How breastfeeding taught me my first lessons as a mother

I couldn’t wait for milk to arrive.

The final weeks of pregnancy, I would stand in the shower or sit back in the bath squeezing around my areolas to extract a little drop of hazy white-tainted fluid. The colostrum collected like the tiniest bit of morning dew on the central disc of a daisy. It was exhilarating to see, the most exciting thing to happen to my body since puberty…without all the fear and self-consciousness and wondering, “Is this right? Is this how it’s supposed to look?” This time around it was more like, “Whoa!!! It’s working!!!”

Once again, I found myself an explorer of my body, a newcomer. Like those adolescent days alone in the bathroom figuring out what was what. All the mashing, pulling to the side, gentle padding with my fingertips, looking on with curiosity. All of pregnancy was like this in a way as I became fascinated with my silhouette, gazed at my belly in the mirror, ran my hand along the main orb and its growing satellites. I examined the changes to each curve and each new fault line of stretching skin that rippled under the stress of this heavy carriage. I didn’t mind any of it. I was a curious onlooker. It was like a nature show happening in real time before my very eyes, and I could zoom in and pause and rewind to my heart’s content.

But the milk. That was somethin’ pretty special. To know that soon this little drop of colostrum would become a coursing stream, a powerful river, Niagara Falls! And it would provide all the nourishment my baby would need to live and grow and thrive for half of a year or more. I mean, who comes up with this stuff? This is some good material. Not only had I incubated this baby INSIDE my own body for 40 weeks (more like 42 but who’s counting?), but I also would continue to actively grow this baby, to power this baby on my body’s fuel alone for at least six months more. Wow! Is there any better show on Earth?

Then my baby came, in all his perfection with his searching, squawking mouth and the little hands that were determined to somehow live between his lips and my nipples. It took three people to try to get food into the kid. My mom would help keep his legs from kicking me in my healing, c-sectioned belly while my husband would try to redirect the baby’s hands to a place not directly in front of his mouth. Then I would try to coax him to actually open his mouth, which he was reluctant to do.

It was a comedy of errors. But it didn’t feel like a comedy at first. It felt more like a horror movie. The theme of Jaws should have played every time I worked up the courage to quickly stuff my breast into the ever-narrowing cavern of his mouth. I don’t know who cried more–him or me–but I know I came out of it a lot more banged up than he did. Who knew a little baby with no teeth could be so powerful? 

I was a child of wonder.

In my dreams I sat in a field of spring flowers, crowned with my daisy chain halo in the last golden light of the day, my babe at my breast. That hypnobirthing lady floated above me like a cloud and breathed into my ear, “I love my baby and my baby loves me.” It would be pure pastoral beauty. Actually, here I am as a pregnant mama living perfectly into that image. 

Much to my surprise, I hated nursing. I dreaded it. Not only had I not given birth the way I wanted when my natural birth turned into a c-section, but this was taken from me, too, I thought. And I had to keep doing this thing that was toe-curlingly painful on-demand at any hour of the day. It was a reminder every couple hours that maybe I wasn’t as good of a mother as I thought I would be, that this whole gig was not as well-suited to me as I had expected. What else would I lose in this process of becoming? 

After the doctor told me I had to supplement with formula in my baby’s first week of life due to a delay in my milk coming in, his stout 10-pound newborn appetite, and his loss of weight, I had a long cry and crawled into bed with my headphones on. I felt like I had failed my son, and he was not even a week old. I felt like my whole parenting vision was crashing down on me as I made compromise after compromise for what I felt was best for my baby.

I was trying to figure out who I was as a mom, and time and again my vision and my reality clashed.  On which issues should I push back and stand my ground and on which should I see flexibility as the wisest approach? Welcome to parenthood! Becoming a real-life mom required a lot of unbecoming and letting go of rules I didn’t even realize I had made for myself as a mom.

I started to learn that who I was as an abstract mom was less important than who I was as Guider’s mom. I wasn’t just a parent; I was his parent. I started to see mothering as a relationship between my son and me rather than a prescribed protocol. It made sense. Without the relationship my husband and I have cultivated, I wouldn’t know how to be a wife; I am his wife, with a history of shared exchanges and understandings. I’m not just a friend; I am many friends. Each friendship is different, and I’m a little different in each one because of the unique interplay with the other storied person in the relationship.

I stopped being as hard on myself. I couldn’t have known who I would be as a mom because I didn’t know whose mom I would be. I had never met this little person. Breastfeeding became one of the big ways that Guider and I got to know each other. We had to learn to work together, and we sure worked through a lot of frustration together. He would get so angry from being unlatched over and over again because of my nipple pain, and I tried to stay calm and gentle because I knew he was feeling every bit of emotion that came out of me. Even still, I don’t know how to nurse just any baby; I know how to nurse my baby. Being a parent is about relationship, and nursing is about relationship, too.

It took us a few months to get in the rhythm of this miraculous biological dance. Now my body is in tune with his body’s needs. When I feel my breasts getting full and heavy, I know he must be getting hungry. When I’m walking around holding him, I can feel which way his body will move next. We have a deep connection and understanding that has been built on the foundation of our nursing relationship.

Years ago on a cross-country move, my husband drove the U-Haul while I paved the way ahead of him in our car with our menagerie of pets. We bought walkie talkies because we wanted to be able to reach each other in the miles of desert and country where cell phone service may be nonexistent. And, come on, WALKIE TALKIES. Do you need a reason? At one point to stay awake, we sang call-and-response style over the walkie talkies a song that was very popular at the time, “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Driving down two-lane highways towards our new life together with everything we owned packed in tight and our pups sleeping on the seat, we sang. “Home is wherever I’m with you.”

Fast-forward four years, and we had our first child together. In my first months of life, he and I have done some traveling of our own. The foothills in Tennessee, big city California, the Mississippi Gulf Coast. No matter where we go, whether it’s across the country or across town, he can have that feeling: Home is wherever I’m with you. He latches on, and it’s perfect peace. For him and for me. For a few minutes we are home.

Photo credits: Clementine Birth & Photo (top and bottom photos), Story Street Media (middle photo)