There’s a lot of pressure and weird culture around breastfeeding. It should be about choice and whatever is best for mom and baby, right? Spoiler alert: it is not.
I have twins — neither of whom could breastfeed and one of whom is not tolerating breast milk. Thankfully I have amazing friends. One of those friends is a mom and another has worked in child care for almost as long as I’ve known her. They continue reminding me “fed is best” rather than the popular maxim “breast is best”. That alone has saved me so much stress and anxiety; but not everyone has such good or consistent advice. Even my good fortune hasn’t protected me from the expert opinions of every other person I’ve met.
When my body was letting me down from the starting pistol, I got mad. A trip to the hospital at seven weeks for some suspicious bleeding. A twenty week scan that shows a heart condition in Baby B. Extra amniotic fluid. Preterm labor. Early delivery. I hoped the disappointment was over once they were here. I’d get to business making up for all I’d failed to do so far.
I was pregnant after very little trying and that’s good. That’s great, in fact. Right? That’s the last easy part (and even though it only took a few months they were FRAUGHT and LONELY and everything about reproduction seems horrible and yet we keep doing it.)
The tries themselves included taking my temperature every morning at 4, researching timing and positions and the right attitudes. Depression every time I got my period, disappointment, feeling like I had no right to feel this way because reproducing in and of itself is selfish. But not reproducing feels like opting out of this big milestone every woman should not only want, but be good at.
When you find out you ARE pregnant it’s like a secret because you’ve got to be careful and anything can go wrong at any moment and it would feel like it’s your fault no matter how little control you had over it.
It’s about a year since I found out we were having twins. And I say I found out, not we found out, because it’s my body and my feelings and my vomit at all hours of the morning and night. This is not to say anything against my partner at all — he was encouraging and supportive and we were as “together” in the pregnancy as we could have been. But there are still a lot of singular parts.
And there are so many secret parts because everyone has an opinion about what you should be doing and how long it’s been since your wedding and how close you are to thirty.
I wanted to write about breastfeeding and pumping and I haven’t even gotten to the kids being born. I have a lot of feelings and thoughts on this topic and I get how people make whole blogs about it.
