When Nursing Turns Into a Nightmare

To all you supermoms out there who had absolutely no problems breastfeeding, I say congratulations and go to hell. (Of course, I mean that in the most affectionate way.) But if your nursing endeavors resembled, like mine did, a Stanley Kubrick flick, I say, pull up a chair, sista, and let’s commiserate.

Nursing did not come easy to me. For starters, none of the women in my family had done it, so there was no maternal experience trickling down through the generations. Second, I gave birth in a New York hospital where “doula” was a dirty word and the nurses were too understaffed and not as educated as they should’ve been on the benefits of breastfeeding. At the time my daughter was born, a new mother with any intentions of not bottle-feeding in that maternity ward had the Similac cans stacked against her.

It was bad enough the nurses kept stocking my room with free samples of formula and asking me if I wanted them to “give the baby just a little nip” from the bottle, even after I repeatedly said no. But more frustrating was the fact that when I realized something was wrong—my adorable baby girl wouldn’t latch properly, causing me tremendous pain and both of us an enormous amount of frustration—I received no help from the ladies in white (or should I say, the ladies in the teddy-bear-print scrubs). I’d ring the nurse buzzer and no one would appear. So I’d walk, with my crying baby in my arms, very slowly (because, after having delivered vaginally it’s the only way you can walk) to the nurse’s station to beg for help. If a nurse was available, she’d tell me I had to wait for a lactation consultant. Hours later, when the consultant would finally arrive, she’d spent three minutes with me before claiming she had to head out to another hospital. It was insanity.

There I sat in my room, exhausted and nerve-wracked, with a hungry, screaming newborn on my lap. The baby was nursing for a few minutes at a time, but clearly not as much as she wanted or needed to. I cried. She cried. She clenched her tiny fists in frustration and turned beet red. I clenched my swollen fists in frustration and screamed at my husband. All the while, my hospital roommate, who’d just given birth to a 10-pound boy who was consuming six ounces of formula every two hours, spent her days laughing on the phone with friends, and her nights sleeping as well as her baby. Was I crazy or what?

I was convinced that I was starving my infant and was therefore the worst possible mother. Was I just trying to prove something to myself? Was it selfish to push my little fantasy that I would nurse my child for a year? I was a bottle-fed baby and I turned out OK (relatively speaking). Finally, the pediatrician persuaded me to supplement with some formula, which only made me realize the No. 1 reason for not supplementing: If you miss a nursing session, your breasts will swell to six times their original size, so that just one of them is as large as your noggin.

Things only got worse when when my huge rack and I took the baby home. At the end of each teary nursing attempt, I’d give in and pour the formula into a bottle. Not many people were encouraging. My mother and aunts, staring pitifully at me and my (in their eyes) scrawny baby, beseeched me to quit. Even the nurse in my OB/GYN’s office said in her not-so-cute Brooklyn accent, “You still breastfeeding? Isn’t that a pain in the ass?”

My sister, a carefree single at the time, would come over and watch in amazement as her formerly modest older sister paraded around the apartment naked from the waist up and sobbing. (I’m surprised she ever had kids of her own after witnessing that spectacle.) You see, as far as I was concerned during this time period, my breasts were no longer a part of my body—they were simply two milk-producing machines that were malfunctioning on a regular basis. Too bad no one had given me an instruction manual.

In a whole lot of pain one night, I took out the electric breast pump that I’d been given at my baby shower and decided to give it a go. Now, if you’ve ever seen one of these things, it looks like the love child of a Flux Capacitor and a Medieval torture device. Connected to the main box are two tubes, which are connected to two plastic baby bottles, which are attached to two suction cups, which are in turn attached to your poor unwitting breasts. When you turn on the pump, the suction kicks in and your skin is grabbed like one of those cheap stuffed toys in the Claw Crane game at the amusement park. While the machine extracts milk from you, it makes a rhythmic noise like a vacuum cleaner on Valium, something like this:

Wuh-whoosh…ah-huh. 

Wuh-whoosh…ah-huh. 

Wuh-whoosh…ah-huh.

Sometimes this repetitive noise actually put me to sleep. But occasionally, in the wee hours of the night, as I sat half-asleep in the darkest corner of my bedroom, hooked up to those awful tubes, the breast pump provided not a lullaby but a sinister voice that spoke to me. And ladies, it wasn’t chatting me up about tomorrow’s weather forecast. What it had to say about the current state of affairs was far more pessimistic:

Your dumb…life sucks.

Your dumb…life sucks. 

Your dumb…life sucks.

One particularly bad night, I was certain it had instructed me to do bodily harm to my husband, who was, unlucky for him, sleeping peacefully a few feet away:

Slam him…in the head. 

Slam him…in the head. 

Slam him…in the head. 

Now, even though I’m a quarter Sicilian, I’m not a violent woman, so I never carried out the breast pump’s evil plots. But I did come to dread that friggin’ machine and knew I had to snap out of this nursing funk. But how? I wasn’t getting any sleep, the baby wasn’t gaining much weight, the machine was literally and figuratively draining me, and everyone was telling me to quit already. But I wasn’t ready to give up.

As a last resort, I opened the phone book and called a local lactation consultant, whose name I now forget, but for the sake of this narrative will call Mama Cass, because she truly resembled the legendary Mamas & Papas singer. Within in hour, I was opening the door to a large, long-haired woman in a flowery tunic and love beads. But just as quickly as it took me to take in her bohemian appearance, she metamorphosed into Mary Poppins, setting down on the floor a tremendous black shoulder bag and pulling from it even more tremendous objects. Like a metal baby scale, which she used to weigh my daughter both before and after a feeding. (“See, she gained an ounce-and-a-half! She’s eating!”) Best of all, this incredible woman pointed out that our nursing problem was partly due to the shape of my baby’s mouth, and she taught me a progressive “off center” latch that hadn’t yet made it into the nursing books. Needless to say, I instantly fell in love with this woman and would have invited her to live with us, had she not mentioned that she had four dogs and a husband to feed back at her apartment.

So that was how I finally became a successfully nursing mother. And I did it for almost eleven months with each kid. How about that? A few months after I mastered Mama Cass’ latch, I even started to look forward to those nursing sessions, when the oxytocin would kick in and I’d doze off with my sleeping daughter in my lap. Almost three years later, I felt the same relaxation when I breastfed my son, who was a master nurser from day one. I remember every time he conked out and fell off the breast, his little lips would remain puckered and he’d continue to make those little sucking motions in the air. Five years later, I still think about those cute puckered lips.

Little does my son know that as the second born, he benefitted greatly from having a mother with some experience under her nursing bra. My daughter, on the other hand, will probably be scarred for life after all that drama in her first weeks of life. One day she may be hooked up to a breast pump that eerily instructs her to do me bodily harm. And I must say, I won’t blame her, or the machine, if she follows through.

—This column originally appeared in Lady and A Red Typewriter, 2011.