The Battle of the Boob

The chronology of the last few weeks is a little murky. I woke up to a screaming Thumper again this morning after several frustrating nights. After getting angry at him, and angry at Mrs. Rodius, this thought occurred to me: find a way to deal with what is, instead of getting upset that it's not something different. We'll see if I still feel that way in the wee hours. Anyway, like I said, it's all a little murky. I think this is what happened. Eh, close enough.

Like many things with which I had no previous experience, I had absolutely no understanding of the depth of complexity in the breastfeeding world. When, in our birthing class, I heard that there was a "Lactation Department" full of "Lactation Consultants" at the hospital, I thought, "Huh. A whole department for that? Babies try to suck on just about anything that comes within a foot of their mouths. How hard could it be?"

Well, hard enough. We had a few strikes against us to start. Thumper showed up a couple weeks early, and apparently those are a key couple of weeks. He should've been spending those weeks practicing sucking on amniotic fluid. Yum, right? So he didn't get the practice. And he was breech, which apparently somehow wonks him out a bit, too, though I didn't get the why's and wherefore's of that one. And that couple of weeks also meant that Mrs. Rodius wasn't quite ready in the production department. And neurologically, he was underdeveloped and had a weak suck. And his tongue is short. And Mrs. Rodius had edema. And pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel syndrome.

Which all meant that we had many frustrating hours in the hospital, with a few satisfying successes. With varying amounts of wrestling, and varying degrees of pain and exhaustion in Mrs. Rodius' hands and wrists, he'd latch on, but couldn't get enough to satisfy the nursery nurses, who said his blood sugar was too low and insisted on formula supplementation. So we bottle-fed him formula to get his blood sugar up, but we agonized over what we had heard: if you introduce the bottle before at least a few weeks have passed, you'll ruin him! He'll never breastfeed again! But it had to be better than starving the boy, right?

But the Lactation Consultants would come during the day, and he'd latch and suck away, and all seemed right with the world. Then the dark of night would come, and he'd fight and scream and refuse to latch on, and after a couple of hours of tears (his and ours) and exhaustion (his and ours), we'd give in and give him the bottle again. Then we discovered the nursery nurses were giving him a pacifier when they had him, so we righteously marked him down as "No Paci," but eventually the lure of the pacifier overcame us, and we were slipping it to him ourselves. And we were ruining him! Ruining him!

We had a few victories, when a particularly kind night nurse with five kids of her own stayed with us and helped get him latched, or when the Lactation Consultants were on duty and Thumper chose to show off for them and latch right on immediately. But mostly, it wasn't working out very well. We became intimately familiar with the football and the cross-cradle, with sideline and reverse pressure.

Eventually, one of the consultants brought us a pump to help keep up supply without relying on the boy to latch on, because protecting the supply was the most important concern. That's when it became clear that the supply wasn't really there yet, though it really began to improve before we left the hospital. It seemed like no wonder Thumper preferred the bottle to the boob, because the boob wasn't really competing yet.

With a few successful sessions here and there, though, and an ever-increasing supply and a pump of our own, we left the hospital with hope in our hearts that soon, the boy would learn to love the boob as much as his Daddy, though for admittedly different reasons. But on our own, the exhausting, painful, frustrating wrestling matches for an hour or two in the dark, desperate hours seemed insurmountable. So we called in another consultant for a house call. She had suggestions and techniques that we hadn't tried. She had tales of babies who'd learned to latch on after a couple of months. She had reassurances that the bottle did not sound the death knell of the boob. She had a highly specialized scale and a supply of extremely reassuring sympathy. She came on Tuesday, and said she'd follow up on Saturday. We had a plan of new techniques and positions, a plan of short, frequent sessions that would reduce all of our stress levels. Hope was resuscitated.

But Wednesday was a disaster, so we left her a voicemail on Thursday. She didn't call us back. She left us a voicemail on Saturday saying that she hadn't heard from us, so she was assuming everything was fine. She had her home on the market and had an open house on Saturday, so she'd follow up in a couple of days. In the meantime, Hope was starting to look a little green around the gills again. The sessions got shorter and less frequent. We were all so tired of fighting. The supply was really coming on, though, so we didn't even need to supplement with formula anymore. I shouldn't, but I kind of blame that consultant now. If she'd called me back, everything would have been idyllic. But she didn't, and between Thursday and Tuesday, pumping and bottle feeding started looking more and more inevitable, and more and more just kind of all right. I did tell Thumper that if he latched on no problem when the consultant came back, I was going to have to kick his ass. I was just kidding, though. Sort of.

And I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I was glad when he wouldn't perform for her when she finally returned on Tuesday. He gave us a half-hearted latch-on, of which she made far too much, but he wouldn't really suck. She used a few milliliters of expressed breast milk (known to those of us in the business as EBM) to get him going, but he never really did, and when she did the "After" weigh-in, that EBM was the only extra weight on the scale. Ha ha, I say! Take that, you professional!

So we tried a few more times, but our hearts weren't really in it. Pumping and bottle feeding was working out just fine. The consultant said that many women make that choice for a variety of reasons and pointed us to pumpingmoms.org. And since ultimately our plan is for me to stay home with him during the day, we were going to have to introduce the bottle right about now anyway. So I'm fine with it. For Mrs. Rodius, though, it's much more emotional of an issue. For her, it feels like a failure and a rejection. I don't think it's either. It is what it is. I still stand amazed by the fact that not only can she grow an entire human being within her body, she can also produce all of the food required to nurture that human being and make it grow at the rate he's growing. She's producing more than he can eat. She's even been able to have the well-deserved shot of vodka that she said many months ago she would want when this whole pregnancy thing was over, because she's got enough of a supply built up that she can actually pump and dump (as we say in the business.) Woman, you are an astounding creation.

So I guess, as the reports on the Battle of the Boob come in, it looks like we may have lost the battle, but we're definitely winning the war.

Oh, and to anybody out there who says, "What's with all this 'we' crap, you Man! Stop inserting yourself into the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding! Stop oppressing me with your penis!" I say to you: I get it. At the pediatrician, after a string of questions about Mrs. Rodius, the only question they asked about me was if my last name was the same. The Consultant, too, made it clear that I was of little use except to fetch blankets with which to prop the boob or the baby, or wet washclothes with which to wake him up and stimulate him into sucking. Every time, I was the one who called her, but when she called back, she always asked for Mrs. Rodius. It's been made abundantly clear that I'm a lesser participant in the entire process. But still I say, "Screw you. I was there for all those sessions with the boob and the boy. I hunched blearily over Mrs. Rodius, trying to be her hands when her hands didn't want to anymore. I've touched my wife in ways more clinical than I ever would have foreseen. I've paced and bounced and patted Thumper to calm him when he was as inconsolably frustrated as we were. I rubbed her shoulders and told her we were doing everything right when I really wasn't sure it was true. So screw you. It was 'we' all the way."