Hit by a Pitch

Well, I haven’t been doing a good job of updating this blog. I still haven’t even finished my birth story and my kid is three and a half weeks old already. Honestly, I’ve been a little overwhelmed by my awful breastfeeding experience. I’m sick of thinking about it, but figure I should write about it. Maybe this will be helpful or comforting to someone else who goes through the same thing.

Whether to breastfeed was not an issue for me. That I would breastfeed for at least a year was a given. That’s just what you do. I did everything right, even before the birth, or at least I tried. Unfortunately, I went into labor the day I was supposed to have breastfeeding class, so I never had the class. I did have a nice, uncomplicated (but painful!) natural birth. I had a lactation consultant (LC) present at the birth (she’s my midwife’s assistant). She set me and the baby up in bed after the birth and showed me how to do side-lying nursing. It seemed like everything was fine.

When my midwife came back for the three-day follow up, we found out that S lost more than 10% of his birth weight (all babies lose weight at first, but they shouldn’t lose more than 10%). He also wasn’t pooping often enough and had been up screaming and crying for hours and hours the two previous nights (which is not, we know now, his usual behavior). It seemed that he wasn’t getting enough food. That was the day my milk came in, and my boobs were so full I had to pump to relieve the pain and pressure. My midwife figured S couldn’t get a good latch because my boobs were so full, so she suggested feeding him expressed breast milk by cup or spoon. We tried both and neither worked. Then she suggested using a syringe. It took us at least half an hour to get less than half an ounce of milk into him using a syringe. It was a lot of effort for us and for him. However, we were instructed to never, ever, ever give him breastmilk in a bottle. Using a bottle, we were told, would result in “nipple confusion” and we’d never be able to get S back on the breast (I kind of laugh at the idea of getting him “back” on the breast, because I’m not sure he was ever actually “on” the breast).

We took S to the pediatrician later that day to have him checked out. They were concerned about his weight — he was down to 5 pounds 14 ounces. The physician assistant we saw that day told us to just give him a bottle. As soon as we heard this, B and I were kind of relieved. The PA said that the goal was to get S food and not make him burn too many calories trying to get it. The bottle was a nice, easy way to get some milk into him and it shouldn’t cause any confusion or problems.

We gave him breastmilk in a bottle that night and when we went back to the doctor the next day, he was up to 6 pounds 4 ounces. Holy crap! It worked! This was incredible news. B and I met with a LC that day. She showed me how to try to get a good latch with S — it turned out I was totally doing it wrong. Unfortunately, I have flat nipples (I didn’t know this even was a thing), gigantic boobs, and a tiny baby with a tiny mouth (and he also has a short tongue, according to another LC we saw). Even doing everything right, we didn’t get a good latch. We tried a nipple shield and that didn’t work. The LC weighed S before and after our attempted nursing session and we found that he got absolutely nothing. She encouraged me to pump often to build up my supply and keep working on latching. I understood what to do and was doing everything right, so I should just keep trying.

I started pumping for 10 minutes 7-8 times per day. I read everything I could find on the internet about building a milk supply through pumping, and upped my sessions to 20 minutes and settled on 7 times a day. The first weekend was rough — I had approximately one ounce more than he needed and was absolutely terrified that I’d run out of milk and we’d have to supplement with formula. I thought that giving S formula would be the end of the world.

I kept pumping and by the next weekend, we bought a chest freezer because I had so much milk it was crowding our freezer. I had established an awesome supply. This was supposed to make getting him to latch easier, but it didn’t. I still tried and he still can’t or won’t latch. So he continued to get breastmilk in a bottle and I pumped.

The other day, I went six hours without pumping and got a plugged duct. I upped my pumping sessions to get rid of it before it turned into mastitis (it worked). The next day, I dropped from 7 to 6 pumping sessions a day. I’m still getting approximately 50 ounces a day, which is more than a baby will ever eat in a day.

The problem is that it’s really hard to pump when you’re home alone with a baby. I try to stay on schedule with the pumping, because I don’t want to go too long and get another plugged duct. I also try to pump only when S is sleeping. This doesn’t always work. Today, he woke up and started crying every time I started pumping. This morning, I had to prop him in the boppy and feed him with a bottle while I pumped. I don’t know. That just seems kind of jacked.

My attempts at getting him on the boob are getting less and less frequent. We tried again last night with the nipple shield. That didn’t work and it had the bonus of being excruciatingly painful. My gut feeling is that my baby and my boobs are just not compatible and it’s never going to happen.

This is without question the most upsetting thing that has happened since I found out I was pregnant. I don’t doubt that “breast is best.” I want to breastfeed. I think breastfeeding is great. However, nothing I’ve read on the internet or in a book, nothing I’ve watched in a breastfeeding video, and no LC has shown me how to get S to latch. As far as I know, he has never latched. I’m pretty much ready to give up trying.

That said, I’m willing to continue exclusively pumping (that’s what they call it when a woman doesn’t breastfeed but does pump breastmilk and give it to her baby — according to the internet, there are many women who do this). Well, I should say that I’m willing to continue exclusively pumping for as long as I can do it without going absolutely batshit crazy. The good news is that my supply is awesome. The bad news is that I feel like spending as much time on the pump as I do is interfering with my relationship with my son. Despite what the pro-breastfeeding zealots say, I don’t think that breastfeeding is something that must be continued no matter how miserable it makes everyone. I want to give my baby breastmilk. I don’t want to go crazy doing it. If my sanity requires me to stop, I will. I’d love to make it one year, but that seems like an impossible goal at this point. I hope to make it six months, but I don’t know if that will happen. All I can do is try my best.

It really, really sucks that I’ve had such a hard time with breastfeeding. I had no idea that happened. I mean, I knew it can be hard, and I was ready for that. I didn’t know that it could result in me basically starving my kid for the first few days of his life (you have no idea how much that messed me up) or that sometimes, no matter what you do, it just doesn’t happen. It seems like whenever you try to learn about breastfeeding, you get a bunch of propaganda and nobody tells you that it might not work. You get a bunch of shit like, “OMG, breastfeeding was so hard and awful at first I cried every day but if you stick it out it gets better!” or women who go on and on and on about how they cried every time their kid latched and had bleeding nipples and mastitis and thrush and pain and their boobs had to walk uphill to school both ways in the snow with no shoes but goddamn it they stuck with it because they aren’t pussy ass losers like those selfish bitches who just give up and feed their children poison because it’s easier, like they’re going to win the fucking breastfeeding Olympics or something. Shit, I’ll bet you $5 that somebody will comment on this post saying that I just need to meet with an LC who will help me get S to latch. Dudes. I’ve done that shit. It’s not happening. It breaks my heart and makes me feel like a failure, but I have to try to get over that and do the best I can. If that means pumping, awesome. If that means turning to formula, fine (I really don’t want to go to formula but I’ve finally admitted that it’s okay if I do).

Anyway, the one thing I’ve learned from this experience that has real-world application? I will never, ever again judge another person who does things differently from how I do them. I’ve done this in the past, I’ll admit. Never again. There is so much judgment and shit about breastfeeding out there. Women, especially, can be incredibly judgmental about how other women feed and care for their children. The thought of someone judging me because I feed my baby with a bottle (and believe me, this happens to people all the time) fills me with rage. I will never do this, and I will never present my way as the right way or the only way. That just sucks and there’s way too much of it in the world. This parenting shit is hard enough already, you know? I think that most of us are doing the best we can, and that’s enough.