February 2012
3 posts
3 tags
When Breastfeeding Doesn't Work
Friend (and neighbor!) of Feeding the Baby, Wendy Atterberry, wrote this brave and lovely piece for her own site:
I feed my baby formula. Exclusively. Here in Brooklyn that’s one of the biggest parenting offenses you can commit. It’s right up there with circumcision and “crying it out” in terms of emotionally scarring your child for life. I didn’t plan to feed my baby formula. Or, I should say...
6 tags
Laura writes:
Breastfeeding is not—as I’d hoped—like riding a bike or ice skating: you cannot simply pick it up again where you left off. Every child is different, and every breastfeeding process is different. I nursed my daughter who is eight with relative ease. Ok well, after the first three months of soaking my engorged breasts in hot water and applying grated potato and slippery...
6 tags
Melissa writes:
When I became 29 I felt the first true yearnings for a baby. A friend announced her pregnancy and I cried my first of many tears of this sort. I knew then that I needed to face the ugly truth that I had known for some time but was too afraid to contemplate. I was infertile. I decided to “attract” a baby into my life by visualizing what it would feel and look like, as...
January 2012
10 posts
5 tags
Friend of Feeding the Baby Melissa Cotton Womack wrote a piece for Inhabitots, on exclusive pumping:
Before my son Jude was born I had bought a single sided pump, but truthfully, I never expected to use it much. I was going to be a stay at home mom, so I thought I would have the opportunity to actually nurse him through all of his feedings. I had taken a breastfeeding class before he was born...
6 tags
Dani writes:
She is almost ten months. And she is the most amazing, beautiful, perfect thing that ever happened to me. She’s old enough to ask for the breast now: she smiles and leans over me, tugs at my arm, touches my chest, wrinkles her nose playfully. When I lift my shirt and take down my bra, she lets out a little laugh, happy and trusting. I feed her as she fiddles with my hand, collarbone,...
9 tags
Giving Her What She Needs
Naomi writes:
“I told Daddy to shave his chest and grow breasts that could give me delicious milk like yours,” my daughter informed me when I returned home from a conference.
M. is currently three-and-a-half and we are in the midst of a long, slow weaning. Though I sometimes despair she is a nursaholic, I see the irony of my frustration. When M. was born, my milk never came in. Like many of...
10 tags
Sarah B. writes:
This is what we do, now that Ames is four months old: When Ames naps, I hook up to the breast pump for thirty or forty-five minutes while I sit at the computer and write, email, muck around. Ames wakes up and I feed him the milk I’ve recently pumped in a bottle. When there isn’t enough breast milk to make a bottle, he gets formula. When he wakes in the middle of the...
7 tags
Grief and Solidarity
D.L. Mayfield writes:
We were two kids with a baby, a baby who came way too early. Sick with fever, shivering in the makeshift NICU (our hospital wasn’t equipped with one), I actually wondered what all the other older and wealthier and more prepared mothers must have thought of me.
Sigh. The things we waste our lives wondering about.
The feeding thing was the only element I felt like I...
9 tags
Jamie writes:
I gave birth to my son 9 weeks early, after a hideous, foreshortened pregnancy that included bleeding gushes, trips to the ER, and bedrest. When I delivered him, I did so with the calm I only have during a crisis: before, I was inconsolably anxious about carrying him to term, and after, I worried constantly about his health and prematurity. When I gave birth – with an epidural,...
4 tags
Lisa writes:
I’m a Type A-minus — big into to-do lists, calendars, project management and deliverables. Therefore, I am prone to a lot of planning ahead and I have often weathered storms of disproportionate disappointment when something I planned for did not go exactly as anticipated. Then something great happened: I dealt with a few years of infertility. This was a gift because I...
7 tags
Hester writes:
I went into breastfeeding all wrong; pregnancy, too. I’d been an athlete (or “sportive” as my Dutch college roommate called me) and thought I could control my body’s response, even in injury, to which I thought pregnancy and childbirth were equivalent. This feeling of pregnancy as malady should have been a bad sign. I should also have known that I had...
7 tags
Adrienne O’Keefe writes:
I am a researcher at heart and a good student. I follow directions very well. When it came to breastfeeding, I took a class, educated myself and read literature- I was all set! I thought these things, plus my certainty that nursing was the best choice for me and my child, would be enough. I knew people said it was hard but I’ve never shied away from hard...
4 tags
Feeding “Professor X”: Vignettes
JDW writes:
Fountain
A six-week old baby boy is latched onto the left breast of his mother, who is sitting cross-legged on the couch. We can hear the boy hungrily swallowing and then he pulls his head back, releasing from the nipple. A strong spray wets first his cheek and then eye. As he squirms back his neck and shirt become wet. The nipple near his cheek is freely spraying milk in three...
December 2011
11 posts
3 tags
Sarah A. writes:
I did not have the birth experience I wanted. Four days in the hospital trying to ripen my cervix. Preeclampsia. Only allowed to walk around for twenty minutes twice a day. A botched IV that probably contributed to the pitocin not working properly. An epidural that sank to my right or left side (depending on which one I was lying on), numbing only half my body. My baby’s heart...
6 tags
Jen B writes:
After it took medical intervention to conceive, and then again to labor, I thought the one thing I had left that my body could maybe, just maybe, do right was breastfeed my son. I took classes. I requested lactation support. It wasn’t until many months later that I realized, in my haze of sleep deprivation and adrenaline and newness to motherhood, that many of the same...
3 tags
Tyliag writes:
I’ve been thinking about how to write this a thousand different ways a thousand different times. I think everybody who expressed their opinion about breastfeeding has reiterated my point about a thousand times, which is that breastfeeding, or not breastfeeding is an individual act, and it shouldn’t be viewed as a statement on feminism or motherhood or even as who we are as...
5 tags
pumping in cheap hotels
anonymous writes:
I travelled a lot after Perry was born and mostly not the glamorous kind of travelling to the plushness of bathrobes and sleep and company somewhere, but more travelling to cheap hotels so as to spend one or two days in the archives. I didn’t have parental leave but my husband did, a good long 9 months of it, and so this was an almost excellent arrangement involving long...
6 tags
Katherine P. writes:
The nurses checked his blood sugar so often during our hospital stay I started to feel like there was something wrong that they weren’t telling me. The babe slept. And woke up occasionally to take a look around. And then slept some more. But never ate. And even on the last day as the lactation consultant stood over us and adjusted my sleeping boy to the correct position she...
4 tags
Sometimes too much of a good thing...is just TOO...
kaj writes:
I nursed both of my kids pretty successfully. In fact, when I pumped between feedings with my first kid, I McGyvered (sp?) the breast pump machine to actually pump into a giant, glass measuring bowl (I think it held 8 cups) because I could fill it 1/2 way which was WAY more than the little plastic receptacles could hold!
About 4 months into nursing my daughter, she had one of those...
5 tags
this.blue.angel writes:
For the record, I am supremely grateful for my labor, delivery and new baby experience. I got really lucky. I thank my stars for this all the time, as in, I actually look up and say thank you. I had a healthy baby in under four hours, I almost gave birth on the floor in triage. I sometimes feel like I shouldn’t talk about this luck, for fear of jinxes. But the rational me...
7 tags
Sarah M. writes:
Here’s what it was like to nurse my second son: we snuggled. While he slept, I read literary criticism; when he was at the breast, I read YA romances. Sometimes we made sweet faces and sounds. I’m not making this up. Asher grew; I slept. It was amazingly great.
It was only when I realized how content I felt with Asher that I realized exactly how fucked up I’d been with Elliot, my...
5 tags
Anonymous writes:
Long, long ago (okay, 31 years ago) breastfeeding was “what one did” but not what one’s mother had done… Alas. Lacking that support and wisdom and encouragement, my efforts at breastfeeding were undone by loving sabotage. My beautiful boy was a first grandchild. Everyone visited, everyone wanted to hold the baby, everyone wanted to feed the baby. I...
7 tags
Kate F writes:
I was lucky, in that I eventually succeeded in nursing, and since I’m a freelance writer and was staying home, I nursed exclusively until 6 months, then added in solids and kept nursing until just after my son’s birthday. But I think that we are misled, as women, about the experience. Everyone builds up the “it’s natural! it’s wonderful! you’ll love it” and maybe they mention some...
Feeding the Baby
When I posted a manifesto of sorts, “Breastfeeding is Not Free,” I got a lot of responses from friends and strangers sharing their own “Feeding the Baby” stories, and my friend Sarah M (who always has the best ideas), suggested starting a Tumblr where we could collect these stories in one place.
As I mention in the above piece, when I was really in the thick of trying to...