The nursage chronicles

Nursing, in case you have never tried it, is not always easy. Before I had kids, I had no clue about this. It never occurred to me while I was pregnant that I might bottle feed. In the hospital, when the nurse asked, "breast or bottle?" I blithely said, "breast." It's natural, right? How hard can it be?

With Barak, it was pretty awful for quite a while. When he was born, he got whisked off to the NICU without ever getting close to the Source of All Good Things; the first time I saw him, he was twelve hours old, lying on his back in a warmer, bright purple, screaming at the top of his obviously healthy lungs, being totally ignored and with a pacifier right next to him, spat out amidst the hysteria. "I hope you don't mind that I gave him a pacifier," the nurse told me, apologetically. "He was just beside himself." Well, yes, so was I, and you don't see ME sucking on a piece of green plastic, do you? Perhaps you might have PICKED HIM UP AND SOOTHED HIM? But I digress...

The internet doesn't need to know the details of my anatomy, but suffice it to say that most women are not shaped like pacifiers and neither am I. So when Barak was introduced to what was supposed to be in his mouth, and it wasn't shaped like green plastic, he had no idea what to do. It smelled good, but he just couldn't get his mouth around it, and he definitely couldn't latch, and he just cried. And cried. And I cried too. And there was the evil evil nurse floating around behind him, intoning "Weight loss... formula... hungry..."

The hospital lactation consultant was worse than useless, and the list of lactation consultants I got at his pediatrician's was composed almost entirely of out-of-service numbers. (I'm not making this up. One of them was supposed to be something like "Gentle Wings Lactation Consultants" or whatever. I called it, and got the voice of a very manly-sounding man on the other end. "Um, is this Gentle Wings Lactation Consultants?" I squeaked. Amidst the sounds of grunting and banging, I heard, "What? No, this is Big Burly Guys Construction and Destruction." "Sorry, wrong number...")

Anyway, I finally did get a hold of a lactation consultant, whose fee nearly made me faint, but it wasn't even close to what I would have spent on formula. She showed me what was wrong, and gave me a little piece of silicone to make me more pacifier-shaped. Barak needed it for five months. Five months of losing it in the middle of the night, needing full light and wakefulness to nurse, sterilizing the thing a million times daily. Yecch. When I finally got around to calling the LC to ask where I could get more, she sounded shocked that I was still using it. "And you're still nursing?" she asked. Um, yeah, obviously, or I wouldn't be needing more. "I've never had a woman make it more than two weeks still needing one. It's just too much of a pain." Tell me about it. And then when Barak finally could latch without it, we got into the yeast infections...

Well, anyway. He did, in the end, nurse for almost 19 months. And I know now that there are some babies who just cannot do it. I couldn't do it. He couldn't do it. I could never have done it without a whole lot of very expensive help. Which makes the current "nurse your baby or else" campaign all the more enraging. But I digress. (I do that a lot, don't I. Well, what can I say, it's my blog, where else can I digress if I feel like it?)

When Iyyar was born, I knew what not to do. He didn't get a pacifier until he was a month old. I made sure to nurse him right away and had the nurses plaster his bassinet with "I'm nursing, NO FORMULA, NO PACIFIERS!" signs. He caught on immediately, and it was all good, although excruciatingly painful for the first couple of weeks. Who knew it would hurt again? Not me. It hurt more than it did the first time. Unfair, unfair...

Now, happily, it doesn't hurt at all, which is good because Iyyar spends a LOT of time nursing. It is his favorite activity at any hour of the day or night and he is, fortunately, very very good at it. He can do it while I'm completely asleep, and as I recently discovered I now don't even need to get him started. I can put him next to me in bed and wake up a few hours later to find him still happily at it. I have to assume that he did stop, sleep, and start again, but who knows? All I know is that unlike Barak, who at this age was in something like the fifth percentile for weight, Iyyar is cruising past the fiftieth.

It's funny to watch him nurse. This morning, he was obviously done eating but not done with the comfort part of it; he was still latched on but his eyes, peering over the top, were darting around with interest, busily taking in everything going on in the kitchen. I let him do that for a little while, then, needing to get Barak's bag ready for camp, took him off. Squawk of outrage: "EXCUSE ME! Can't you see I was USING that!" Sorry...

Nursing is about so much more than food and antibodies. For me, it's knowing that there is one thing that nobody but me can do for him. It's making me sit down and pay attention, making me ignore the laundry and dinner and the million other things that I need to be doing. For him, it's love, comfort, and All Things Imma. When you watch him nurse you can just hear him humming, "mmm, so good, so good, so goooood." It's absolutely my favorite, most satisfying part of mothering him. It's doing the right thing and making both of us happy.

He's asleep now, in his favorite spot next to the dishwasher, which is currently sterilizing pump parts. I don't know yet what will be so far as work, but I can't wait until I do to get started building a freezer stash if I'm going to need one. So I'm pumping, which I did for Barak. And today I went out and bought bottles. It's the next best thing. I know that. He'll still nurse all he wants 148 hours a week, and he won't ever get formula if I can help it.

But it won't be the same.