On: Breast milk, Part 2

I am not a good pumper. I work outside my home, so I have to pump in order to maintain my nursing relationship. But I am not good at it. I cannot count the number of times I have wanted to give up. I also cannot count the number of times I have sobbed before, during and after pumping; the times I have been inconsolable in defeat and grief.

Pumping is inconvenient. You have to stop whatever you're doing, plug in the machine, take off your shirt, outfit your breasts with these terrible plastic things that turn your breasts into a shape that would never exist in nature. You have to assemble the valves, attach the bottles, adjust your pumping bra.... and then you can turn on the machine and listen to it for the next 45 minutes while your nipples are tugged at in a ridiculous manner. When you're done, you have to wash all those parts, and there are lots of them and they are tiny with lots of crevices.

To do all of this, you have to remove yourself to a private place. That means announcing to others, "I'm sorry I must leave this meeting. I have to pump." and you say it apologetically as if you owe an apology for something your body must do. You will plan your day around pumping, accept or reject invitations to meetings based on pumping. Your will ask your coworkers to cover for you more times than you care to count (mine always cover for me because they are the best women in the world and they never give me any flack for it). Hopefully you work somewhere that has a private place for you to pump. My office is private, but if I'm in public, there are zero guarantees. I have found myself many times on the floor of a bathroom, next to the sink or the trash can, wherever the outlet is. Gathering food for my baby, in a bathroom, on the floor. My husband has suggested that I publicly shame these places on Facebook. Someday I might start.

Sometimes, even if your pumping place is private, someone will still barge in on you. A closed door means nothing to people. I finally made a sign for my office that says "Pumping in progress, please mooove along." because I want to be nice, but also, move the hell on. It has a round little cartoon cow on it and I do not feel ironically about it. Even with the sign, I have been interrupted, so now I put it right over the door knob. No one can open the door without moving that little cartoon cow and now they stay out, or at least knock first.

Add to all of this that the pump is not very efficient at getting milk. So you sometimes have to "massage" to get the milk flowing. I use quotation marks because for me, "massage" has meant "pushing milk out against all odds." I have bruised myself, my breasts, to get more milk. Just one more drop. Just another half an ounce. Push, push, push, drip, drip, drip.

Because you always need more milk. The daycare workers used to practically chant it at me "more milk more milk more milk more milk." Some people say their pumps talk to them. That's what my pump says: "more milk more milk more milk more milk" ad nauseum. You hear women call it "liquid gold" in a half-joking, half-deadly serious tone, because it is precious and you always need more. More milk, more  milk, more milk.

So to get more milk more milk more milk, you will do superstitious things, anything someone suggests. I have eaten more oatmeal than any one person should ever be forced to eat. I have baked cookies, chugged Gatorade, and Kool-Aid, and coconut water (which is worse than oatmeal, even). My husband joked that I was going to give myself diabetes in an attempt to get more milk. I have swallowed hundreds of tablets of Fenugreek and blessed Thistle. I have created strange superstitions about when I should drink water, trying to time it just right to maximize that milk.

The milk became for me a symbol of my abilities as a mother. I measured myself and my worth against those graduated increments on the bottles, and I came up short time after time. I judged myself because I was not some kind of Lactation Goddess, milk pouring unfettered from my breasts. Pumping became an obsession. I could not focus on anything else if it was time to pump. I rushed through time with my husband and baby so I could pump. These were dark days for me. The bottles would be short, and I would beat myself up. Milk got wasted at daycare and I was inconsolable. The couple of times I had to pour milk down the drain, I experienced real grief. I counted the dwindling number of bags of frozen milk in my freezer like Dexter counted his blood slides.

I went to a therapist. We talked about how my obsession with milk was affecting my every day life, how I was attempting to will my breasts into submission, how maybe I should stop pumping. But I couldn't talk rationally about any of it. I called my lactation consultant for advice, and when she suggested pumping for longer times, I did it. I would have eaten a cat turd if someone said it would make more milk more milk more milk. My inability to pump copious amounts of milk became my biggest source of guilt, my biggest sore spot, my biggest place of mom-failure.

It doesn't help that the failure is so literal and right in my face. When I need 4 ounces of milk, and I can only force 3.... the failure can't be any more obvious. It is a clear place in my life where I have a goal and I come up short, and there's no hemming and hawing about it. The writing's on the bottle.

Compounding that guilt is the fact that I have to admit that I can do all of this because I am privileged enough to do all of this. I had a lactation consultant to call. I had insurance that covered the cost of my pump, and a rad friend to loan me another one when that one wasn't doing the job. I have a boss and coworkers who support me. I have a job that gives me flexibility. I have a private office where I can pump. I have a daycare that will give breast milk to my daughter. I have a regular schedule and I don't work manual labor or food service. I have a reliable and clean place to store pumped breast milk. As far as working mamas go, I've got it pretty dang good.  Knowing my privilege just complicates my relationship with pumping even more.

I belong to a group of mamas online, and they are smart, funny and wonderful women. And we talk a lot about pumping and the struggles we have with it. And I find it hard to give good advice, because my relationship with pumping is a mess. So I try to tell them "I hear you. It sucks and I hear you." because I don't know what else to say.

I wish someone had warned me: pumping sucks...it might be hard for you...it might not happen like you imagine it. I don't know if I would have listened anyway.

My initial pumping goal was a year. Working with my therapist, I have revised that to six months, which I have already achieved. I don't feel the darkness I felt even just two months ago. I still feel pressure, and I still follow those superstitions, and I still "massage" but I don't obsess any more.  Now, every day I continue gets to be a victory. One more day that I didn't give up. I don't know how I got here for sure. It took a lot of serious conversations with my husband, my therapist, my friends and my online mamas.

Pumping and I are working it out; but it's one day at a time.

On: Breast milk (part 1)

I have written this post about nursing about 1,000 times in my head over the past 7 months. I never knew I could become so obsessed with a body fluid.  Feeding a baby is complicated and emotional, far more so than I would have predicted before I had a baby. I think on some level I knew, because messaging about breastfeeding is pervasive and (in my opinion) sometimes aggressive. So I knew there was something swirling in the collective unconsciousness about baby-feeding. But I had no idea the size of the impact this had on my own unconsciousness.

I have never judged another woman for how she feeds her baby. Just feed your baby! However that works for you, whatever iteration or combination or exclusive or inclusive model works for you. There are so many variables that go into the feeding relationship between a parent and a baby; I could never presume to know or understand all of them. I don't understand all of them in my own feeding relationship. Other parents deserve my support, not some know-it-all judgey attitude from me.

Society does not give us this courtesy though. Whatever you've chosen, someone thinks is wrong, and they will tell you as if it is their business. The occasion when I was most offended when I was pregnant was related to this phenomenon. I was barely pregnant, we had just started telling people, and we went out to lunch with family. A family member told the waitress I was pregnant, and she said, no joke, "Of course you'll breastfeed, right?"I.Was.Shocked. This woman, whom I had exchanged maybe 5 words with, suddenly presumed to know so much about me. The decisions a person makes about feeding a child are deeply personal, emotional, conflicting. But here's this waitress, invading my life in a way that had zero regard for any of that. I was angry; I felt raw and exposed. I have come to find that this event is indicative of how society treats women with babies; not as free-thinking individuals with choices, but as if there is a one-size-fits-all approach to baby-feeding. The "right way" or no way.

There are actual experts who exist in this field of baby-feeding. I have had mixed results in my interactions with them. I had the help of a wonderful lactation consultant who supported me, taught me, and dried lots of my tears. I had a terrible pediatrician tell me I was starving my daughter while I waited for my milk to come in and forced me to feed formula. Our normal pediatrician has been supportive and kind, although not particularly educational. My point is this: if even "experts" can't agree, then who can say what the absolute best answer for every person could be? Certainly not our waitress.

Messaging about breastfeeding is all around. On one hand, of course I can understand the importance of such messages. Breastfeeding can be hard. Sometimes you need a reminder about how it's important to keep going, if you can. But as a person who has struggled with nursing/pumping...these messages seem aggressive. The messages hold women back, pit us against each other. Particularly those messages about how "breastfeeding is natural! Your body was made for it!" are really troubling for me. Yes, we are all mammals. In theory, our bodies are designed to feed milk to our young. But in reality, we all exist within normal biological variation, and some women can make loads and loads of milk, and some women can make none and some make barely enough. And if you're in those last two categories? Those messages make you feel like shit, a failure, a loser. Those messages weighed me down with guilt and self-loathing and anxiety.

Throughout history, I believe women faced much less pressure. Women worked together, forming a village where they could share responsibility for children and nursing. If you were a woman who made lots of milk, you fed the babies of the women who didn't make as much. That still exists to some extent, with women who donate to individuals or to milk banks. But overall I feel women today are isolated and we feed our babies without the benefit of that supportive societal village. The societal village has become a peanut gallery instead, throwing rotten tomatoes at you when you trip up.

Please don't misunderstand. Among people whom I actually know, and have relationships with, I have had wonderful, loving support on my nursing journey. Every time I have struggled, I have had my husband and many supporting women and my therapist to cry to and I have felt their love and empathy. These relationships have kept me moving forward for far longer than I could ever have done on my own. My village is wonderful; the societal village is failing. Which of course is part of a larger conversation about women in society at all.

I'm not done writing about this topic. I have a lot more to say, but I need more time to gather my thoughts. If you're reading this and want to share your own thoughts or journey, you're welcome as a guest poster on this blog.