Humor

Breastfeeding Dropout

By Jodi Neelin

Humor

I am a breastfeeding dropout.

I think it was a karmic payoff for my arrogance. Having responsibly taken my Breastfeeding 101 class, I knew that this was the natural and most nutritious choice for my baby. All I would have to do is persevere while my infant learned to latch, and soon I would be effortlessly dispensing milk like a prize-winning cow. I would easily shed those post-pregnancy pounds while my baby and I basked in the warm, sacred glow of breastfeeding bonding.

My freshly birthed daughter, ravenous, latched on like a vacuum cleaner. I was shocked. The teacher had told us that breastfeeding wouldn't hurt!

The nurse gave me lanolin to soothe the screaming rawhide that had been my breasts just days earlier. (It wasn't until after I got home from the hospital that I saw the warning on the tube that said "if ingested, contact a poison control center immediately.")

The night before we were due to take our tiny new daughter home, she was taken out of our room for tests. At 1:00am, she was still AWOL, and I alternated between fretting in my bed, and dragging my bloated, drugged self to the nursery to comfort her.

By 3:00am, she still hadn't returned. A matronly, no-nonsense nurse came into our room, wheeling a hospital-grade breast pump. She instructed me to hook up this machine and pump for ten minutes a side, increasing the power gradually higher over the ten minutes. I protested as I was very doubtful there was any milk yet.

"There's more than you think," she snorted, and left the room as quickly as she'd entered.

With no basis for comparison, I had to trust that this maternity nurse knew what she was talking about. However, even in the depths of my drug-induced delirium, I instinctively knew that I hadn't felt the discomfort of engorgement that I had so studiously learned about in class.

Yet eager to help my baby and confident that the milk would soon be flowing, I hooked up the machine and off we went. I craned my head around the tubes to see the milk. Nothing.

It took about five minutes for the blood to start.

Drip, drip, it was watery and came out drop by solitary drop. Was this normal? Surely the nurse would have told me to stop if I started bleeding, if this wasn't OK? I dutifully pumped 10 minutes worth of blood into the bottle and the nurse returned.

"Um, there's no milk, only blood," I offered.

"Oh, that's OK, just go ahead and latch her on," she said.

I finally had a moment of clarity in this narcotic whirlwind and put my swollen foot down.

"I will NOT feed my baby blood; you need to bring her formula," I insisted. The nurse attempted to argue but I wasn't having any of it. At this point, my baby needed nourishment and I didn't care if it came from me or a glass bottle. That night, we began the slippery slope into the bottle.

I spent hundreds of dollars on rented hospital-grade breast pumps and fenugreek supplements. One afternoon, I pumped for half an hour and produced one teaspoon of milk. I know it was a teaspoon because I carefully gathered it up with a medicine dropper. 5 ml. At least that day my daughter got the good stuff: an hors d oeuvre of Mommy's finest while she waited for her bottle to be ready.

In an ironic twist, while the dairy lay idle, there was some fluid flowing freely for the first few months: if I could have fed my baby tears, we would have been in business.

I was riddled with guilt. I had been blessed with a perfect baby and in my care, she was going to become an allergy-ridden, asthmatic, overweight adult with a low IQ. Living in Portland, Oregon, I was an outcast, an anomaly, and the Breastfeeding Nazis frowned disapprovingly at me as I popped my bottles of Enfamil.

The reminders of what a terrible mother I was were everywhere.

"Are you nursing?" inquired the doctor at Urgent Care, when I took nine-month-old Jenna in with an eye infection.

"Oh, McKinley refuses to take a bottle!" lamented one mother at a Mommy and Me group I attended for a few weeks."I think I'll just nurse Tammy until she's a year old," confirmed another mom.

People assumed I was nursing the way people assume everyone has a Christmas tree. The box of nursing pads sat unopened on my dresser.

Then the pamphlets arrived in the mail. Little booklets from the diaper people that talked about the wonders of breastfeeding . Pictures of little cherubs with huge eyes gazing lovingly up at their moms while they suckled their breasts amid the soft halos of filtered light.

Then came the page about formula feeding, the page that basically admonished "Well, if you've read the first 12 pages and have still chosen to formula feed for whatever reason, then that's your choice, and your baby will still get the nutrition she needs" (even if she will grow up to be an armed robber). Even the cans of formula told me that breast was best but if I made the choice to give my baby second best, their formula was the one on which to empty my wallet.

I was a pariah of motherhood. The sense of failure was compounded by the fact that this was my second strike: my body, which had failed to push out my baby, necessitating a c-section, had also failed to provide her with the nourishment that women have given their babies for thousands of centuries.

Two years have gone by and my bouncing, beautiful daughter is speaking in full sentences, memorizing books and loves to sing and dance. She is funny and strong and fiercely aware of her likes and dislikes. She is an adventurous eater and is a pleasure to take out as she sits at the table and occupies herself, patiently drawing with crayons on the children's menu until her food arrives.

I am the one she cries for if she is hurt; the one she looks for to share in her ecstatic joy when she does something by herself for the first time. We adore each other and when she wiggles into my lap to read her a story, all is right with the world.

My very dear friend had her first baby five weeks ago. She was not interested in breastfeeding at all, and never latched her baby on, even once. Three days after her daughter was born, my friend was wearing frozen cabbage leaves in her bra to try and get the milk to subside. And I finally forgave myself.

Some of us just don't get milk. The same way some of us just can't get pregnant, or can't have a vaginal birth, or are five foot one. But as long as our children are thriving and happy, by whatever means they came to us, and by whatever means we provide for them, we have given them the most precious gift of all: a mother's love.

And love, I am happy to discover, is something I do have, in infinite abundance.

Jodi Neelin lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and daughter. She recently published her first book, The Pregnasaurus.

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