Dirty Little Secret

A few days ago I bought a burgundy nursing top. It has strips of material that criscross my body and pull down for easy boob access, sort of like a designer mummy costume. I also bought a new nursing bra, one with underwire support that will keep my currently pendulous breasts looking perky (as perky as a 38DD can look). I have a few packs of nursing pads on my night table and a tube of Lanisol cream (for nursing mothers, the tube reads in a comforting lilac script). And now, packed away in the back of the closet in the baby's room are my blue and white My Breast Friend nursing pillow and Dr. Sears's book on nursing. At first I packed them away because I couldn't bear to look at them. Then I took them out again to torture myself. And now they're back in the closet mostly because they're useless and make me feel bad. My dirty little secret? Milo won't nurse.

There are all kinds of reasons I could point to - the jaundice that kept him in the hospital for an extra two days, where I was told by the NICU nurses that my choices were to either give him a bottle, start producing more milk, or have him hooked up to an IV; the fact that he's now used to the bottle and screams when my breasts don't produce instant lunch; Milo's faulty tongue, which the lactation consultant says he uses improperly and needs to be retrained through finger feeding - but I'm not sure which reason is important or accurate or matters in the long run.

I'd always imagined that I would breastfeed. I pictured myself being one of those women who dot my neighborhood, the ones with their babies tucked neatly into maya wraps, casually popping out a breast over salads at the 2nd St. Cafe, offering junior a little suckle to tide him over until the big feeding after lunch. Of course, this has nothing to do with who I am in reality. For starters, I don't really know anyone in the neighborhood to meet me for lunch at the 2nd St. Cafe. And I have no plans to acquire a maya wrap. And part of me feels like this is a blessing in disguise - I get more sleep because formula-fed babies sleep longer, I can pump and Milo can get breast milk whenever he likes, not just when I'm around. Which means I can take the afternoon off and go shopping, or do some writing, or get a pedicure and not have to worry about whether he needs to eat (even though I worry anyway).

Yet I can't help but feel like I've lugged these breasts around in vain for all these years. Seems like if you've got 'em you might as well put 'em to work. But the amount of effort it would have taken to get him on the breast - the two hour finger feedings, the one hour sessions with the tube taped to my breast that would leave him screaming in anger for more, the mental exhaustion, the fact that I needed a good stiff drink after many feedings despite never having been much for alcohol, that my stomach would roll over and inside out each time he awoke with the thought of another feeding, and another feeding, and another feeding... at some point I had to take stock of what was really important.

"It's okay," the pediatrician said, eyeing me a bit pitifully as I sobbed in response to her question about whether I was breastfeeding. "Plenty of women don't or can't breastfeed and they have perfectly happy, healthy children."

"It's not that big of a deal," my father insisted as I cried to him over the phone. "Nobody is sick, nobody is dying. You have a wonderful kid. He just is bad at sucking. May that be his biggest problem in life."

"That's true," I sniffled. "I guess he can still grow up to be president."

I wanted to believe it, but some of my friends sounded taken aback when I admitted that I was thinking about giving up on breastfeeding. It was too early - I'd only been trying for 2 weeks. Everyone has problems with it, I should just try harder. My mother gasped in horror when, after witnessing me attempt to feed Milo with the tube, I eventually gave him a bottle of formula.

"Formula is poison," she said. Or maybe she didn't. Maybe it just seemed like she wanted to.

But the worst is the breastfeeding book, which makes me feel like Satan every time I open it.

"My baby is two days old and I have been advised to offer a bottle after each feeding in case I don't have enough milk. Is this okay?," a question in the book asks.

"No, it's not okay," the book replies flatly. "If you run into difficulties get help from a reliable source and solve the problems. Believe that you can make enough milk for your baby and you will."

Well what if your baby has jaundice and is likely to permanently damage his nervous system unless he gets something into his system and you aren't making milk yet. Then is it okay? What if after he comes home from the hospital for the second time he refuses to latch on and is rapidly losing weight. Then is it okay? What if you simply don't want to spend the next month of your life doing nothing but trying to get him to suck, because you are s elfish, horrible mother who also wants to participate in activities like, oh, I don't know, sleeping or eating lunch. Then is it okay?

Milo is getting some breast milk. Actually, mostly breast milk, because now instead of spending my time with a baby at my breast I am spending time with my new best friend, the Medela Pump In Style. Every three hours I hook myself up to it, prop my boobs on my knees and attempt to read the New Yorker while expressing what the breastfeeding book refers to as "liquid gold" into two plastic bottles.

Sometimes I forget that my sole purpose in these sessions is to squeeze nourishment for Milo out of a part of my body. Sometimes I think i am just sitting there reading the New Yorker, and I try to turn the page. This is always a mistake, as one of the suction cups usually unseals itself from my breast and breast milk leaks down my torso.

When I first used the pump i would listen to the motor running and it always sounded like it was saying wacko, wacko, wacko. Sometimes I still hear it whispering.

My friend Allison says that she knows someone who pumped exclusively for 6 months and it almost killed her. Such is the desire to do right by one's child. To give him all the goodness and truth that is supposedly sealed up in those little droplets of breast milk.

But here's the thing: I was breast fed until I was old enough to walk over to my mother and demand milk in two languages (we lived in Switzerland at the time). And I'm allergic to everything under the sun. I sneeze all the time. I can't eat eggs. For all intents and purposes, I've always thought myself to be a more sickly person than most of my formula-fed friends.

And still I try. When Milo started crying the other night as i was pumping, Steven shushed him and whispered into his ear, "Don't worry, Milo. Mommy's making dinner."