What the pump.

I'm getting mighty tired of pumping breast milk. Tired of lactating in general, but having mixed feelings about when to stop. I can't believe it but Levi will be 6 months old tomorrow! When he was born, my goal was to breast feed for at least 6 months, and I hoped to do it for a year. Unfortunately Levi has never nursed well and despite the coaching of some wonderful lactation consultants, breast feeding for me has meant attaching this ungodly device up to my chest and allowing it to milk me like a cow five or six times a day. It is significantly uncomfortable to use, a hassle to clean, annoying to have to haul around every where with its many tiny parts. It is cumbersome, restrictive, and decidedly unsexy. I have to get up an extra half hour early in order to pump, I have to plan the activities of my day around pumping. If I don't pump every few hours, my boobs get huge and start to ache in this crazy bursting way. Not too long ago I stopped getting up at night to pump because the tiredness hurts more than the burstiness. Now I wake up in some agony every morning until I can get the thing on.

I pump in the car and am pretty sure that strangers in big trucks have often been able to see right in when stopped at a stop light. I'm always afraid I'll get pulled over and have to explain myself. I've pumped in the window seat on an airplane (not a full flight). I've pumped in restaurant bathrooms, friends' guest bedrooms, parking lots, and drive through windows. I pump about 40 ounces of milk a day (that's two starbuck's "ventis"). Levi drinks about 30 or 35 ounces a day, so I've been slowly building up a freezer's worth of surplus, which for some reason I am very proud of.

Levi recently started eating a little bit of cereal with his milk. His first food that is not made by my body. Until this point I have enjoyed the idea that Levi's little body is made and nourished entirely by my own. For a little while, I was losing weight at the same rate that he was gaining. I was down a pound for every pound he gained, and it seemed like I was directly transferring quantities of my body to his. Feeding him anything other than breast milk, or stopping pumping, feels like the next step of separation between mother and baby. It's not that I think that my bond with him will be diminished in any way when I stop pumping, but stopping breast feeding is another marker of the time that has passed since he was born. I'm having a hard time with how fast everything is moving, how quickly he is growing and changing. Shayne and I got pregnant immediately when we decided to try. The pregnancy itself flew by, and now the first half year of his life is gone! So as much as I complain about pumping (and I do complain) I find myself reluctant to stop because I don't yet feel ready for another whole stage to be in the past. I want to hold onto this time a little longer.

Anyway. What the pump.

My baby bear

I’m the first to admit that I have done a poor job of keeping in touch with many people in my life since my son was born last October. The most generous among you will not take it personally and will just assume that I have been too damn busy and tired to write or call. True, true. And so I submit to you here, my attempts to write down a description of the ridiculousness that I have created for myself (given birth to).

I am simultaneously happier and more miserable than I have ever been in my entire life. It is a completely incongruous state where I often find myself laughing and crying at the same time. Levi does this too, and we like to cuddle together at the end of the day, cackling maniacally while the tears stream down our faces. Having a baby leads to a special kind of insanity. Sleep deprivation is probably the biggest cause of it, but so is the fact that I love that baby more than my mind and body can possibly contain. And it is not necessarily the gentle, nurturing, motherly love that I imagined I would feel for my child. It is more of an urgent, visceral, exploding love. It is an insatiable, demanding, crushing love. It is kind of like a punch in the face. But it's a punch in the face that you just want more and more of. In fact you want it so much that you joyfully throw most of what used to seem important directly into the trash just so that you can get your face bashed in even harder by babylove. Hence the insanity.

I think what is going on here is that I have become addicted to my son. In a heroin kind of way. Is that a bad thing? I think about him constantly, and when I'm not with him, I am always scheming about how I could get to him, how I could get more of him. When I finally do get to him, I clutch him desperately to my chest, I feel my heart rate increase. My lungs fill up with him, and I breathe in as much as I possibly can of him. For a minute or two, everything beyond what I hold in my arms flickers and fades, and I cannot hear or see anything else. (If you tried to get between me and my son in these moments, I think I might kill you. In fact, I think I would rip your limbs off with my bare hands. Which is why this blog is called “The Momma Bear.”)

Others have written about this opium den of new motherhood and have been criticized harshly by the contingent of feminists who believe that this is a social construction engineered by patriarchy in order to oppress women. I don't really have an answer for that. Before I had my son...before I grew him inside my body, nourished him with my blood, pushed him into the world through my vagina (yes, my vagina), and then fed him with my own milk, I probably would have agreed. I would have been irritated by educated and talented women who had worked so hard and then made such drastic compromises in order to be with their babies. Women who sacrificed everything just so that they could stay home and raise their husband's children. But now, here he is. A little person in this world who is made entirely of me, who has not one molecule in his body that hasn't first passed through mine, and I guess I feel differently. I don't think that what I am experiencing is a device of patriarchy. I do feel like I am at the mercy of a power that is much greater than myself, but that power is definitely not Men. It’s a power that is a secret between Levi and I and I mostly feel grateful it because it makes it easier to make the difficult choices that motherhood is confronting me with.

And now I have to sign off because I’m starting to get all itchy and I need to go and get my babyfix!