My son’s entrance into this world was a moment of such chaos that were it not for my fear and the pain of small head tearing through my vagina might be considered almost comical. After three hours of pushing—a nurse holding one of my legs, my husband holding the other while feeding me ice chips and whispering “you’re doing great”—the doctor decided to use the vacuum.
“He’s almost there,” she assured me. “He could just use a little help.”
The vacuum, if you’re not familiar with it, is not of the Oreck or Dustbuster variety, but is more like a small toilet plunger that the doctor attaches to the baby’s head in order to pull him out. Unlike the peaceful birthing stories I had watched on the Learning Channel, my birth story had everyone moving anxiously, my doctor barking orders while tugging on the vacuum with the force of someone extracting a well-embedded weed from a flowerbed. It worked. Out came a slimed, disgruntled being who, to my amazement, looked to be about the size of a small linebacker. My husband cut the cord, and then the nurse practically tossed my son onto my chest where, dazed and horrified, I held him as his little mouth opened and closed repeatedly, like a fish searching for food on the water’s surface.
Before Ethan was born, I had never even heard of the sucking reflex. After he arrived, I would learn that this primitive urge to nurse is the most powerful impulse infants possess. It ruled our relationship from that moment he was placed on my chest and I first rejected his advances. The rejection continued into that night when too exhausted to make my first breastfeeding attempt, I sent him to the hospital nursery for a supper of formula, a decision that would make die-hard breast feeders gasp. The next day, a nurse delivered him back to me at 6am singing, “Time to eat,” and I had no idea what to do. I had spent my entire pregnancy worrying about how much labor would hurt and whether or not I would poop on the table, and never gave much thought to breastfeeding. When I asked a friend if I should take the hospital’s breastfeeding course for $75, she told me to save me the money. “You don’t need a course,” she said. “You’ll figure it out.”
But when the nurse showed me the best ways to hold a baby and how to get him to latch on properly, I remembered none of it by the next feeding. I was also surprised to discover that despite his small size, Ethan had the sucking power of a Hoover. So my husband could sympathize, I stuck his pinky finger in Ethan’s mouth. He looked frightened when he almost couldn’t get it out.
I arrived home with a third degree tear and cracked and bleeding nipples. I felt this overwhelming responsibility to feed my son and, at the same time, entered each feeding feeling like Dustin Hoffman in the Marathon Man.
“I can’t do this,” I cried to my husband. “Maybe we should just buy formula.”
“Ok,” he said, although I didn’t have to be a body language expert to know something wasn’t kosher here. Then he added, “But maybe you shouldn’t give up yet. Maybe there’s something you can do that would help.”
I wanted to scream: why don’t you let the little piranha suck on your nipples, then? That would help!
Truth is, my mind was in the throes of a wrestling match; basically everything I had read or been told about feeding my baby by the media, doctors, friends and family was battling it out in a litany of confusing “shoulds:” “You should nurse to protect the baby’s immune system”; “You should nurse in order to bond with the baby”; “Nursing should come naturally”;
“Nursing shouldn’t hurt.”
Finally, from somewhere in the distance, my own voice piped in: “If it hurts, you shouldn’t do it…remember, YOU were formula fed and you turned out fine, right?”
In the end, I was in a mental headlock and my own lightweight voice didn’t stand a chance.
At the suggestion of a friend, I called a lactation consultant, a profession I had never heard of pre-baby. Normally I hated being needy, but I was desperate. The consultant spent three hours with me, going over the breastfeeding basics—the cradle hold, the football hold, burping. I felt slightly self-conscious, but giving birth changes you, and exposing my breasts to a complete stranger seemed almost as normal as showing her the sample of green paint I had chosen for Ethan’s nursery. When Ethan began what she called a “cluster feeding,” a nursing session which lasted for 45 minutes, she made me a turkey sandwich. It was an act she probably thought little of, but for me—an emotionally and physically vulnerable new mother—she may as well have been Mother Teresa. When she left, I wrote her a check and tried to hug her.
“Uh, that’s OK…” she said, avoiding my outstretched arms. “Good luck with everything.”
But the next morning, instead of getting lucky, I got a yeast infection. Not in my vagina mind you, but in my boob. Like discovering the existence of lactation consultants, the ability to get a yeast infection above the waist was yet another eye-opener. That morning I awoke with searing pain in my left breast, as though shards of glass had taken up residence in my milk ducts. My OB said it was caused by yeast in the baby’s mouth and gave me a prescription for an oral anti-fungal medication. “These types of infections can be persistent,” she warned “You may want to try some other things too.”
She directed to me a website where I learned that these “other things” included sanitizing everything in my home (yeast is a powerful little bugger I guess) and smearing something purple and messy called gentian violet on my boobs. Although I purchased the gentian violet, I never used it. Nor did I disinfect my entire house. I just took my medicine and hoped things would improve.
At the same, I was beginning to feel like nothing more than a giant walking boob myself, with Ethan leering at me like an infantile Hugh Heffner from behind his crib bars.
“He doesn’t even appreciate me,” I moaned. “All he wants is to suck the life out of me.”
“Give it a little more time,” another friend who had struggled with nursing advised. “Two months was when I turned a corner.”
I sighed. At one month in, that corner seemed a long way off.
By the week’s end, I developed a new problem. A moment after latching on, Ethan would come off my breast like a drowning victim, screaming and coughing and gasping for air. I called the lactation consultant who told me I had too much milk. Her solutions included squeezing some out into tissue before nursing, nursing him only on one side for a couple of feedings, and nursing in the recliner where I could position him flat on top of me.
“What am I supposed to do…carry a recliner around?” I complained to my husband. “This is nuts. Maybe I should quit.”
“You can if you want,” he said unconvincingly.
I was certain I was done and I felt relieved. This lasted about 30 minutes until those annoying wrestlers came to life again, cracking their oversized knuckles and shouting their ugly threats so that any doubts I was still harboring won out. I would trudge on. Despite the pain. Despite the inconveniences. I wouldn’t quit.
And then, without my even noticing, something strange happened: Days blurred into nights, and then nights into weeks, and before I knew it, my milk supply was under control. Then my yeast infection disappeared. Suddenly, I was nursing like an old pro. I had miraculously moved from what felt like the most grueling experience of my life into some semblance of normalcy.
When I looked at the calendar, I had just reached two months.
******
More than a year later, I sometimes wonder if things might have been different if I had prepared myself. If I had just dished out the money for the breastfeeding course or, at the very least, bought a book. Would that one small act have saved me? Looking back, it’s hard to say.
Yet here’s one thing I am certain about: At eight months, when I decided to begin weaning, I was extremely emotional. In the end, I had fallen in love with nursing. I had become a sucker for Ethan’s gulping sounds, the way he would caress my hand as he drank, then pass out in my arms. On the day when the little bit of milk that had been there just yesterday was gone, we both knew it was over. Together, we cried.
I’m quite certain nothing could have prepared me for that.
Amy Yelin’s essay “Torn” was listed as a notable essay of 2006 in the Best American Essays 2007. Her other work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Gettysburg Review, the ImperfectParent.com, and other publications. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lives in the Boston area where she is the working mom of two boys. She is currently weaning her 2nd child and is feeling kind of weepy about it.