pumping: a love/hate story

warning: discussion of boobs ahead.

The first time I pumped I felt a sense of giddy relief. I texted a friend about the precarious power of the bottle in the fridge: “Now if I died in a car crash, my family could still feed the baby once before they needed to find formula.”

(If I had to summarize motherhood as succinctly as possible, I might go with that anecdote.)

My son nursed before I even had a chance to wrap my mind around his violent, angry arrival into the world. I gave birth with a doula who deftly maneuvered his body and mine — a couple of overwhelmed amateurs — so he was latched even before the umbilical cord was cut. I was amazed at so many things in that moment, not the least of which was that after the ordeal of pregnancy and the trauma of birth, breastfeeding seemed so easy in that instant.

Archer was so good at eating. In our desperate hunger to get to know him — to have our familiarity catch up to the overwhelming adoration and fill the huge swaths of brain now occupied by thinking about him with some sort of specifics — we reported and repeated this fact over and over, to each other and fervent texts to anyone who reached out.

I entered motherhood armed with research and an array of strong opinions — and a lifetime perfecting the art of quickly establishing strong opinions on new topics as they arose — and yet I simply didn’t know how I would feel about nursing. I had neither collected colostrum nor considered the world of formula before he was born. I had acquired a pump but didn’t know how to use it beyond that it seemed self evident enough.

Then he was born — perfect but small and helpless and hungry. Feeding him became more important than life itself. You think having a baby will be about so many things and it is, eventually, but not at first. Diapers are whatever. Sleep is precious and fleeting but a blur (and more plentiful at first than it will become in a few weeks). But eating? Eating is everything. When, during pregnancy, my doula had said to expect to nurse a dozen times a day at first I was shocked and then immediately developed a mental block around the reality of what that meant. It meant my all-consuming love had one very necessary and literal outlet that fully occupied my mind and my time.

In the hospital nurses started saying the phrase “exclusively breastfed” to me and I quickly developed a sense of pride or at least ease around that. “He’s exclusively breastfed, right?” someone would say looking at our chart and it made me feel like I knew how to be a mom to say “yes that’s correct.”

I loved knowing things about my son and making decisions to do what was best for him and relaying those plans confidently as if my assurance and good intentions were enough to guarantee what would come to pass. Exclusively breastmilk for the first six months. At six months he’ll start on solid food and formula can be part of introducing variety into his diet. This was the plan. I told a lot of people The Plan. Look at this baby! I exclaimed to friends! I made all of him and every day I make more. I have no job but I make life and life-sustaining sustenance. It’s not hard to see in retrospect what was happening.

Nursing hurts. Or maybe I was bad at it. Even as a newborn, my baby felt heavy as I struggled to maintain the same static hold for what amounts to hours a day. I couldn’t figure out how to not hunch. Before he was a week old my back felt like it would never recover and every time I fed him it was like pressing on bone-deep bruise that stretched from my neck to knees. My boobs were huge and heavy and not even the nursing bras fit properly but I wore them every minute except in the shower and I braced myself to take them off like peeling a supportive bandage off a long-injured limb where the muscles have atrophied. Latching triggered such an extreme thirst in me that Jake would stand at the ready with the giant plastic jug with the same disposable straw they had given me in the hospital so I could guzzle water while our baby ate. I didn’t even want to switch to a more permanent water bottle for fear of losing the precarious sense of competence.

We had a lactation consultant visit us at home at some point in the hazy first week and she said I was doing an amazing job. I don’t even believe in this kind of thing but she told us we were blessed — to have such an easy baby, she saw so many parents struggling to get their newborns to eat even though eating was the only way to stay alive — and we relished it.

The day after she visited, my son and I moved down to my parents’ house, where we would live for nearly a month while Jake was in Paris for the Olympics.

While I was there I started pumping. Once a day to start. My family didn’t want to change dirty diapers or lose sleep to help with the baby but if I gave them one bottle a day, I could get a couple consecutive hours of rest. Immediately, I felt immense guilt at how much easier pumping felt. I could sit comfortably, scroll on my phone or watch Love Island without ignoring my baby. It was a break. It was the only break. I confided in other new moms and they couldn’t relate. Often they had come to pumping under duress, their baby unable to latch properly, their supply uncertain. But I had come to resent the urgency of nursing. No matter where I was or what I was doing, my son’s hunger — and it seemed he was always hungry — necessitated a very specific, physical kind of care. My body was never not on the clock.

It wasn’t that I only wanted someone else to give him a bottle, I wanted to give him a bottle too! I wanted to sit at the breakfast table and feed him without taking my boobs out. I wanted to go for a walk and not worry about the logistics of breastfeeding far from home. I never figured out how to nurse without the cumbersome pillow that curls around your midsection and helps to support the baby in the correct position. First one, then two bottles a day came to represent the chance to break free of the tight circuit of nursing, changing, sleeping, that could all take place within the one room in my parents’ house I’d commandeered.

Of course, not total freedom. I told people that nursing and pumping is like being pregnant all over again — your body belongs to someone else in a way that demands constant logistical, physical, and emotional preoccupation. I obsessed about my baby’s seeming preference for one breast, then his worsening latch, then an uneven supply, then an oversupply, and later, after getting sick, an undersupply. At all hours of the night I read Reddit threads and Amazon review all the while trying to keep up with the breakneck treadmill of keeping my baby fed. When Jake was finally back, we tried to go out to dinner to celebrate his birthday belatedly, but by the end of the meal, my breasts were so swollen and leaky that I couldn’t focus on the food. As we rushed home, I Googled clogged ducts and tried to strategize whether I should pump or wait for Archer to be hungry again.

After weeks away, Jake relished the chance to give the baby a bottle and so I started pumping more. Daycare loomed and I could pump two bottles worth at a time, building up a freezer stash in the process, so I pumped more. Archer got old enough to get distracted while eating and meals started taking longer and he would unlatch repeatedly to look around and so I pumped more. Eventually, when I tried to nurse, my son would cry. My therapist said this was normal — babies eventually learn to differentiate and find the bottle may be easier or more flexible to accommodate their curiosity. Didn’t I prefer pumping anyway? But faced with a baby who wailed when I tried to feed him directly, blubbering snotty tears onto my boobs, which I hated except for the fact that they provided him sustenance, I couldn’t believe I had ever said such a thing. But the treadmill of his hunger kept coming and I had enough milk, as long as I pumped every few hours, and so at some point I was exclusively pumping.

pumping at the tv studio

Daycare started, I went back to ballpark, and some not insignificant portion of my brain was perpetually consumed with calculating the endless cycle of getting enough milk to send with him the next morning. And how many hours it had been since I last pumped, and how far I was from home, and ice packs, and access to some way to clean the pump parts, and maybe the next newsletter will be all about the ordeal of pumping at the World Series when the team simply wouldn’t bother to find me somewhere private and accessible.

Every growth spurt ate away at our freezer supply. My son was so hungry and some days I was stuck at home, unable to take him to daycare until I could squeeze in one more pumping session so he’d have enough bottles. I did my bit about how everything this baby is, I made for a friend and she didn’t think it was cute, she was concerned. You know formula is fine, though, right? she asked. I told her about The Plan, and how it was just six months.

At pediatrician appointments when they asked if he was still exclusively breastfed I would say something like “exclusively drinking breastmilk, yep.” I felt like I was going to get figured out for having failed at nursing despite my easy baby. I felt like I was being a Good Mom in a clinical sense — giving him breastmilk — but not in a spiritual, sort of higher plane only accessible to moms sense. I had broken the precious, fleeting physical connection that persists beyond birth between babies and mothers who breastfeed. We were not a self-contained, autonomous ecosystem, my baby and I. The memes and TikToks and jokes about breastfed babies and their googly-eyed adoration for the same fleshy orbs that motivate much of adult society didn’t quite apply. I wasn’t special to him. And when I said that, Jake reminded me that I still made all of his food and so of course I kept doing that.

At four months, our pediatrician said we could start Archer on some solid foods. He took to it immediately, ever precocious in his pursuit of eating. The logic of exclusively breastmilk until he could eat other things fell away. I held out another month-plus of exclusively pumping. When we’d burned through all but two bottles worth of the freezer stash, I relented and we gave him formula.

The relief wasn’t instant. I was still pumping as much as I could, using formula to fill in the gaps. It felt like a last resort. Like a concession, an argument I’d lost because I was too tired to keep fighting. But I was tired. So once he was drinking full formula bottles without complaint, I set myself a new schedule: pump three times a day. Suddenly, it felt like I had come up for air. Right when I woke up, right before I went to sleep, and then just one other time during the day. It was still draining, just not all the time.

Now, my baby is six months and I don’t know how to feel. At his last doctor’s appointment, Jake asked how much breastmilk he should still be getting to reap any remaining immunity benefits and the doctor shrugged: “More is better, but you’ve given him a lot.”

I think it’s hard to make a sensible cost-benefit analysis with a baby. The extremeness of the love doesn’t allow for reasonable weighing of mitigating factors. It’s heavier than everything, how much I love him, so the scale never shift from whatever it takes. Choosing to forgo even a tiny benefit on his behalf feels like an affront to the sanctity of the relationship and to how much I genuinely want to give him everything good. Is it even a sacrifice if what I want most is for him to be happy and protected? If more is better, why would I ever do less?

Maybe that’s the sadness or at least ambivalence about weaning even slowly: it’s a loosening of that single-track, early-days mind. I need to make room for other aspects of my life, and that does come at the expense of all-consuming dotage on my son. When I only did things for him, it wasn’t easy but it was simple. I don’t think that the love will ever be so simple again.