Impressive

I wouldn’t say I had a desire to breastfeed. I would say I had an obsessive passion to breastfeed. I read countless books on the topic, clicked through endless websites, visited with my friends who had successfully breastfed, pitied those who were unsuccessful, and signed my husband and me up for classes in which I dunked my nipple in a doll’s mouth. I talked endlessly about it to everyone. Registered for a breast pump with more horsepower than my car. I bought heaps of nursing bras, nursing tops and breast pads. I refused my friends’ offers of used bottles and bought extremely stylish apron-like contraptions that would hide my baby and exposed breasts as I fed her at places like the Farmers’ Market and the cloth diaper emporium. It was going to happen. I hadn’t prepared for anything more in my entire life, and there wasn’t anything I didn’t know about nipple texture, let down, mastitis, positioning and colostrum. I spoke to my doctor about making sure after delivery that my child’s lips would touch my nipple as quickly as possible. Was there a way I could bend myself into a position such that I could breastfeed my child as she was coming out of me? Because that would be impressive.

After the birth of my daughter, and the hour-long process of stitching my vagina back together, I finally got my baby to my breast. While it wasn’t like they showed in the video in class, with the dim lighting and soft music, it was a special enough occasion. A nurse came to me with my daughter in one hand and her other hand pawing at my hospital gown to expose my left boob. She flopped my daughter in my arms, took a gloved hand, squeezed my breast and forcefully guided it into my baby’s mouth. My child seemed tired and annoyed, but she suckled enough to let me know that I was already mastering breastfeeding. And motherhood.

My husband and I returned home with our little bundle feeling pretty damn good about ourselves. We were told our newborn would sleep constantly for the first few weeks. But our first two nights were very difficult as our baby cried—a lot. She was fussy, mad even, and would only sleep once she cried herself into exhaustion. I kept on breastfeeding, forgoing sleep and trying everything I could to make her happy. On her second day home I began to notice she was looking more jaundice with each passing hour. And despite breastfeeding her every two hours, she had not had a single wet diaper.

When I noticed the whites of her eyes were the color of autumn gourds, we decided to call the doctor. They said to run, not walk, to the nearest emergency room. We assumed that she just needed to sit under the Bili lights for a few hours until the jaundice subsided and then we would be back to kicking ass as parents.

But when her blood work came back in the ER, it was discovered that my child was severely dehydrated. She would need to be admitted to the hospital for several days to get her fluids up and to be under strict observation. She was only three days old.

My husband and I were in a state of shock. Having had no sleep because I’d been so impressively breastfeeding every two hours, I immediately burst into tears. And I didn’t stop crying until we were allowed to take our daughter home three days later.

After the long process of getting our daughter admitted, hooked up to an IV and situated in our bleak, sterile room, I began answering over and over and over again the only question any one seemed to care about: Was my milk in? Though I was a scholar at all things breast, I had no idea if my milk, was in fact, in.

The theory was that my milk had not “come in” and the colostrom I was producing was so minimal that my child was suffering from dehydration, or starvation. So while my three-day-old daughter was hooked up to an IV with a 5-pound bag of fluid, tiny, small and scared, I was to sit beside her and use a breast pump anytime I wasn’t breastfeeding to encourage my milk to arrive.

So for three days, I sat, in a bathrobe, still bleeding out the vagina, having had no sleep since giving birth, with a pump on each breast, looking in shame at the bottles not filling up. I would stop pumping every hour and bring my daughter to the breast. This was difficult as her arm was so bandaged with IVs, so I had to do the football hold, which always put a kink in my back. When she would finish, I was back on the pump. I would feed her whatever little I eeked out over the hour and then try to breastfeed again.

A lactation consultant came to visit me. She asked me a series of questions and concluded that there was a very high chance that my milk would never come in. I protested this assumption. No book, no class, no person ever said there was a chance your body would be the obstacle for breastfeeding. They told me about laziness, selfishness, inconvenience and just not being impressive enough, but they never said your body could fail you. But, the very hormonal imbalances that led to us having to seek fertility treatments were the same hormonal imbalances that were delaying my milk from coming in. My struggles with hypothyroidism and my extremely irregular periods are symptoms just like poor milk supply. Bragging through my pregnancy about not having my breast grow or feel tender was merely an early sign that I would have trouble nursing.

The consultant weighed my daughter, had me breastfeed her for an hour and then weighed her again. “We like to see at least 60 mgs at this stage,” she said.

“What did I produce?”

“Less than 6.”

My husband kept cheering me on, not because he thought it was necessary to continue this path, but because he knew how badly I wanted it. He acted as though producing 6 mgs of breast milk was the most amazing thing I’d ever done. Next to my Mexican casserole. The consultant talked to us about supplementing in a way that wouldn’t discourage breastfeeding. So—instead of pumping, then feeding my daughter the pumped milk, then breastfeeding her, then offering her one ounce of formula out of a bottle—she suggested a more breast-friendly alternative. It was a bottle that clipped to my shirt, with a long tube I taped down my breast and around my nipple. While my baby was at my breast, she would be nursing, but also getting formula from the tube. Then, we would need to clean the tube and bottle so thoroughly or else risk an infection from leftover bacteria. Properly cleaning this contraption took nearly 20 minutes. And we would need to do this between pumping, breastfeeding and talking with doctors who came in on the hour to take more blood from our baby.

We spoke with a total of eight pediatricians during our stay, all of whom had a different opinion about my ability to breastfeed. The first doctor said I would never be able to do it and that pumping and giving her breast milk through the bottle was the only option for me. Upon hearing this, I burst into tears and cried so hard I fell on the floor. The next doctor said that I should stop supplementing and strictly breastfeed. This brought me to such a level of ecstasy that I jumped in the air with the breast pump still attached. The third, fourth and fifth doctors said that supplementing was the only way but that my milk should come in at some point and I could wean her from the bottle. This saddened me, but the idea of weaning off the formula at some point made me emotionally stable enough to remain moderately calm. The sixth and seventh doctors both suggested a tea and an herbal supplement that should easily bring my milk in and up the quantity. My husband left my side long enough to purchase these. So, while I pumped and he washed the bottle/nipple tube contraption, I drank the tea and downed the herbs. My dream of exclusively breastfeeding for six months was already shot to hell. Now it was a matter of trying to construct a feeding process that most resembled what I wanted.

Meanwhile, I spent my time on the pump texting my friends who had all done so well with breastfeeding. They offered words of encouragement even as they contradicted the doctors. They told me how doctors don’t know much about breastfeeding and to not trust them. They told me how no woman in the world has ever been documented as not being able to make enough milk. Despite my daughter’s dehydration and her plunging weight and health, they insisted that supplementing formula would doom us both. That breastfeeding is possible for everyone, unless they just don’t try.

All this advice. All this work. My tiny baby in a crib, dehydrated, yellow, tired, hungry. My dream of being able to do this for her. My friends telling me I was able, just try harder. The doctors giving me conflicting advice. My husband cleaning bottles and tubes and nipple clamps and running around getting me herbs and teas and clean underwear all led to an all out nervous breakdown while I was in the bathroom. My husband had to nearly beat down the door to get to me as I was on the tile floor screaming and crying with my raw nipples exposed. I failed to imagine a life outside the moment I was in. I couldn’t see beyond coming out of the bathroom. Because outside the bathroom was my sick daughter, a hard cot and that goddamned breast pump. The attack felt like the culmination of five extremely stressful, exhausting, and harrowing days, but also a way to escape. To pop the bubble of madness in which I had become trapped. Sitting on that bathroom floor screaming, crying, beating on my husband was the only way I knew how to release all the sorrow that was sloshing around inside of me. Luckily my husband was able to get me to a calmer place. A more stable frame of mind. And he got me a turkey sandwich. Life was going to go on. It had to.

We were finally sent home with the definitive word from the eighth doctor being that I should stop the formula all together since my milk had truly come in (it took almost eight days), though they were slightly concerned it wasn’t increasing any in volume. They thought that if my daughter nursed more the milk would come in stronger. So home we went thinking we could put the sad occurrence behind us and move forward as we had always planned; exclusively breastfeeding. I spent two days nursing exclusively, and pumping round the clock, and at her follow up appointment, she had lost even more weight. Supplementing was our only option.

Again, friends came back to contradict the doctors, saying if I had my child to my breast just eight times a day, my milk would be more than enough. I had my child at my breast roughly 15 times a day and she was facing another bought of dehydration. So I came to terms with the idea that I would just have to supplement.

Watching my daughter nurse should have convinced me to stop. I woke her up constantly, repositioned, squeezed my breasts to help the milk flow, and still she was tired. When it came time for a bottle, she was alert, gave me direct eye contact, stayed awake and burped like a sailor. I wouldn’t allow myself to acknowledge that her laziness on the breast was exactly like my college boyfriend; she didn’t want to put much effort in because she knew she wouldn’t ultimately get what she wanted.

For days after the hospital I pumped, nursed, supplemented and then lay on my couch and cried. My mother was supportive. She couldn’t produce much milk either, so my siblings and I were formula fed. My mother-in-law kept remarking on how much she loved breastfeeding but quit after five weeks so she could return to work. But I wanted to be better than my mother and my mother-in-law. And all other mothers, really.

So I kept pushing myself, continuing the routine from the hospital: breast feed for a half hour, pump for another half hour, lie down for 20 minutes, start over again. I’d walk around the house, crying, in an untied robe with my leaky breasts exposed to any visiting family members. I scoured websites to see if it was normal that my milk supply wasn’t building up at all (if anything, it seemed to be lessening), furiously read through blogs of mothers who kept claiming what a joy it is to breastfeed, and texted with my well-meaning friends who were supporting me so fervently that I couldn’t tell if they were just wanting this because I did, or if they were refusing to let me off the hook.

Part of the reason I really wanted to breastfeed was because of the bond it would help me form. At the time, in the throes of stress over breastfeeding, I didn’t have many feelings for my daughter. She was cranky and wiggly, but when she was put to my breast, she would fall into a sleepy stupor. I didn’t feel myself attaching to her in any way, despite many hours lying with her, pressing her naked body to my naked body as she nursed. Rereading everything I had read before about nursing, I couldn’t understand why I was struggling so hard. I refused to believe my body was failing. I blamed nobody but myself.

For days I nursed constantly. Once, she was attached to my breast for a five hour stretch overnight—I woke up in tears from pain and from flat out hating the experience. My child didn’t seem to ever be happy, and so I kept placing her to the breast in a fruitless attempt to cheer her up. Meanwhile, I was beyond sleep deprived. The typical equity between my husband and I was gone. I was holding her, nursing her, changing her and thinking about her 95% of the time while he ran around doing the only things he could: laundry, meal runs, vacuuming. I felt like I hadn’t seen him in years and was afraid our marriage was falling away. I couldn’t figure out what my priority should be. My child? My husband? Myself? Because I seemed to be sacrificing each of them for the others. And no one was satisfied. Least of all me.

The morning of our daughter’s newborn photo shoot, my husband rolled over after turning off the alarm to find me as he always did: awake and crying. “Someone has to tell me what to do,” I said. “Because I can’t seem to give this up.”

“We’re done.” He said quietly. Sweetly. Kindly. I knew in that moment, with his hand on mine, that we were. I couldn’t go on. My daughter wasn’t thriving. I wasn’t functioning. Our marriage didn’t exist. That morning we gave our baby a bubbling bottle of formula and nothing else. No pumped milk. No nursing. She looked at us with gratitude. And finally full, finally content and hydrated, she slept. Which gave our photographer two hours to photograph our darling baby, resulting in the most precious collection of images that I will forever cherish.

The choice to stop nursing was the right one. My daughter instantly changed in demeanor once I stopped. She slept great, sighed with happiness, gripped my finger with hers and stared at me with intensity. We finally started to get to know one another. My husband and I were able to alternate feedings, so I was finally getting sleep. He and I were able to find moments in the day to kiss, hug, talk. Our daughter started gaining weight, her cheeks filled in, and her skin changed from a pale yellow to a rosy pink.

But despite the many wonderful changes that came after I stopped nursing, I couldn’t help but continue hating the situation, loathing my inability to do it, being sensitive to any friends who stopped by and asked how nursing was going. I felt pressure all around me. I felt shame when I mixed a formula bottle in public. I felt, above all things, like a failure.

There is no doubt in my mind that breastfeeding is the absolute best thing for your child. Assuming you can do it. And I couldn’t. Doctors, lactation consultants, self-righteous mothers and parenting books all told me what was best for my baby, and I listened. For awhile. But I rest assured in the fact that I recognized breastfeeding wasn’t best for her and I stopped. And that is pretty damn impressive.