A Blessing and a Curse

Back in the early days of nursing Sophia, when she wasn’t choking on my milk, she would clamp down so firmly with her gums of steel that my tender nipples soon became red and sore.  Feeding her was excruciating, and since I was doing it every 2-3 hours, I spent most of my days in pain.  I met with a lactation consultant who discovered that I had an oversupply of milk, which I had made worse by pumping at night.  I could fill a 10-ounce bottle with one breast.  In fact, I could have fed a whole army of babies.  Ironic, because, let’s just say I don’t know where I was storing it all.  To look at me, you’d think I was a 2-ouncer. 

Poor Sophie was overwhelmed by my milk, which shot down her throat like water from a fire hose.  She bit me to stem the flow.   It was self-defense. 

I went to a breastfeeding group in need of a little sympathy and advice.  But when it came my time to talk and I told the other moms what I was going through, I was met with incredulity.

“You mean you have too much milk?  Wish that was my problem.”

“I might have to stop because I can’t make enough.”

“How is that a problem, again?” 

Most women, it seemed, had an under-supply.  I might be in pain, but at least I could feed my baby and in less than five minutes. 

I shut up.  And I didn’t go back, lest they think I attended these things to gloat about my highly productive mammary glands. 

So, I don’t expect anyone to have sympathy for me, when I reveal my current parenting issue. 

I’m just going to lay it all out there.  Sophie is an early reader.  She was decoding three letter words before the age of three, and, at five, she can read passages from Kevin’s history books with relative ease (though not with the comprehension that she can read Ivy and Bean).  I am not saying this to brag, but to provide context. 

I don’t take full credit either.  Now, I read to her from the day that she was born, and I talked about the different sounds the letters made, and I gave her “educational toys,” like the Leap Frog electronic doohickey on our fridge that sings “A says /a/, a says /a/, every letter makes a sound.   A says /a/,” in the most maddening way.   But reading is a unique and mystifying skill.  You can give a child all the tools to be able to read, but the “glide,” the smooth blending of letter sounds to form a word, is automatic and developmental.  And as development is uneven and chaotic in young children, different children develop this skill at different times.   

Ever since Sophie was able to make the glide, she has been a voracious, irrepressible reader.  I say irrepressible, because, as of yet, I have not found a way to restrain it.

Why restrain her? 

Sophie becomes emotionally threadbare when she doesn’t get enough sleep.  She is subject to fits, hysteria and odd emotional outbursts that have her cackling one minute and hurdling her lunchbox at me while I’m driving the next.  She has always struggled to rein in intense emotion, but any grip that she has on her feelings is loosened by exhaustion.

Tonight, at dinner, the mere act of calling her to the table has her on the floor. 

“I don’t want dinner.  I’m not hungry.  I just want to go to bed!”

Kevin says bluntly, “Sit in your seat.  It’s time for dinner.”

She drags her body up from the floor, slumps into her seat and glances at her plate.  She is galled.   “What is this?  Gak!  It’s disgusting!  I will not eat it.  Not ever!”

“It’s the delicious dinner Mommy cooked for us tonight.  You’re eating it.”

“If you make me eat it, I’ll never sit in this room again!” 

“Take a bite, Sophie.” It’s said as a warning. 

She takes a different tact.  “My head hurts.”

“My heat hurts, too.”  I say.  “Must be all the noise in here.”

“STOP COPYING ME!” 

“Sophie, take a bite.”  Kevin says again. 

And so it goes.  Dinner takes an hour.  I hustle her up to her room.  She changes, we brush teeth, read half a book, and review the stars she’s earned for the day (one). 

“Mommy, can I leave my book in the hallway?” she angles. 

“No.  Give the book to me.”  I hold out my hand. 

“No.  I won’t read it.  I promise.  I just want to put it in the spare room.”  The spare room is where we have placed all of her books, having removed them from her room two nights ago.

“Okay,” I relent.  “But you are NOT to go in here and get this book.  You are to go to sleep.”

“Yes, mommy.”

“I trust you,” I say with great emphasis on the word trust. 

“Thank you, mommy,” she replies and hugs my leg. 

Kevin and I retire to the attic, where we veg out in front of the television.  An hour later, we hear the pitter patter of feet on the stairs and the light goes on.

“Sophie?  What are you doing out of bed?” Kevin says in a stentorian voice.

“It’s too hot in my room.”

“Then turn on the air conditioner.  Good night, Sophie.”  We have to be firm. 

“Have you been to sleep?” I interrupt, suspicious.  “Have you been sleeping or reading?” 

“Reading.”

“Sophia!  Did you go in the spare room?”

“No.  I went in your room and got the fairy book we were reading this morning.”

A loophole.  She finds every one. 

“I told you to go straight to bed.”

“But—“

“No buts.  Go downstairs and go to bed.  Daddy and I will discuss your punishment.” I feel like I’m channeling my own parents. 

My eyes widen as I give Kevin my most exasperated look.  This is the cycle we have fallen victim to:  She sneaks books at night and stays up all hours, reading.  The next day it is impossible to get her out of bed, which makes both of us cranky.  She’s exhausted by the afternoon and becomes a bruin.  We battle our way through dinner and bedtime, and then the whole damn thing happens all over again.

And it’s not just bedtime either.  It’s hard to get her anywhere because she’s too busy reading.  I have to rip the book out of her hands to get to get dressed, get in the car, get out of the car.  She begs to bring books into the grocery store, to school, to the shower. 

Books have become the bane of my existence. 

It felt cruel to remove her books the other night—the piles that have formed in every corner of her room, the shelves packed tightly, the stash underneath her pillow, a couple forgotten ones under the bed.  But she was chipper as I carried them across the hall and stacked them on the floor.  Her mind was probably already working on a plan to buck the system. 

What do you do with a child who reads too much?  Is there a support group out there?  A book written?  An easy 12-step process to releasing your child from the grips of literature? 

Must we lock her books in the basement?  Barricade her door?  Patrol the hallways?

You can have too much of a good thing. 

The Last Breakfast

Each time I broached the subject, she chose to ignore me.

“Sophia, in a few days mommy is going on a trip. She’s going to take an airplane to Florida. You’ll stay with daddy (this evoked a broad smile). But during this time, mommy won’t be giving you milk. And when I come back we’ll be all done with mommy’s milk.”

I know she heard me. The kid doesn’t miss a trick. She can be deeply engrossed in playing drama queen, coloring her hands, or reading a book…but will recite back to me bits of overheard conversations had with other people.

“Do you understand what mommy is telling you?”

Crickets.

I wanted it to be a mutual decision, but the way things were going, it didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon. Oh, there were certainly times when she woke up and didn’t immediately ask for my milk:

“I woke up. I want to paint!” Or

“Play with pegs! Play with pegs!”

And there are times when her babysitter or her father puts her down and she knows they have no milk to offer her.

But, if she was tired, sick, or just looking for a little snuggle time…she’d ask. It had been my rule for the last couple of weeks to only give when she asked. And, she WAS asking less than she used to. But still, she asked.

So, on that final morning, when I fetched her from her crib, head buzzing from a sleepless night, I took her into my bed and told her it was the last time.

“I want milky.” She told me.

“Okay, Sophia, but this is the last time.”

I had a romantic notion of what the last time would be like. Full of emotion. A sense of heightened connection. The bitter-sweetness of saying goodbye to one phase of our relationship and the dawn of a new one.

But for the first few minutes she kept slapping at her legs as she drank. It was distracting.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“I’m playing with my legs,” she said, matter-of-factly, carefully putting words the together to form a sentence.

I tried to focus on the thought of it being the last session and my mind wandered, the way it always does when I’m feeding her. Where were my sunglasses? Did I leave Kevin the emergency phone number? She pulled off, and I snapped back to the present.

“Another one,” she demanded, sitting up and pointing to my other breast. Oh yes. It’s time, I thought as we switched places in bed.

And it ended just the way it always did. Abruptly. With Sophia sated and ready to move on to the next thing.

I, too, am ready to move to the next thing.

Maybe.



Epilogue: Lean, Mean and (finally) Weaned

Sophia spotted me at baggage claim from about sixty feet away, in a cinematic moment she ran to me, arms outstretched, face a-glow, “MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY.” We embraced tightly.

Oh how I missed her. Oh how that hug pained me. Tears sprang to my eyes as she crushed my engorged, sore breasts to my chest.

Later, I checked in with Kevin, “Did she ask for…you-know?”

“Not once.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. It had been Kevin’s fear that she would tantrum for the one thing he could not give her while I was gone. But no, she had understood that both me AND my breasts were absent, and settled for the water and cows milk he gave her. I had hoped that there was no turning back at this point. That she was ready to move on. But that night after she had changed into her pjs, brushed her teeth, and read a book, she turned to me and asked for milk.

It was the moment of truth.

“We talked about this Soph. There’s no more milk. Milky went away.” A little white lie. Actually, I read that your breasts can produce milk up to six months after weaning—which wasn’t doing much for my resolve. Neither was the pain of engorgement.
She burst into tears! “Mommy! I want milky! I want MILKY!” My heart ached. My breasts ached.

I looked to Kevin for direction. Kevin was Switzerland. “I’ll support whatever you want to do.” And then he was my psychologist/husband, “but you did tell her no.”

Ugh. The worst thing you can do to a behaviorist is to suggest to her that she might be sending mixed messages. It was all I needed to hear.

To Sophia, “I love you, Sweetheart.”

To Kevin, “Could you put her to bed for me?”

Sophia and I both sobbed as he lay her down to sleep. She was quiet within two minutes. It took me about two hours to pull myself together.

“I don’t know why I decided to stop!” I told Kevin. And it was true. I couldn’t pinpoint a reason. Was it because of what I was afraid everyone else was thinking? Was it because I had set an arbitrary deadline? Was it because I was ready?

Damn reason.

It was a full two weeks before my body reverted to its original form. I agonized through clogged ducts, fear of mastitis, and more waffling. But, I remained committed to my decision, and one day I woke up and was staring at my pre-pregnancy-self in the mirror. Deflated. Oh yeah. That’s what they looked like.

Sophia tried one last time when we were cuddling in bed and reading, activities that have replaced the first feeding of the day. “I want milky,” she tested, gesturing to my chest so there would be no mistaking what she meant. I tried a new angle…something I had read somewhere. “Soph, when you were a baby, mommy made special milk that’s just for babies. But you’re a big girl now. You’re two years old. You can do so many big-girl things like drink milk from a cup, eat with a fork, walk….” I listed off all the things she could do as a big girl.

This time there were no tears. From either of us.

Sophie silently digested this information, slid of the bed, suggested, “Play, downstairs?” And we both moved on to whatever was to come next.

Hard Habit to Break

There are probably some thoughts that are better off never put into words, let alone on paper. Ones that are too intensely personal, not for public consumption. The kinds of thoughts that inspire judgment even before they have left your lips.

And yet, I feel compelled, not just to speak them, not just to write them, but to share these most personal thoughts with whomever is willing to read them. And so, whether this was a tantalizing prologue or a thinly veiled caveat, I’ll just say it:

I cannot bring myself to give up breastfeeding.

If you ever wondered what is going on in the minds of those women who hoist 8-year-old children into their laps to suckle at their empty-sock boobs, you might get a little insight here. This is how it went down last night:

We fed Sophia too late, again, which meant that she was almost comatose by the end of dinner, alternately staring off into space, giggling hysterically, and begging for bed.

We went through our usual routine: I tried to pin her down long enough to remove her clothing as she gleefully rolled all over (and occasionally off of) my bed. Once caught, Sophia lay rapt, as Kevin sat at her head, narrating the events of the day, while I did the dirty work, meticulously cleansing each crease. Next, Kevin wrestled her into her monkey pj’s, while I left to get the implements of torture: her toothbrush and toothpaste. Upon my return, I recited a reworked line from Shel Silverstein, “Mommy’s a little bit crazy; she thinks a babysitter is supposed to sit upon the baby.” And with that, I straddled Sophia and brushed each quadrant of her mouth for a count of ten, amid tears and protests. Dismounting, I grabbed her fluoride drops, or what I have deemed “Screamy Mimi” (screamy, because she screamed bloody murder the first hundred times I tried to give it to her, mimi because that’s her word for medicine). Sophie stood up on my bed, wobbling and falling into me, opening her mouth like a baby bird, and sucking the medicine down. Then, she turned to her father and ordered, “Bye bye daddy,” shifted her gaze to me and announced, “Milky time,” hyperventilating with joy, as she has done since she was an infant, when I unhooked my bra.

Finally calm in my arms, Sophia drank a little and, in between draughts, chatted a little. On this night she was counting, “five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,” and surprised me by continuing on, “eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen,” she paused, “eleventeen?” she asked. “Twenty,” I whispered, and she resumed her counting, “twenty-one, twenty two….”

This is bliss. My baby, both as she was and as she is. Infant and child. Dependent and wild.

I have read accounts by some mothers who have kept breastfeeding because they were afraid their child would not be able to cope without it. Or because it was easier than facing the repercussions of not breastfeeding. Or because they felt guilty taking it away. I have heard women complain that their bodies are no longer their own. That their children lift up their shirts in public demanding num-nums. And I have witnessed children, in the flesh, take full advantage of their mother’s open shirt policies, children who feel entitled to take a nip when they please (or whenever they need soothing).

This is not our story. In the beginning, when it hurt like hell, every day I had to recommit to breastfeeding Sophia. And even after eight weeks, when it finally no longer hurt but I was still feeding her every 2-3 hour around the clock, I continued to take it day by day, with a shining goal of six months.

Then one day, Sophia looked up at me and smiled with full recognition that I was the one connected to the breast. It was a smile of gratitude, pleasure and love. A rare, transcendent moment.

By the time six months rolled around, Sophie and I had established a rhythm. Breastfeeding was an oasis of calm in our day. I decided to continue exclusively for two more months. When I started her on solids at 8½ months my supply instantly dropped, and I panicked. I wouldn’t feed Sophia “real food” until after I had nursed her. I pumped. I took fenugreek until my sweat smelled like maple syrup. If only I could make it to a year. And then we hit the year mark, last November. The holy grail of breastfeeding; when all women finally have permission to stop. But by then, I was in it for the long haul. The guidelines said we should do it as long as it was mutually satisfying…and it was. It is.

So now, the two year mark looms before me. The date I set as the end, the very end. But as the end approaches, my sense of reluctance grows. I am still waiting for a twinge of resentment to surge forth. For it to feel like a chore. For me to want my body back.

I don’t. Breastfeeding remains a precious time between Sophie and me. A time when she stops. When I stop. And we’re both fully present for each other.

I’m sure we’d be able to find another way of capturing this time together. But why? Other than my fear of what everyone thinks about it, I can’t think of a single good reason.

No Need to Feed

We sat in a circle, our babies perched in front of us, drooling over the teething rings, unbreakable mirrors, and rattles the facilitator had laid out on the floor. Each mother took a turn sharing her story of initiating solids. Then it was my turn.

I’m going to delay solids for a little while.

A stunned silence.

The facilitator asks, how old is she?

Six months. Six months, today, in fact.

The mothers look at me squinting, their heads tilted, not understanding. They hadn’t taken me for one of those “Breast is Best” people.

How come? Another mom asked.

Where do I start? I launched into my list of practical reasons, beginning with the most trivial:
I’m not ready for her poop to stink
I’m not anxious to take on the added work of preparing baby food, feeding her and cleaning up
It took me forever to get to a point where I could breastfeed painlessly and I don’t want her to self-wean prematurely.

But the real reason, the one that I am slightly embarrassed about:
I am in no hurry for her to grow up

Already those early days spent in pain and exhaustion—recuperating from the hematoma while feeding Sophia around the clock—are barely visible in my minds’ eye. I need my friend Elisa, who helped bring Sophia into the world, and my mother, who stayed up with me night after night and lifted her into my arms to feed, to be my memory.

The thing is: I may never have another child. Sophia might be it. I feel so very grateful for this opportunity to be her mother. And so I have to cherish every minute of her babyhood.

I take pictures. I write. Hoping to capture and preserve this thrilling present. But, like everything, it slips away and only that which has a strange salience remains.

Sophia has her whole life to eat solid food.

And how do we know six months is the magical month anyhow, when suddenly they need something more than that which has sustained them for and made them double in weight in half a year? When I was born, the pediatrician told my mother to give me solids after one month. Now, the research tells us that a baby’s digestive system isn’t ready to handle solids, and a baby doesn’t have the fine motor skills to eat until 4-6 months. If breast milk is such a perfect food, why not delay even longer? I’ve read the studies—the three primary concerns are:

• Nutrients: Iron, in particular—an infant is born with iron stores that he/she utilizes over the early months. Breast milk contains very little iron. After these stores are depleted, the infant needs another source of iron. But that might not occur until somewhere between 9 – 12 months, depending on the size of the infant at birth. Babies are typically assessed for anemia at 9 months.
• Growth faltering: The baby fails to gain weight and grow longer.
• There is a window in which you need to introduce new tastes and textures or the baby will be a picky eater.

Only the first reason has any science to back it up, and still, it doesn’t point to the necessity of starting at six months.

To soften the blow, I told the group that I was going to check in with my pediatrician about it. The facilitator exhaled, relieved. The mother next to me whispered, I’m the opposite of you. I can’t wait until he’s out of this stage. Her baby kicked the air, like a turtle on its back.

At the pediatrician’s, the nurse weighed Sophia. She was right at the fiftieth percentile, just an ounce under 15 lbs. I was disappointed to learn that our regular doctor was out sick. Dr. Cromley, who had never met Sophie, would be standing in.

I asked Dr. Cromley if she thought I could wait. She looked at me like I had three heads, why would you want to do that. This surprised me a little. I didn’t expect it to be quite such an uncommon request. Again, I went into my reasons, this time feeling a bit more selfish and a bit more irrational. Dr. Cromley launched into the “picky eater” argument, surprising me again. I thought for sure she push the nutrients one. When I told her I wasn’t able to find any research supporting this notion, she said her years of experience with countless babies who became picky eaters was evidence enough. (I doubted this, since it didn’t seem like very many people were trying to delay solids in the first place.) She begrudgingly told me no later than eight months. Okay. Fair enough.

Then, a few nights ago, I had a dream: Sophia was dead. I hadn’t fed her enough. My mother was hiding her from me in the car, but I found out. I was screaming with grief and wracked with guilt.

Might I cause her harm, simply because I’m not ready?

As a parent, you are always trying to decide what’s best for your child. Sophie will get her first taste of rice cereal on Father’s Day—when she’ll be exactly 7 months. Until then, I’ll enjoy that I am building her face, her body, her brain with my body and my body alone.