Did you know? The poster on the wall on the doctor’s office beckoned, Breastfeeding reduces your child’s chances of . . . a list of illnesses followed. It was a long list. I cringed and looked away. I was there for an ultrasound, my baby still kicking in my belly, happily fed through our placenta. I hadn’t started breastfeeding yet, of course, but I already had a sinking feeling it wasn’t going to work out for me. My breasts hadn’t grown at all during pregnancy, and I had little faith that they would swell with milk once my baby was born. My fears, it turned out, were not unfounded, and I wasn’t able to produce as much milk as my baby needed. But it didn’t mean the end of nursing for me. With help from a lactation consultant, persistence, and a cooperative baby, I was able to make do in the very situation I had dreaded.
I gave birth at 11 pm on a Saturday night, and the first time I nursed my son we were alone in the delivery room. As visiting hours had ended, my wife and our families had been sent home. Rain pattered at the windows. I held his head in the crook of my arm while he suckled. Is he even getting anything? I wondered. How was I supposed to tell? With my free hand, I swung the tray of hospital food within my reach. I hadn’t eaten in over a day, and I hungrily pulled apart a piece of dry chicken with my fingers.
Max sucked and slept. Then he cried, then he sucked and slept some more. This went on all night, and the next night, too, but he only slept in small increments. I didn’t know how to interpret his baby sounds, and couldn’t tell if he was swallowing milk or just sucking on me like a pacifier. What I could tell was that he wasn’t happy.
“He’s hungry,” I told a nurse. She squeezed my nipple, and it obediently wept droplets of golden-hued liquid.
“You’re making milk,” she assured me. “He’s just cluster feeding. Babies do that sometimes.”
We went home, and nothing changed. I spent our first night together out on the couch with him, desperately moving him from my right breast to my left, praying that there was something in there that would soothe him.
Twenty-four hours went by and he didn’t pee, and the pediatrician who had been so reassuring during my first frantic phone calls changed her tone and instructed us to give him formula right away. She suggested using a baby medicine syringe if we were worried about nipple confusion.
My wife held him on her knees and dribbled the formula into his mouth like he was a baby bird.
He swallowed. He gulped. We watched his newborn skin, red with tension, turn pale again as he relaxed. He had been so hungry.
I was gutted. People talk about lactation failure, but it felt so much bigger than that. It wasn’t just that I was no good as a human female. I was useless on this most base, animal level, too.
My boobs had one job to do, and they had fallen down on it completely. I hated them. I hated the breast pump and its confirmation that I was hardly producing any milk. I hated all the nursing mothers I saw snuggled in with their babies on park benches. It was summer, and everyone was using those soft muslin blankets to cover up, while my blankets were rancid with regurgitated formula.
But I wasn’t ready to give up. We called in a lactation consultant. She did a weighted feed and watched me pump. I held Max in my lap while she examined my breasts, confirming my suspicions that I had insufficient glandular tissue (IGT)—there simply weren’t enough milk glands to feed a baby. (While IGT isn’t common in general, it’s a fairly frequent diagnosis among infertile women, and it had taken me two rounds of IVF to get pregnant.)
I asked the lactation consultant to be frank with me. Was there any possibility that I would be able to produce a meaningful amount of milk?
With supplements, and a stomach medication that had the side effect of increasing milk production, and pumping, and nursing, she said I would get up to 12-14 ounces a day. (It’s hard to measure how many ounces a day breastfed babies eat, but it’s approximately twice that.)
Some women, the lactation consultant gently told me, hear a number like that and decide it’s not worth it. Others, she said, feel like that many ounces are well worth the effort.
Half empty, or half full? It was my call. What did I want?
Apart from all the numbers and statistics, ounces and months and chances of disease, nursing was something I wanted to pursue. I wanted a breastfeeding relationship with my son, and while it wasn’t going to look exactly like I’d imagined, I wasn’t willing to abandon it entirely, either.
While my breasts were defiant, I had been blessed with a cooperative baby. Max had an iron latch that effectively emptied my breasts, and he showed no preference for rubber bottle nipples. During each feeding, I’d offer one breast and then the other, then a bottle, then a breast again to soothe him to sleep. It wasn’t a process I loved going through in public, especially around other nursing mothers—having to break out the bottle during baby yoga class, in particular, made me wish that I could disappear. But as time went on, we just kept going. What I couldn’t provide in daily ounces, I gave him over the course of the two and a half years that we nursed.
By the time a baby is walking and eating solid foods, nursing becomes more about comfort than anything else—and for us, this is what nursing always had been. I comforted him with milk, and, in turn, with his soft little warm body snuggled up against me, he comforted me. It’s hard to feel anything other than success as a parent when you get a crying child into a peaceful sleep in your arms.