Good morning!
Today’s newsletter is twice as long as usual. I thought of splitting it into two parts as I’ll be out next week for Sunny’s Annaprashan, a Hindu ceremony celebrating her introduction to solid food, but it made more sense to publish it all together. So I’ll see you in two Sundays (paid content will continue as normal). At the top, I want to warn anyone who’s sensitive to motherhood content that today’s essay is very much about motherhood.
One of the distinct features of having a baby in a hospital is how often people check on you. There are the nurses monitoring your vitals and the baby’s vitals every few hours, peeking inside your underwear, replacing your bloody sheets. There are doctors assessing your baby’s senses and reflexes, attendants bringing food and clearing it away, midwives asking how you’re feeling. I’ve said that everyone who worked in my recovery ward was an angel, but I wasn’t being completely honest. The lactation consultants were the exception that proved the rule.
Over my 48 hours there, I saw three. I cannot say whether this disposition is endemic to the role, but each one I met was gruff and impatient in their own specific style of TSA agent, and all seemed confused as to why I didn’t already know how to breastfeed. The rules appeared to change between their visits, and I was always breaking them—sitting at the wrong angle, arm in the wrong spot, latching the baby too slowly, too softly, too quickly. I was so fragile and worried I wouldn’t get it. Everything hurt. I wanted the LCs to hug me and pet my hair; my LCs wanted me to stop messing everything up with my pain and inexperience.
Breastfeeding requires coordination: the alignment of the baby’s body with your chest, the dragging open of their chin, the positioning of your nipple in the baby’s mouth, the timing of the shove that enables a proper latch. None of this is intuitive, which is surprising as it’s technically a bodily function. (The appropriate angle between the baby and the boob is not the angle you might guess—the baby’s chin should be buried in your boob, their nose barely touching you.) This keeps the hospital LCs busy. They say a proper latch is never painful, but they’re wrong. Even after I got the hang of nursing, it still curled my toes. On my third day of being a mother I could barely move my arms from holding her in weird positions. For weeks my nipples were so sore I jumped around the shower in fear of the water touching them.
There is a strange phenomenon experienced by breastfeeding people known as “Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex,” which is the sudden onset of negative feelings when milk releases. It only lasts for a couple minutes, maybe less. My sister told me that every time her milk let down she felt homesick—not for any particular place, just homesick generally, consumed to the point of tears, and then poof, it was gone. Strangely, I felt the opposite. Whenever my milk let down I felt euphoric, like everything was going to be okay. This would take me by surprise, sometimes causing me to laugh even when I was already crying from the pain. This confused the LCs further.
Over the course of those first weeks, the pain dulled, then came back, then dulled again. The clogs arrived, then dissipated, then returned. I Googled endlessly. Switch boobs every time or start on the one you last left off? Proper nursing angle to release clogs. Ice or heat for clogs? Sharp pain in nipple breastfeeding. Burning pain in nipple breastfeeding. What to do when baby only nurses on one side and you don’t want to get mastitis but you also don’t want to cause an oversupply by pumping more than your baby is eating. You wouldn’t believe how specific my questions could get at 3 in the morning. The supply-and-demand nature of breast milk is proof of both the existence of intelligent design and its bias against women.
One month in, we were in a rhythm. I could latch Sunny quickly and easily in the dark, my body slumped against my pillows. I kept spare bras and t-shirts stashed around the house for when my current ones got too damp. I took her on an airplane, sneaking her under my shirt whenever the symbiotic alarm clock of our bodies rang out. Our skin was always the exact same temperature. Both of us smelled like milk. “I feel like a house to which an extension has been added,” Rachel Cusk wrote in A Life’s Work, “where once there was a wall, now there is a new room. I feel my heat and light flowing vertiginously into it.” She calls this composite motherbaby. The two cannot be separated.
At my six-week postpartum checkup, my midwife asked how breastfeeding was going and my answer came fast and sure: Great! The baby was eating well, gaining weight, attached to me like a barnacle. Then she asked if I had any questions about it, and I replied yes, actually, did she have any suggestions for the searing nipple pain? The recurrent clogs? The dull throb in my boob? I rattled off several more. She looked concerned—she’d thought breastfeeding was going well. It was, it was, I assured her.
Breastfeeding is so sweet, I texted my friend, who was also nursing. I miss when it was sweet, she replied. Her baby had taken to yanking. Sunny still looked so peaceful when she nursed. I loved the intimacy of cuddling and feeding her at the same time, of providing exactly what she needed when she needed it, our bodies in perfect sync. It was thrilling to leave the house with her and never bring food, because it was already in me. That felt like magic. A week after texting my friend, I took a needle to my nipple, attempting to “pop” a milk blister that may or may not have existed—I was pretty sure it was there and that it was the source of my discomfort. (It wasn’t.) A week after that, both my boobs sore with clogs, I laid Sunny on the ground and attempted several different angles of upside-down “dangle” nursing in hopes of releasing them. I looked like I was playing Twister. I kept collapsing in laughter.
Four months in, Sunny started sleeping through the night and eating less frequently, and my supply tanked in response. I started pumping after she nursed, in between nurses, and again after she went to sleep to increase my supply, which agitated my vasospasm—a lack of blood flow to my nipple that made it feel like I was holding my nipple to a hot pan. One night she was hungry and I didn’t have enough breast milk for her, so I made some formula. I put two ounces of water in a bottle, added two scoops of powder, then shook it up. I froze, sure I’d missed a step. It had been too easy, too fast. No sterilizing then pumping then labeling then refrigerating then rewarming? No pain?
I wanted to stop but I couldn’t. I wanted to be in less pain, to be free to leave the house for more than an hour without thinking about where I was going to put all the milk, but the thought of weaning Sunny made me panic. Breastfeeding is not something most people think much about, and why would they? Without the proper context, which I’m doomed to fail at providing, the idea that a woman might feel attached to breastfeeding just sounds creepy. Breasts have been too sexualized, mothers too easily dismissed as self-involved. Sometimes in the shower, I would concoct elaborate metaphors to help non-breastfeeding people understand. What if they had to give blood to their partner every day to keep them alive? What if this caused them pain but helped their partner thrive, prevented them from getting sick, and helped the two of them bond? What if they could stop but the alternative was administering powdered blood that came in an expensive can and that everyone was always arguing about? This was some of my worst work.
I ran into an acquaintance at a party. She’d had a baby two months before me and I hadn’t seen her in a while. I confessed that I fantasized about weaning Sunny off breastfeeding. “I have a lot of pain,” I told her. She looked at me sadly. Breastfeeding had never hurt her. “Not even in the beginning?” No, she said. “I also struggle with clogs,” I told her. Clogs? She’d never heard of such a thing. She planned to breastfeed for at least a year.
Before I had a baby, I could not imagine nursing or being worried about nursing for any particular amount of time. I knew and still know that formula-feeding has as many benefits as breastfeeding, just different ones. But then I grew and gave birth to Sunny and feeding her from my body felt like an obvious continuation of our relationship. I felt so lucky it worked. We were motherbaby. “I imagine my solidity transferring itself to her, leaving me unbodied, a mere force, a miasma of nurture that surrounds her like a halo,” Cusk writes. In her memoir Splinters, Leslie Jamison describes nursing her baby while her mother brought her water, the three of them composing “a single hydraulic system.” Motherbabymotherbaby.
The drive to breastfeed isn’t just emotional or practical. There’s propaganda everywhere. Breast milk is often referred to as “liquid gold,” said to bolster your baby’s immune system, microbiome, IQ, and more. Supposedly it fights off cancer and disease, indigestion and rashes. Nevermind the studies that question all of that. The World Health Organization recommends that you breastfeed your baby for two years. The CDC recommends one year. Breastfeeding is said to take about as much time, hour for hour, as a full-time job. In America, there is no guaranteed paid maternity leave. The average paid leave granted by US companies is 29 days. After I gave birth, I didn’t stop bleeding for six weeks.
Five months in, my parents came to visit. They watched my face crumple in concentration at the pain of nursing Sunny on the right side, which seemed to be getting worse despite my perpetual belief that I was around the corner from it disappearing forever. Breastfeeding was always about to get better, I just had to wait a little longer. They heard Avi remind me to breathe, as he always did, because I always forgot. After two days of this, my dad said, You know, I wouldn't do something that hurt that bad once a week. He put emphasis on that last part—he wouldn’t even do it once a week. My resolve unraveled. I told them I badly wanted to stop but couldn’t bring myself to do it. This was all they needed to hear to launch their weaning campaign: Why are you doing this? You’ve done great! It’s time to stop! Something loosened in my chest. Parental permission could still have that effect.
In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson quotes the gender theorist Eve Sedgwick: “That's enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.)” Enough enough enough.
I’d been nursing Sunny for 10 minutes on each side, but the day my parents left she unlatched after seven and I never let her go longer than that again. Seven became six, then five. I dropped my nighttime pump. Four feeds became three. You have to wean slowly or you could get infections from clogs or your hormones could swing so wildly it could trigger postpartum depression or even psychosis. I crafted a detailed plan in my phone, then cheated on it. When I brought Sunny to my body, her mouth opened instinctively, like a baby bird’s. When we brought a bottle to her mouth, thank god, she did the same thing.
My friend agreed to wean at the same time as me. We tried to hold each other accountable. We sent voice-text novellas back and forth detailing our indescribable ache. We wanted to stop, no we didn’t, yes we did, no we didn’t! We’d heard from a kind internet stranger that breastfeeding tricks your mind and body into never wanting to stop. We had to overcome the trick. We became obsessed with the expression “powering through.” I put the pump away for good and floated around all day, high on my imminent freedom. It was amazing what I could do when I ignored my own protestations.
Three feeds become two. When Sunny drank, her hands gently wandered around my chest, like she was studying me. I closed my eyes to capture the sensation, to lock it in for later recollection. The less I nursed her, the less painful it became. Breastfeeding and I were like a couple who finally gets along once they decide to get divorced. Two feeds became one. Sunny was fattening up on the formula. Suddenly she was rolling over, sitting up, giggling more than she’d ever giggled. Sometimes when I looked at her I was so overcome with joy I thought I might vibrate off the floor. But a sadness crouched in my gut, weighing me down.
Three weeks into weaning, my college roommate texted me that she’d just given birth. Breastfeeding was proving difficult. I started typing furiously to her—we’d barely spoken in years—I wanted to hug her, tell her everything I knew. I thought of every mother learning to breastfeed that very minute, or trying to. I was standing in a Shake Shack, weeping.
On Sunny’s six-month birthday, I woke up with a stomach ache. I knew this would be it. I’d been ambiently sad for days, struck by grief I didn’t understand, which meant there was no hope of anyone else understanding it either. I dreaded the ceremony of the last time, or maybe I dreaded what I knew would be a lack of ceremony. As she nursed, none the wiser, my euphoria faded while two measly tears rolled down my cheeks. It wasn’t enough. The next day, I got the heaviest period of my life. I guess I asked for that.
It’s been three weeks since I finished. My boobs are empty and officially out of service, replaced by a canister with a plastic scoop. I keep thinking of Cusk’s words about those first days after birth: “We are still so close to our sundering that neither of us seems entire: the painful stump of our jointness, livid and fresh, remains.” Weaning felt like a second birth in a way, a second severing: motherbaby becomes mother, baby. The wound left by our separation is healing now, but it’s still there, even if no one can see it. My baby is sleeping and eating well without me, no signs of motherhood left on my body but a fading line below my belly button. Now, of course, I mourn the signs, try to laminate the last one in gratitude. Formula is so expensive, I say to Avi. So was breastfeeding, he reminds me.
I thought I wanted to come back to myself, but there’s no coming back. Before having a baby I feared the exact things I now revere: the immersion, the sacrifice. These days I relish finding new ways to give myself to Sunny: swinging her body through the air until my arms are sore because it makes her laugh; kissing the tears off her cheeks to form our new hydraulic system. And at night when she’s sleeping, I turn over in bed and lie flat on my stomach, something I couldn’t do for a year and a half, and let gravity push me into my own private oblivion.
My favorite article I read last week was this amazing 2021 interview with Maggie Nelson by Nelli Ruotsalainen for Tulva. Last week’s 15 things also included my latest baking attempt, an unexpected gift idea, some new things to listen to, and more. The rec of the week was meal kit delivery services. The anti-Hello Fresh bias made me laugh.
Last week I had Tavi Gevinson on the podcast to discuss her Taylor Swift zine—don’t want you to miss it if you loved the zine too!
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley
Reading about your parents’ permission and reassurance was so moving. Thank you for publishing this. I imagine it was a beast to write and think through. Beautifully done.
This was a lovely read. And we need more MEN to read about the journey of motherhood, not just the women. Our society is designed to erase Pregnancy and motherhood under the carpet. It is essential that everyone understands the ups and downs of the process of motherhood and it’s highs and lows.