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 misjudged when pregnancy brought dislocating changes that I couldn’t stay on top of, ones that felt like alien possession, total entrapment. I’d heard a few friends say that breastfeeding was harder than they’d thought, but I felt (this is super obnoxious and hard to admit) like I had a higher pain threshold, that I was used to and better at overcoming the flesh failures (I’d had three ACL reconstructions in my knee from basketball, I live with three herniated disks in my spine). The day before my labor was induced (ten days past due, zero dilation, zero effacement) I swam 45 minutes of freestyle. I was not one of those women who wanted a “natural,” drug-free childbirth—meds have treated me pretty well, and I’ve used them liberally, head and body. But 46 hours of pitocin-driven labor, even with epidurals, were more than I could bear. I kept thinking “why am I fucking this up?” during the pushing. I thought it was a competition. When I tried to breastfeed in the hospital I wasn’t successful but I didn’t care—I was already slipping into the PPD that would occupy my next six weeks. Our baby was struggling a bit from the long, hard labor—she’d swallowed meconium and had had to be suctioned. A horrible nurse, the one awful medical provider we encountered, told us that our baby wasn’t nursing because the suction was like “oral rape.” I pumped, I tried to nurse, they gave me shields for flat/inverted nipples. I forgot they had given me the shields. I was sent home late the second afternoon and only realized at 2am that first night home that I was on the hook for feeding this baby. Hideous, sucking panic. My husband tried to feed her a bottle of formula; she wouldn’t take it. Failing again. I remembered the shield, forgot that I had a boppy to ease my wrecked back and neck, contorted myself with five pillows. My baby took a little milk through the shield. Rather than think of this as success, I remembered reading that the shield was bad to use. More airless panic. I couldn’t nurse in public with the shield and felt all the more trapped. (I used the shield for 5 weeks, after my lovely and wise friend Emily assured me that she’d done so for 6—still competitive, asshole me, had to beat that sequence.) I thought nursing was painful through the shield; what a ninny I was, after abandoning it, and succumbing to real, toe-curling pain. I struggled through. I nursed while watching episode after episode of Deadwood in the middle of the night. Every time Al Swearengen said “cocksucker” I swelled with righteousness, until I thought my baby was turning her head at the “cocksucking hooplehead” references. I stopped watching Deadwood while nursing, and sorely missed the motherfucking cocksucking hoopleheads. I had six mastitis infections in eight weeks, six episodes of 103˚ fever, cabbage leaves, ground-glass feeling while nursing. I didn’t stop nursing because I was unattractively competitive with friends who had done so successfully; and mostly, primarily—explanatory for all the above—because I hadn’t yet gone back on anti-depression/anti-anxiety meds. At week 5 of my daughter’s life I broke down sobbing in the parking lot of the PNC Bank and told my husband “I can’t nurse anymore, I need to go back on meds.” I thought that I couldn’t nurse on Lexapro; my doctor said no, you can. Sweet flooding relief to be back on Lexapro fought with darkly belated anger at the doctors for not telling me I could go back on meds immediately (or have stayed on them while pregnant). But still I nursed. It got easier. The PPD eased. When my baby was 11 weeks old we went to Paris for 6 weeks, something I would never have imagined possible if not for my husband’s quiet confidence and inexorable support. It was a revelation; I could be mobile, I could nurse standing on a streetcorner if I had to, I could nurse drinking kir. Happiness, mostly. At eight months my baby started biting me while nursing. I tried all the tactics; still she bit. I bled through clothes, I scabbed, I rotated her around, I cried from the pain while she nursed. At MLA, with my parents in an adjoining room to watch my daughter while I served on a search committee, I had fever and ague. I went to the emergency room and was diagnosed with staph infections; the emergency room doctor said of nursing “why the fuck are you still doing this?” I sobbed hugely, but with relief, being given medical authorization to stop. Twenty-four hours later my daughter started sucking down full bottles of formula, started eating the solids she’d refused before, and thrived. I thrived too. She is more splendid every day.
I wish that not nursing had been an option for me. I wish that I knew that I could combine formula feeding and breast. I wish I had not spent the first 6 weeks of my daughter’s life fantasizing about driving to the next street over and sleeping in the car, thinking they’d never look for me just one block away. I wish that feeling that nursing was more important that my mental health had not kept me from returning immediately to the SSRIs I need (or at the very least, I wish I’d been better informed about nursing on SSRIs). I wish this forum had existed then.
