My daughter was born two weeks after she was due, and even then she had to forcibly evicted. But really, who could blame her? She enjoyed being inside of me as much as I enjoyed having her there. Yeah, I’m one of those jerks who just loved being pregnant.
Even the delivery was a rockin’ good time. After the epidural worked its rubber-legged magic I was joking and laughing, and then I squeezed out that 9 pound 10 ounce baby like I’d squeeze a watermelon seed through my fingers.
A few seconds after she was born, my kid grabbed right onto my nipple and nursed like she’d been doing it all her life. Which, if you do the math, she had been.
Even my recovery was pretty much trouble-free, right down to that first poop. Mine, that is. They warn you that your first post-delivery poop will be excruciating, and when I felt the tell-tale abdominal rumblings on day three I trudged into the bathroom, squatted and braced myself for tears, but the experience turned out to be downright pleasant. In fact, when it was over I felt renewed, as though my bung-hole had been replaced, as though god himself had picked up the Grand Canyon, shaken it out like a damp towel, and let it settle, although this time the valleys had become peaks and the peaks valleys. I called it my “brand new anus”, just another perk of the motherhood game… the game that I was clearly winning.
Until our one week pediatrician appointment revealed that our perfect little girl had lost nearly twenty percent of her birthweight – double what was acceptable. Failure to thrive, he called it. Even though she was nursing every three hours, she was literally starving.
My tits were failing me.
My tits have always been my best quality. I’m not bragging when I say that. They are great, relative to the rest of my body, which is a gallery of horrors in comparison. There is so much wrong with what’s below my belly button there’s not time enough to list it all (although if you’re familiar with the myth of Medusa, then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what my pubic hair looks like). By default my tits were my best girls, and historically the first things to be revealed on a first date, a game of strip poker, or during a sale at the Home Depot.
The pediatrician suggested we switch to formula right way.
Whoa dr. cowboy! This is not my beautiful motherhood experience. I know what happens to children who don’t breastfeed. They become drug addicts, serial killers and socialites. I know that Michael Jordan was breastfed until he was three, and that Michael Jackson was not breastfed at all. But since I’m 200 years too late to locate a wet nurse, I conceded to use formula until the had gained the requisite amount of weight, but it would end there. After that I was determined to breastfeed my child for one year. Minimum.
It was suggested I visit a lactation consultant by the name of Binky. If Binky wasn’t available I was to see Corky. Those names are so real that I don’t even have a joke to go with them.
We drove to Binky’s office in Woodland Hills and she proceeded to examine my breastfeeding technique.
Her findings? What was coming out of my nipples was something closer to puffs of milk-scented air than actual milk. My supply “sucked”. That was the bad news. The good news is that it was the baby’s fault, not mine.
The baby had a bad latch, which led to my breasts being engorged, which led to my milk supply drying up which led to me sitting in a small office in Woodland Hills while a grown woman named Binky milked me.
Yeah, that’s right. She milked me.
Binky grabbed my nipple and pinched it hard, rolling it between her fingers…. I know this sounds like porn for Teletubbies, but it was about as sexy as b’acne, which is to say not very.
Binky pinched my nipple hard, jammed it about 12 inches into the baby’s mouth. At that moment, the moment of my first proper latch, it became perfectly clear to me that my baby was part piranha. I’m not sure how I managed to conceive a child with a carnivorous freshwater fish from South America, but it seemed the only way to explain the excruciating pain.
I stamped my foot on the floor repeatedly. That was to keep me from punching my baby in the face. Truth is, I would not punch my baby. But I may wait until she’s thirteen years old and give her one retroactively. I’m fairly certain she’ll deserve it by then anyway.
Two hours and several hundred dollars later, Binky sent us home with a hospital grade pump which I was to use every three hours until my supply could match my daughter’s demand.
When we got home, the husband bottle fed the baby while I zipped on my hands-free pumping bra, turned on the pump, and watched as it stretched my nipples through a transparent sleeve like Augustus Gloop going through the pipes of Willy Wonka’s chocolate river.
Now that I could actually see the milking process, I understood the problem. Milk wasn’t flowing, it was eking out of my nipples, like beads of flop sweat. One hour of Hoover-strength milking left me with a grand total of a half ounce of milk. And most of that came from the right breast. The left was completely useless. If my right breast was a slacker, my left was its illiterate cousin who lost half his brain in a tragic pig-farming accident.
But I would not be beaten.
Over the next few weeks my husband bottle-fed my daughter, while I pumped every three to four hours for up to an hour at a time.
I learned all about galactagogues, which though it sounds like an alien form of governance, is actually any substance that encourages lactation. As a result I ate oatmeal in large amounts, drank Guinness beer in small amounts and ingested an herb that made my skin smell like a combination of maple syrup and curry. Mostly curry.
I took a prescription medication for reflux, one side-effect of which is increased lactation; another side effect of which is depression. A hilarious situation for a new mother, if you think about it.
I went to breastfeeding support groups and listened to other new moms complain about their problems with overabundant flow, saying “ohmigod, I’m absolutely gushing. I could feed an army with what comes out of these”. I smiled with empathy while imagining punching them in their overflowing gazongas.
And I pumped.
Until little by little, drop by drop, my milk started to flow – or at least dribble. Not nearly at the rate the child was drinking, but enough that I could supplement her formula feedings with a little of my own milky love.
I was winning. Soon we would be the very picture of skin to skin maternal bliss.
But as one slow-flowing nipple said to the other, “not so fast”.
The child did not want the breast.
When I offered my ever-so-feebly lactating nipple to my daughter, she would give it a look and a suck, then scream into it like Henry Rollins yelling into a microphone. Worse, she could only be calmed by a pacifier. By a silicone version of my nipple.
This is what is known in the breastfeeding world as “nipple confusion”. But if you asked my daughter, she would say there was no confusion. That savvy four week old knew exactly what she wanted, and she couldn’t have been clearer if she’d emailed her thoughts to me and bcc’ed her lawyer.
It was hard not to take it personally. Almost as hard as it is to saw through a silicone pacifier with a steak knife.
So I continued to pump around the clock, and poured my liquid gold into little bottles that I or my husband would then feed her. I did this for four months and that’s when I gave up. As much as I believe in the benefits of breastfeeding, I believe that the six hours a day I was spending with the pump would be better spent with my child. So I 86’ed the pump and decided to let nature take its course.
For a while I tried to fool her into sucking on my nipples. I’d make her laugh and while her mouth was open I’d try jamming my nipple in there. But she never took to it, instead would just stare at me like I was some kind of pervert.
So now, two months later my child is one hundred percent formula-fed. She’s healthy and growing and I’m at peace with my choice. And that last part is a complete lie.
I am still tortured by it.
I worry.
I worry that there will be a chemical explosion and the city will be under siege by robots who take over the water supply and my baby will die because I won’t be able to breastfeed her during the ensuing apocalypse.
I worry that she’ll grow up to be a high school dropout, and date a guy with a tattoo of a snake on his face who tries to rob a liquor store and in the process shoots and kills kindly old Sheriff Jenkins and my dum-dum of a daughter gets blamed for it and ends up on death row where Susan Sarandon tries but ultimately fails to spare her life.
I worry that she’ll become an asshole.
And that’s why I still fight the daily urge to jam my dusty nipple in her mouth. I just hope I can get over it by the time she turns thirteen.
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Peter Bruce Photo
