IT’S NOT THAT MY MOTHER HAD BEEN lying to me so much as she had been protecting me in hopes that I was the one human on earth who didn’t have to worry about things. I can hear her say, Well, what if it never happens to you, and here you worried for nothing?
She was kind to try to protect me, but I do wish she would have prepared me better for one pivotal part of motherhood. Breastfeeding.
My stance on breastfeeding came from a place of pure peer pressure. Yes, the same If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump? peer pressure. And don’t ask me if I would jump off a bridge if all my friends jumped off a bridge. I had the most amazing group of girlfriends. If they jumped off a bridge, then it was for a good reason. So, yes, we’d all jump off a bridge!
I couldn’t name a single friend that formula-fed her baby. I heard friends at work say they could pump so fast they’d make your head spin. Then they’d hide the milk in the fridge under their desks and get back to work lickety-split.
By the time I was pregnant, all of my girlfriends could tell you the pros and cons of every breast pump on the market, and no less than four gave me their leftover nipple cream. My friends knew every trick in the book when it came to surviving nipple torture. They even helped me purchase the best nipple covers to help my boobs on their milk quest. As committed as I was, I found the one line I would not cross. CABBAGE LEAVES. Yes, one friend told me to bring frozen cabbage leaves to work and put them on my breasts if they started to hurt during the day. The idea of setting up a salad bar on my chest at work was too much.
What helped me truly commit to breastfeeding was knowing that I was giving my baby the best nutrition on earth, that it was God’s perfect design, and—the cherry on top—that it burned a TON of calories. And I mean a ton! Some books said three hundred calories; others said five hundred. It didn’t matter. I decided to get my pre-baby body back by feeding my baby nature’s milk around the clock!
I was so committed that I didn’t just buy myself breastfeeding books, but I bought them for my mother too. Formula was in fashion when I was born, but so was smoking,1 so we weren’t following that generation’s lead. For this baby, we were going to be a breastfeeding dynamic duo.
When I left the hospital with Meg, my milk hadn’t come in, but the doctor assured me that it would. “Just pump and your body will figure out that it’s time.”
I pumped, and after twenty minutes, no milk. The bottle was dry.
It’s ok, I told myself. It’s gonna come in.
Then I tried a few hours later… still dry.
Remain calm… It’s going to come.
Then I cranked my super-turbo breast pump on HIGH, and I waited and waited. After thirty minutes, the bottle wasn’t just dry… It was so clean it could go back in the cabinet.
I cried.
And when we took our daughter for her three-day checkup, I cried even more. She was losing weight, my colostrum was gone, and I was starving my baby. There was no choice but to formula-feed her. I gave her a formula bottle and decided to try to pump one more time.
I prayed, Lord, if you want me to breastfeed this baby, then send the milk. It reminded me of the scene in Beaches where Bette Midler’s character bangs on the radiator and yells, “Send the heat up!” except unlike Bette’s heat, my milk never came.
I cried.
Why did I dread telling my friends that my milk didn’t come in? Probably because I was the only woman on earth whose milk didn’t come in! In all of my breastfeeding books, there wasn’t a single chapter titled “So, Your Milk Didn’t Come In and Now You’re Starving Your Baby and You Aren’t Going to Be Burning Any Extra Calories.”
At the next checkup, I asked my doctor why it never came in, and he explained that the act of labor sends a signal to your body to send the milk, and it could be that since I was a scheduled C-section and I never had contractions, my body was just asleep at the wheel.
I told my mom that I must be the only woman in history to not be able to breastfeed her own baby.
“Oh no, honey. I remember my mama having to breastfeed for Aunt Flora because her milk never came in.”
What did she just say??
“Yeah, it just never came in, and Mama had plenty to spare.”2
“Mom! You mean to tell me that someone that I am biologically related to never had their milk come in, and you never thought to tell me??” I exclaimed.
“Well, I just never wanted to worry you. You were so excited, and what if your milk came in and you had worried for nothing?”
“I would have been prepared that this could be something that might happen,” I told her.
“Well, it was either going to come in or it wasn’t, and you were having such a good time bossing me around and making me read these books. Plus, look at you! Those motherly instincts kicked right in. You were talking about formula before the doctor even said anything. You already know more about how to take care of your baby than I could ever teach you. It’s been a million years since I did this. YOU trust YOUR instincts.”
“Ok, but you could have told me—” I started.
“Trust me… You’re gonna lie to her too, but it’s only because you love her, and you want everything for her. You’re going to want to protect her from mean girls, from heartache, and from acne, but you can’t. I wasn’t able to protect you from everything just like you won’t be able to protect her from certain things. But you can get her ready.” As we sat beside each other on my bed, I realized that she wasn’t just my mother but also my friend.
“By the time you realized that your breastfeeding was going haywire, you were halfway through it… And what did you do when you realized that your milk wasn’t coming in? You prayed! I watched a sad, heartbroken mom go into her bedroom, and out walked a confident mother talking about formula. What was the difference? Prayer and faith. If you can give your children those tools, then they’ll be set for whatever the world sends their way. It can also help them survive a crazy mother who only wants to shield them from every little thing the world has to offer.”
A week later I was back in the doctor’s office because an infection had opened most of my now-very-painful C-section incision, and the parts that weren’t had to be reopened with a scalpel—and no pain medicine. The doctor then cleaned the wound by filling it with a salt solution, making that the single most painful moment of my life.
The days and weeks that followed were some of the worst for my body, and it’s the reason our children are four years apart and not eighteen months as originally planned. My body needed to heal, and my mind had to forget. I went back to work from maternity leave still practicing “wound care.” I found myself saying prayers that weeks earlier didn’t seem possible.
Lord, thank you for not allowing my body to breastfeed. Thank you for knowing and loving me so well. Had I been able to feed, I would have continued breastfeeding while nursing my wound, and my body needed to focus on healing.
1 My brother was born in 1973, and my mom said that doctors would smoke with you to celebrate a pregnancy. By the time she was pregnant with me in 1976–77, research had come out linking smoking to low birth weight, and she stopped smoking. My brother would give her grief, saying, “Imagine what I would have become if you hadn’t smoked with me.”
2 They had babies at the same time… I know it’s odd to breastfeed another baby, until you remember that we drink milk from cows.