Memories and Waxing Philosophic

Hello Dear Boobjuicers and Friends!

I was just looking over some old posts and remembering how hard it was to pump and have a 40+ hour per week office job. I'm grateful now that I stuck it out (having a month between jobs helped. even though I was frantically packing, moving, and unpacking) and in the rear view mirror objects appear easier than they felt.

A friend is struggling with the beginnings of nursing, getting a pain-free latch, fighting what might be yeast (gads I hope not but she probably wasn't the total yeast factory I was before motherhood), and the general anguish and feeling that this period will never end. Or maybe it's not even being able to look up towards the future and conceive of an end. It's hard to think of something helpful to say... while it's true that at some point this will be over, and at some further point she will wonder how that x weeks ever felt like x months, when a mama is in the throes of that difficulty these words are hard to hear at best, and seriously irksome at worst. Mamas, did anyone hit on a magic phrase that helped you during that tricky startup time?

So many people are so quick to offer bad and unwanted advice too. To some degree it's not their fault - our mothers' generation was taught that breastfeeding is antiquated and weird. Which is bullpoo. But then when these people turn around and spew that bad advice at the new moms, in a way we sort of can't blame them. I mean, I believe in free will, but what will have happened in between motherhood and grandmotherhood to inspire them to reprogram these ideas? For most of them, nothing. Disclaimers aside, though, it was so frustrating to be struggling with breastfeeding and despairing of every being comfortable, and getting advice like, "so quit and give him formula." Argh. It felt like, "No, you can't do it, of course, you fool, so give up." I'm sure it wasn't meant this way, but that's how it felt, nonetheless. I didn't have the emotional or physical energy to patiently explain why this suggestion was totally anathema to me. So I just sort of filtered who I would talk to about what. I would whine to my doula, or my other 100% boobjuice mom friends, or other folks I knew would not give me this advice. They didn't necessarily all have something helpful to say, but at least they didn't offer this unhelpful, if well intended, dismissal of my deep feelings about motherhood.

And when you think about it, this was totally ridiculous. Human babies have survived on breastmilk for millennia, and only in the past few decades has formula even been an option. The idea that some how in the past fifty years womankind has lost the ability to do what we were doing for the ten thousand years previously is really silly. Unfortunately we have lost a lot of wisdom in this time, at least in this country, but the basic biology really doesn't change that fast.

So of course we didn't spend 10,000 years pumping breastmilk at the office. We didn't spend that long removing infected appendices or using antibiotics either. We get to use our brains to help us do more to make life better, and pumping counts. I would have been miserable staying home with my kid all day, and I see that now that I'm not frantically pumping, commuting 45 minutes on the LA freeway, and working a job I needed to leave. I would have been miserable staying home with Kiddo a hundred years ago, too, it just would have been harder to do anything about it.

I'm not sure I have any useful takeaways for you here, ladies, but hopefully something was resonant or at least interesting for you.

Happy boobjuicing!

Love,
Suzi