At the risk of inviting the Drive-By Mommy Brigade and the La Leche Militants to start with the pearl-clutching and horrified reactions, I’m just going to come right out and say this:
Breastfeeding sucks.
See, when you’re pregnant, your helpful medical community bombards you with softly-lit, sepia toned brochures featuring blissed-out moms sitting in fields of wildflowers with cute naked babies tastefully obscuring one breast, and helpful one line slogans like, “It’s the best food for your baby!’ Or, “It’s natural and healthy!” And, ”It’s a beautiful bonding experience!” With the implication being that your child will pop out, you’ll hold him or her up in the vicinity of your boob, and voila! Beautiful, healthy, pain-free bonding time! The wonders of breast milk will ensure that your baby will never be sick! Your baby will be four times as smart as those poor formula-fed creatures! Your baby’s poop won’t stink! Your baby will exude a healthy glow and be writing sonnets by nine months of age!
But what the helpful medical community leaves out of all of this is that breastfeeding, especially the beginning part, sucks. Because it does. It’s hard to do properly. No matter how good your lactation consultant, it is painful at first. For the men in the audience (who haven’t fled screaming from the title of this post) who may wonder what I mean by pain, let’s just say that the corrolary to the first few days of breastfeeding would be this: take a regular emery board, drag it back and forth across one testicle for 20 minutes, then switch sides. Then repeat every two hours for DAYS ON END.
In addition, it is nervewracking–unless you have a hospital scale in your home and can weigh your child every few days to be sure he or she is gaining weight–because you’re never entirely sure how much your baby is getting, which leads to obsessive diaper counting. It also means that you and only you are responsible for every single feeding. Which, in a breastfed baby, is A LOT OF FEEDINGS. Like, twelve a day. So when you breastfeed, you are basically stuck in a chair with a kid on your boob for a month.
Well, unless you pump. And that is a whole other world of “OH MY GOD THIS SUCKS.” Although there is a certain weird fascination to watching your nipples get distended to four times their normal length. And it does promote a certain feeling of sisterhood with dairy cows, for whatever that’s worth.
But beyond all these factors, the worst thing about breastfeeding is that if you can’t do it or choose not to, there is now an entire army’s worth of women and literature out there dedicated to making you feel like a gigantic incompetent loser. To these women and their brochures I simply say, “Bite me, sister.” And to any women out there reading who have been on the receiving end of a La Leche harangue (and the real true believers can be quite scary), be assured I don’t think you’re a bad mom, a failure, or that you just haven’t “tried hard enough to do the right thing for your baby.” Your child will not grow horns or lose 43 I.Q. points if you formula feed. And I don’t believe that you “bond” more closely by having the nipple through which your child draws sustenance attached to your body rather than held in your hand.
This breastfeeding crap is hard, and I fully expect The Girl to be weaned by six months–and it will probably be more like four months, if my past experience with pumping and work and milk supply are any indication.
That said, I am soldiering on, partly because with the H1N1 epidemic The Girl needs all the immune system help she can get, and partly because I am cheap, and breastfeeding does save some cash on the formula front. Plus, I’m about to enter the wonderful world of pumping, which means that I will be free of the recliner for at least a couple of feedings a day. On the other hand, I will be doing the whole “juggling the feeding and the pumping” thing. Sigh.
So that’s why you haven’t heard from me.
