I’m a person who likes to do many things the “traditional” way. My husband and I are trying to produce as much of our own food as possible, gardening and raising livestock. Our house is heated with a wood stove. We live off-grid. I am very much a fan of “the old ways.” Still, there are some very unappealing aspects of times past. First and foremost, high rates of infant mortality. Nope, I am not at all interested in bringing that back. Here are the ways that my keeping my sweet little boy alive has ruined all of my plans to be the perfect, crunchy mama.
I was going to have an unmedicated birth attended by a midwife.
I had all of my prenatal care with a team of certified nurse midwives. I was entirely certain that I could manage the pain of labor the way that women had throughout all of history. I would be brave and push that kid out without any epidural. It was going to be great. Well, a cascade of medical interventions led to me being induced at 37 weeks along.
Don’t worry — I knew all about inductions and how they can end in a C-section if the doctor gets impatient. I would just make everyone be patient, right? Well, after six very patient days in the hospital, the doctors had done everything medically possible to put me into labor. Sure, I had mild contractions throughout most of the six days, but they didn’t even hurt enough for me to need any of the breathing exercises that I had been practicing for months. The induction was a failure. It got to the point where my only options were to leave the hospital against medical advice or to have a C-section. I chose to have a C-section. I felt like a failure. Baby Z came out healthy, though, and ready to eat.
I was going to breastfeed my baby until his second birthday.
OK, so the delivery didn’t go as planned. I could at least do everything right from birth on, right? Bring on the breastfeeding! It seemed to go OK at the hospital. I had watched lots of videos ahead of time to make sure I could do it right. In fact, two of the lactation nurses who checked on us thought that they must have been confused about this being my first baby. I had this part down pat. Only I didn’t. We went home on a Saturday, and by Sunday, I could tell something was terribly wrong. My baby had seemed to cluster feed all Saturday night, into Sunday morning. At noon on Sunday, he stopped trying. He screamed for hours, punctuated by periods of sleep. He would not latch. By Sunday night, it was clear that I needed to do something differently.
I got out the hand pump and bottles that I had bought with no intention of using anytime soon. It was the only choice. Baby Z drank that bottle happily. At his first pediatrician appointment, Monday morning, he had lost 14% of his birth weight. Breastfeeding just hadn’t worked for us. On the recommendation of the pediatrician and a lactation consultant, I kept trying to get him to latch, between bottle feedings. It never worked. He screamed every time. It got to the point where it felt like every attempt to nurse was hurting our relationship and making it harder to bond. We had to stop.
Formula would not touch my child’s lips.
Exclusively pumping is hard work, but I had to at least make this work. Formula is fine if a child really needs it, but I was making milk. We could make it work!
Let me tell you, pumping full-time is exhausting. You’re pumping as often as the baby is feeding, doing the actual feedings, then you’re left cleaning bottles and pump parts afterward. Repeat every two to three hours all day, every day. When my baby and my husband were both slumbering away, I was awake, pumping, watching the milk collect, hoping that I’d accumulate enough to feed my kid.
As Baby Z grew, he required more and more milk to sustain him. His 6-week growth spurt really threw me for a loop. Overnight, he went from taking in 2 to 3 ounces at each feeding to a whopping 4 to 5 ounces. My mammary glands were not prepared to keep up. He ate through everything I had pumped ahead. There came a night when I had given him all of the pumped milk, there was nothing left, and he was still hungry. I had a few cans of formula on hand. Those were an emergency stash, for if I died suddenly. I bought them purely so that my grieving husband wouldn’t have to go to the store right away. Yet there I was, with nothing left to do but use them. I had failed again. My tears flowed as I read the mixing instructions. I apologized to my baby as I fed it to him. He didn’t seem to mind at all. He was just happy to eat. In fact, none of these "failures" seemed to faze him at all.
The next day, full of shame, I admitted to my husband what I had done. He said he was proud of how hard I had tried to make everything work. He also pointed out that Baby Z was still eating mostly breast milk, and it didn’t have to be all-or-nothing. It turned out that, in our little family, I was the only one of us upset about any of these failures. I hadn’t been able to achieve any of my perfect goals, and everything was fine. And, hey, babywearing still worked out, so there’s that.
