27 Surprises I’ve had about breast milk—pieced together from multiple 3 a.m. pumpings. (b/c what kind of millennial would I be if I didn’t give you the rundown on my breastfeeding “journey"?)
Just like every ta-ta is unique, so is every breastfeeding tale, 🍼 and this has been mine…
🎧 Click above to hear me reading this to you, unfiltered, unedited, and in my underwear.
My plan was to not breastfeed. No siree boob. Even though I’d, of course, heard the pithy slogan “breast is best,” I have my own personal slogan (which is well documented in my book, Party in Your Plants) of Not Eating Brussels with a Bitch Face. Because stressfully or resentfully eating healthy food negates the healthy food’s positive benefits.
So I also didn’t want to Breastfeed with a Bitch Face (which I’d heard from many honest women would likely be the case). It’s hard to hide from all the horror stories spread on Instagram about raw nips, feeding in bathrooms, and “pumping and dumping” after enjoying some happy hour wine. Many of my mom friends had experienced painful duct clogs, exhausting around-the-clock feeding, and isolating workplace pumping. They explained how it wreaked havoc on their mental health, negatively impacting their bond with their babe and their ability to love the start of motherhood. One described it as an emotionally difficult experience that, one year later, she *still* deeply regrets it. And she“only” breastfed for the first eight weeks.
So even though I, of course, was absorbing the strongly-worded, laid-on-heavy pressure to breastfeed, it felt most important to me that my baby girl not begin her life with her mama’s freshly milked cortisol. I’m grateful that Jesse was in 100% cahoots with my line of thought. (Probably because he knows what happens when mom’s mental health isn’t prioritized, and he didn’t want to have to take care of a hysterical new baby and a hysterical 33-year-old baby.)
When I casually told our doula that I wasn’t planning on breastfeeding, her face warped into a look I thought would only be reserved for someone admitting to something as appalling as, I don’t know, sharing a toothbrush with their dog?
So, sadly, but admittedly, I felt I had to justify my decision to formula feed with something more indisputable than just my feelings. I figured scapegoating the risks of giving my girl a milkshake containing my prescription happy pills would do the trick.
One thing led to the next and before I knew it, by energetic insistance by our doula, I found myself Facetiming with a lactation consultant. Eh, tittie-timing, really. Because as soon as she finished checking a manual (which I can only compare to the big book of spells from Sabrina The Teenage Witch) and looked up at me and said, “Yeah, no, both of your meds are approved for breastfeeding,” I was somehow, moments later, topless, groping myself while Jesse manually zoomed and adjusted my MacBook camera to give her the breast—I mean best—vantage points of my nips.
Considering I scheduled this appointment to get a permission slip out of breastfeeding, and considering I’m a person who still changes in locker room stalls, it was quite a shock to be live-streaming my ta-ta’s to a complete stranger.
But the moment she shouted out in delight, “WOW you have great nipples!” (a compliment, admittedly, my nipples had never received), my embarrassment quickly turned to pride.
To make sure my nipples worked as well as they looked (😂), she had me squeeze my areola, which during pregnancy had turned super dark (so my newborn can find them without having to borrow my iPhone flashlight and to ruin any notions I had of being able to wear any light-colored swimsuits on our babymoon).
I couldn’t believe it when yellow juice started dripping out of me! It was colostrum—-an antibody and antioxidant-packed super milk specifically formulated for our baby’s immune system. It’s more commonly (around the breastfeeding community anyway) referred to as liquid gold. I quickly learned that’s also how it’s treated, because when Jesse handed me a tissue to wipe the drips of juice off of me, the consultant shrieked, “No! Rub it! Rub it on you!” presumably because wasting colostrum might be akin to wasting a fine cognac, and both of us, startled, started rubbing my colostrum all over my clavicle.
But by the end of the call, substantially more confident about the workings (and showings) of my own anatomy, I felt way more open to the idea of my little girl tap-tap-tapping my tits like maple trees.
This quickly turned from a silly story to a serendipitous one. Only a few days after my live-streamed breast exam, our teeny, preemie, five-pound sweetie arrived three weeks ahead of schedule. With a slew of frightening health concerns, our fragile Hannah went straight from my belly to an NICU incubator, where she stayed for a harrowing week and a half.
Because she is my first baby, I didn’t know the norms—so when Jesse and I went to sleep the night after my delivery without our newborn alongside us, I honestly didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning and slow-walked with my fresh c-section wound to the NICU to say good morning to Hannah while hearing babies screaming in rooms around us that I realized ”Ohhhhh, typically you have your child WITH YOU in this part of the process.”
When we arrived in the NICU, they handed us our fragile Hannah adorned with cords connected to monitors, wrapped in bandages, and rockin’ a heavy-duty, home-arrest ankle bracelet to prevent her from sneaking out with some other parents. That cuddly skin-to-skin contact that I’d seen in photos with the topless mom, sleeping baby, and the dad/partner awkwardly third-wheeling next to them wasn’t an option for us. I couldn’t even see Hannah when I held her because my mandatory mask obstructed my vision of her. So my best vantage point of my baby was when Jesse held her—and vice versa.
A doctor asked if we’d like her to have formula or donor milk. We opted for the latter and soon a nurse arrived with her meal. As I held a minuscule bottle of another (incredibly generous) woman’s breastmilk to feed my sickly sleeping beauty milliliter by milliliter, I was overcome with a motherly yearning to have the milk in the bottle be from me.
When we returned to my hospital room, I asked for a pump and a lesson on how to use it. It seemed at the time like some advanced engineering, but I quickly learned it’s not much different from juicing citrus.
I held each suction up to my *great nipples* and prayed some food for Hannah would come out. Come out it did! I was so fortunate to have that yellow liquid gold pour into bottles like soda from a movie theater machine into a mammoth, so-called “small” -sized cup. Relief washed over me and I think these were the first moments I finally felt like Hannah’s mommy. Since the sweet NICU nurses were the ones who changed her first (and fiftieth) diapers, comforted her earliest cries, and wrapped her inaugural swaddle, brewing bottles of boob-milk was something only her M-O-M could do, so do her M-O-M D-I-D.
The next blurry ten days (some in the hospital and the rest at home) revolved entirely around Hannah’s strictly-structured meals, which we’d botle feed to her among the beeps of monitors, humms of machines, and whispers of other parents to their undercooked babies.
We talked about Hannah like she was a seal at Sea World whose feedings were a spectacle not to be missed.
“So we’ll go home, take a nap, and then return for her 3:00 feeding.”
“Hi, it’s the Waxman’s, we’re running a little late so can you please tell the nurse to hold her 6:00 feeding until we arrive?”
“We love you, baby girl, sweet dreams and see you at your 9 a.m. feeding.”
Now, Hannah’s three months old and I guess I'm doing what’s called “exclusive pumping.” Jesse fell in love with the ritual of bottle-feeding her, I fell into the habit of getting the bajeezus squeezed out of my breasts, and Hannah falls…asleep. To wake her, we were taught to twist the bottle to remind her it’s in her mouth for the sucking, but I’m not so much a fan of twisting my ta-ta. Though every few meals, I do love putting her on my boob so she remembers who the real milk maker is in our family.
But I can completely see why my friends said breastfeeding meddled with their mental health—between the time consumption, inconvenience, discomfort, endless washing and sanitizing of equipment, and storing and organizing of milk, it’s hella hard work. The times where I feel like I’m beginning to Breast-milk-myself with a Bitch Face, I take a walk, eat some Twizzlers, and remind myself that I can always phase in formula (assuming it’s available for purchase) until my Bitch Face fades. But if that face becomes permanent, and if it takes a toll that isn’t worth it for any of us, I’ll absolutely be altering how things go down at this little food manufacturing plant over here.
So I’ve had a lot of middle-of-the-night alone time with my pump, basking in the blue backlit screen of the machine, soothed by the rhythmic draws of the suction cups, and to keep myself entertained (and because finding humor is how I turn my frowns upside down), I put together this list of 27 Surprising Things I’ve Learned About Breast Milk—Pieced Together From Multiple 3 a.m. Pumpings:
27 Surprising Things I’ve Learned About Breast Milk—Pieced Together From Multiple 3 a.m. Pumpings:
It stains fabrics like it’s oil and sticks to surfaces like it’s melted soft serve.
It strangely causes me to crave oat milk lattes…
…And banana smoothies.
Fresh from the pump, it foams like a latte.
Fresh from the fridge, it looks like a banana smoothie.
Do not fuck with your ducts. Clogging them hurts. Heat via shower. Use the boobie warmer thingy. Also use the thingy that helps massage the milk out of them. Or a vibrator. Trust the process. Guilt your husband. Use it as a (valid) excuse to book a lavish massage.
That it’s possible, by way of pressure I presume, to wake up in a literal puddle of breast milk. (Which stains, remember?)
That it’s not possible, no matter what, to not somehow get drops and puddles of breast milk on every surface in the house. (And it sticks, remember?)
How quickly one can go from “I can’t even possibly imagine milk coming out of my tits,” to “I can’t remember what else I ever did with these things.”
But how it likely will not get any less strange to hand milk myself.
How grateful I’d feel for my body to even be able to turn into a drink dispensary in the first place.
Is my milk technically dairy?
That one breast cried, like sobs, of jealousy when my baby is sipping from the other one. (It leaks like a faucet I forgot to turn off.)
That both ta-ta’s throb/tingle when my baby cries! (Kind of like how some people get a headache when it’s about to rain?)
How the idea of my boobs ever being something sexy is, I think, beyond the point of no return. (Same with nips ever being an erotic zone.)
How even though I am very much a grown-ass woman, titty (not breast) milk is our household name.
How the constant reminders from “the sources” that “the more you pump, the more you make!” of course manifests fear and worry about whether you’re pumping enough.
How much that sweet relief of long-held-pee feeling pales in comparison to the sweet relief of milking an engorged breast.
How surprisingly NOT curious I am to taste it, contrary to what I always assumed.
That it’s changed my perspective on food waste now that I understand firsthand, the production of creating it all on my own. I wince every time I lose a drip or don’t use a drop.
That for whatever reason, the minute a nip gets squeezed, a 10/10 level of thirst gets triggered.
The hilarity that it’s not just winning at UNO that triggers my competitive side, my boobs contend with one another every session, to see which one can make more milk.
How bottle feeding spoiled Hannah because even though she’s super at latching onto my *great nipples,* she gets fussy breastfeeding because it’s much harder work for both of us!
How I worry that ^^^ is going to teach her the wrong life lesson: because in life sometimes there are no bottles, only breasts. Ya know?
How often I’d look down at her suckling at my teet and vow to be the first mom in the world whose daughter doesn’t need a therapist to undo her screw-ups.
How it’s funny to look down and see a person asleep with your nipple and areola in their mouth. It’s also funny to have to wiggle with your boob to wake them back up.
How, when I feel discomfort, I’d look at her and think, “If, when you’re a teenager, you EVER say anything along the lines of I HATE YOU, MOM!” I’m not going to send you to your room or take away your phone, I’m simply going to thaw some frozen breast milk I’ll have saved and require you to re-taste your gratitude for me with a lovely mama-milk-matcha latte. 🍵
Now, my favorite titty-milking things:
These bras to pump with, look mom, no hands!
This incredibly helpful breast massager to milk yourself dry (and keep your ducts unclogged!!!!)—it feels really really good
This “hospital grade” pump for pumping at home (‘twas partially covered by my insurance)
This pump for on-the-go (which was my 33rd birthday gift from my father in law) which I use for pumping while doing things around the house and pumping in the car
These thingies to catch milk when I can’t pump but my nips are bursting at the seams!
My lactation consultant (warning: live-streaming your ta-ta’s will be a thing)
This cover I put over myself when pumping in the presence of my father or my fridge repair man
These bags for milk storage
This brush for bottle washing
This bottle sterilizer
This milk warmer
This dish soap
These bottles, nipples, and nipple rings (not as kinky as it sounds)
This natural stain remover that works holy-shit great on stains that aren’t just milk from the teet
This book I wrote that helps you not eat Brussels with a Bitch Face 🥦