This last one, repeated ad nauseam, reads so dense to me. It’s a phrase that has direct gun violence and right wing connotations. But there’s nothing in the interview that says that Huang is right wing. If anything he is saying something quite revolutionary, not necessarily anti-capitalist, but maybe alter-capitalist: there’s more to life than money, and pursuing too much wealth might get in the way of enjoying other worthy things.
This is a hard-working guy, who, with friends, built a company from zero, into the giant Nvidia is today. With a market cap of more than $1 trillion, Nvidia it’s the sixth most valuable company in the world today. In the interview he appears humble and down to earth, even when his interviewers are clearly giddy and fawning all over him. The truth is, if you have your own business, more likely than not you empathize: it’s hard, it can be fucking hard. It can be hard in ways that even your friends don’t realize. To me, the responsibility of making payroll, or making sure that all the employees (and their families) that depend on you will have what they need when they need it, is enormous. It’s the one thing that always keeps me going when I feel a little tired or when I’d like to take a break.
Maybe you live in a fantasy world where you believe that if only he hadn’t founded Nvidia, you would have done it. That if he hadn’t created all the jobs and wealth he created, you could have it. Do you also believe that if The Beatles hadn’t existed you would have written Penny Lane? Your line of thinking is irrational, and your jealousy is poison. Poison to your soul and poison to the world.
One of my favorite things to go through as I would produce a show was the rider. Riders are a list of requirements an artist has for a show. There’s technical requirements and there’s catering requirements. Whenever an artist’s rider comes to light, there’s a huge backlash. How dare they require so many things! You need to understand that some artists are on the road two hundred days out of the year. They have toured for years and they have seen things. They ask for specific brands of bottled water, for example, because they have gotten sick from local bottled waters. A musician with explosive diarrhea is less powerful in their performance. I can only imagine the kind of literal shit Madonna was exposed to, since she seems to ask for new toilet seats in her own rider. Do you think she is being too demanding? Her concerts make millions of dollars to this day, and all the responsibility rests on her shoulders. Dozens of families rely on her capacity to perform. You bet she gets to ask for a brand new toilet seat! And any savvy promoter will provide that and more without question.
Touring is hard. Yes, being a rock star is fucking hard. I have seen international artists learn, on stage, that their mother, or their grandfather, died — on stage, while performing. What the best of them do is: they finish their performance. Because there’s a signed contract, because there are legions of fans who came to see them, and because there’s a bunch of people, from accompanying musicians to sound techs to cleaning personnel, who depend on them to bring food to their dinner table.
Most things in life are hard. Being poor is hard. Being rich is hard. Being middle class is excruciating. Yes, sure, there’s Usain Bolt, innately talented, effortlessly fast. And then there’s the rest of us. But even Usain Bolt couldn’t do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Even he had to show up and improve over the years.
Did someone break your heart? Did they betray you? Did they abandon you? That sucks. Guess what? It happens a lot. Maybe the person who hurt you didn’t mean to hurt you at all. Or maybe they did, maybe they are cruel hearted and criminally evil. If it’s appropriate, go to the justice system. If it’s not, try to heal and move on. The alternative is a loveless, fearful life. Love is hard. Good friendships take time and work. Romance takes effort. Even pure, selfless, devotional love requires sacrifice, courage, faith, and presence.
Do you wish you had more? More money, more cars, more stuff? Having shit takes work. And I don’t just mean down payments, mortgages, monthly payments, taxes or gas. I mean insurance, cleaning, maintenance, organizing, furnishing, space, maybe even managing staff.
Would you like more adventure in your life? Maybe some impulsive, thrilling activities, like skydiving, or flying, or car racing? All of those things take studying, preparation, expensive equipment, and dedication.
Even being a good lover is laborious and takes practice, learning and preparation.
Stop being an envious, jealous, small person. More likely than not, nobody took anything from you. And if they did, move on. Since I was a kid, and through the years, I have been beaten, betrayed, robbed, kidnapped, abandoned, denied and worse. So what? You better believe that I won’t let it define me. You better believe that I won’t let them define me. I am hurt, I am scared and I am broken. But I am also strong, brave, and fearless. I will rise, I will win, and I’ll have fun doing it.
Nobody can take anything from you, because you can keep moving forward. You can be unstoppable, unyielding, resilient. Looking at what others have is pointless, you’ll never find fulfillment running somebody else’s race. Look inside, find out who you are and what you want. If you live to fight another day, everything is possible. As long as you are here, everything is within reach. If you are alive, in this magical year of 2023, in this land of wonder that is the Americas, there’s nothing that you can’t be, do or have.
There’s one caveat: it will probably be fucking hard, harder than you imagine. You might have to leave parts of yourself behind. But it will also probably be super fun. You might learn things and you might make friends. What do you have to lose? You clearly hate yourself and hate your life if you are so dutifully staring at, judging and criticizing random strangers on the internet.
Stop blaming everybody else for your circumstances. Whatever decisions you’ve made, and whatever decisions you make every day, it’s not their fault. It’s certainly not Jensen Huang’s fault. Your life, your choices, your consequences.
