In all of the difficulties of early motherhood, there was a common thread: inadequacy.
My body, the same one that did an excellent job of gestating a baby, wasn’t able to birth my baby vaginally. Inadequate body. I wasn’t able to exclusively breastfeed my baby: Inadequate breasts. I didn’t know my baby wasn’t getting enough milk. Inadequate mother.
Somewhere around 2 weeks postpartum, I was pumping regularly to try to boost my supply, and I was washing pump parts in my kitchen when I broke down crying. I had never felt so frustrated with my own body not being able to do the thing it’s supposed to do – birth a baby, and then feed that baby. While I had gestated and birthed a healthy baby, I wasn’t able to birth my baby the way I had wanted and prepared to. While we live in a miraculous age where we have options for feeding babies that are better than ‘this will merely keep your baby alive’, I wanted to breastfeed if I could.
This feeling of frustration was one I hadn’t felt in a long time. I had worked hard, taking fitness classes on my lunch breaks, learning to love my body. I even walked to work in the Before Times. I exercised until 38 weeks pregnant, and only stopped then because it was the middle of summer and honestly? I felt like I’d made it far enough. I didn’t start working out regularly again until about 7 months postpartum.
I’ve had to redefine what success looks like for me in my new role as a mother, which is hard for some of us who are very particular in how we do things.
Did I get the birth experience I hoped for? Absolutely not. Did I get the postpartum experience I’d hoped for? Oh hell no.
But that’s not the end of the story. I breastfed, in combination with formula, for 5 months. I think I kind of knew that doing a combination was possible in theory, but I hadn’t really integrated that knowledge because it wasn’t relevant to me when I learned it. I stopped breastfeeding right around the same time we started feeding solids, and that felt like the right decision for us. My baby gained weight, and then continued gaining weight. My mental health started to improve (more on that later). This is a success story.
There are some things I wish I had known sooner though:
- Put a sharpie and painter’s tape or post-it notes somewhere handy in your kitchen for labeling formula bottles, pumped breast milk, and anything else that should be discarded after 24 hours in the fridge. Your brain will be mush and you will not remember.
- Instead of buying a pumping bra (especially if you don’t know how long you’ll be pumping for), sacrifice an old sports bra to the pumping gods. Put it on, mark where your nipples are, take it off, and cut slits with scissors to accommodate the flanges. Just don’t cut them too large or the flanges won’t stay put.
- Do not expect too much of yourself. If you are feeding a baby and pumping every 3 hours, you are not getting much, if any, sleep. Don’t feel bad about sleeping whenever you can. Let someone else hold the baby so you can grab a nap. A blackout eye mask might be nice to have. I didn’t have one, but I wish I had.
- “Sleep when the baby sleeps” is some of the worst advice I have ever received, EVER. If I could wave a magic wand and erase that phrase from the world, I would replace it with ”Don’t be afraid to accept help so you can sleep.”
My body is not a lemon. My body is amazing and did the best it could. I am not a lemon. I am a good mom. (Repeat until you believe it.)
