I’ve been wanting to write for some time about my love/hate relationship with nursing the Emma. The phrase love/hate is misleading, though, because it implies that I feel the two in equal measure, and I don’t. Most of the time, I feel the love more. And it is good. Real good. I can feel it in my bones good. But when that other pesky emotion sneaks in, I feel it hard. So hard that it pushes all the good stuff far away into the corners and out of the light and makes it hard to breathe.
Emma took to nursing immediately and our first many months were the kind that people who have trouble nursing hate to hear about. Good supply, good latch, no health issues, plenty of goodness all around. Enter the love.
I think that our good nursing relationship was key in helping me to find my groove as a mother. I felt so purposeful, so competent. My life and my body, they had meaning. I was nourishing this little person. With my body! And she was thriving!
My favorite time of every day became the bedtime routine. I would put little Emma in her jammies, swaddle her (for the first four months) or zip her into a sleep sack (since then), turn on the Spa Radio channel on the Pandora, and nurse her to sleep while we lay in my bed with the lights down low and the new age music pulsed and whirred in the background. Many a night, I fell asleep there too, and we cuddled and snoozed and it was perfect. Over time, she learned to be transported first to the bassinet and later to her own bedroom to keep sleeping, and I would get to have a few hours of adult time with JMT and my life felt balanced and so, so manageable.
Man, just writing that makes me want to hit fast-forward on the day and start the 7pm roundup right now.
When she was tiny, there were plenty of full-on love moments during daytime nursing as well, when she would fall asleep on me, or when she learned to look up and smile at me when she was done. All good things. And now that she’s a bigger girl, there are the sweet sleepy moments when her body is heavy against me and we can sit for an hour or more while the day goes on around us, and the silly moments when she decides to make a game of things and repeatedly pull away from me and then dive bomb back in for more, and the giggly moments, when she thinks that this nursing thing is just the funniest thing ever, and the serious, “I are hungry baby” moments, when she takes the business of nursing very seriously—furrowing her brow and focusing very, very hard at the task at hand.
All good. So good.
So what about that other thing I mentioned? The hate? Well, it’s in there too. And in increasing amounts. And it manifests itself in ugly ways. Like the tears. The frustration. And the doubt. And the crushing sadness. The growing feelings of inadequacy. Yeah, I hate those.
The unbelievably trite cliché, “All good things must come to an end” comes to mind here. I have always known that I won’t be nursing Emma when she is seventeen. So of course, I knew that eventually I would stop nursing this kid. Preferably before she learned to drive. But I also thought, perhaps naively so, that I would be able to stop nursing Emma on my terms. That at the time I decided, I would do as the baby-rearing textbooks advise and gradually decrease her time nursing, cut out pumping sessions, etc. I figured I’d have an epiphany sometime after her first year and begin the process of ending things.
What I didn’t expect was this long, slow death. For the past three months, my milk supply has been diminishing bit by bit. I’ve done everything the good Internets tells me to do to improve the situation: the tea, the fenugreek, the expensive supplements, drinking enough water to sail a boat on. No dice.
I could write so much about the specifics of how this sucks. I could write about how demoralizing it is to spend 40 minutes a day at work pumping, and only coming up with enough milk for the daycare provider to spike Emma’s formula with one ounce per bottle. I could write about the pain of watching Emma’s increasing disappointment that there just isn’t enough. I could write about the cuts on my arms that I could swear Emma inflicts on purpose with her little razor nails when she’s trying and trying to get enough to eat, but there just isn’t any more to be had. I could write about the horrific realization that those cries we’d been hearing for days weren’t from teething pains, but rather hunger pangs, and were quickly remedied with a nice big bottle of formula.
But I won’t. What’s worse than all of those things is the sadness. The loss. I can supplement Emma’s dietary needs with formula, and she doesn’t seem to mind. But I can’t seem to find a supplement for what I’m losing: the contentedness, the feeling of competence and purpose, the love.
What makes this harder still is the slowness of it. Since a little breastmilk is still better than no breastmilk, I don’t feel like I can cut off cold turkey. So my sadness has become an open wound that cannot heal. Not yet. It’s like a long, slow break-up where you rehash all the good times and the badness over and over before you say goodbye for the last time.
The rational part of me knows this is all nonsense. Emma is happy to drink formula; I am privileged to have had as good of an experience with nursing as I did; we are healthy and well provided for; I’ll get to stop pumping. I know. But the sadness, it defies reason. It cannot be bargained down. It just has to be, to work itself out. And that’s what I hate.
