It was just as the books had said: when newborn Connor was handed to me, still covered in vernix, his eyes were wide open, regarding his new world with great gravitas. After crying over the miracle of his existence for a few minutes, I extricated myself from one sleeve of my hospital nightgown and, with my shoulders hiked up to my ears in anticipation of agonizing pain, put Connor right up to my breast, nose to nipple. He stared at it unemotionally. “Tickle his lips with your nipple,” the nurse said encouragingly. I did so, with faint distaste. Connor opened his mouth, and—he was there! He was doing it! And while it didn’t really seem like anything was coming out, it didn’t really hurt, either. It felt fluttery. Kind of sweet.

  I figured the hospital’s lactation consultant would come in at some point that afternoon to tell me exactly how this would really work. But other than four ecstatic grandparents, Connor and I had no visitors, so the two of us practiced on our own all night. The next morning, on forty-five minutes’ sleep or so, I showered and put my new robe on so we could attend the hospital’s 10:00 A.M. breastfeeding class. The other new mothers and I shuffled in holding our precious bundles, settling in on our hospital-issued inflatable donuts. Our babies slept. We smiled shyly at one another. The nurse arrived last. She was not smiling.

  “Welcome to ‘Lactation an’ You,’” she said, sounding like a cartoon thug, looking as if she’d sooner pistol-whip each one of us than ever have to give this speech again. “This morning, we’re goin’ ta look at your areolas, and yuh baby’s latch, and make sure yuh all off to a good start.”

  We mothers all sat there, still smiling, awaiting further instruction. The nurse rolled her eyes. “Unwrap yuh babies! Wake them!” she barked. We all began frantically unswaddling. Once I had Connor unwrapped, the nurse pointed at him, cocking an eyebrow.

  NURSE: How old’s that baby?

  I was proud that my infant was already being singled out for attention. She probably thought he had the alertness of at least an eight-day-old.

  ME: He’s nineteen hours exactly!

  The nurse’s face darkened.

  NURSE: What are you doin’?

  I stared at her dumbly.

  NURSE: Wrap that baby! For the first twenty-four hours, the priority is…?

  We all stared at her dumbly.

  NURSE: Warmth! Not hunguh! WARMTH!

  I held Connor tightly to me, hoping that hypothermia had not already set in, and spent the rest of the twenty-minute class castigating myself for not having known the warmth thing. Idiot. The nurse observed the nursing techniques of the handful of babies old enough to survive at room temperature, then handed all of us pieces of paper certifying that we had received breastfeeding instruction and were free to go. The next morning, the hospital sent me home, with no more idea of how to feed Connor than I had had before he arrived. Every two hours or so, he would sort of nibble on me, and it felt not-horrible. But I wasn’t sure if anything was coming out, even the concentrated yellowy colostrum that I had read would precede the actual milk. I considered that Connor could be starving slowly or drinking his fill, and no one had told me how I was supposed to know the difference.

  I was obliged to spend the next several days finding things out myself through endless hours of empirical research. This is what I discovered:

  If you can say “I’m not sure if my milk has come in yet,” your milk has not come in yet.

  It is best to prepare ahead of time for that moment by keeping two bags of frozen peas in your bra whenever you are not nursing your child.

  When you wake up with two hot, F-cup boulders where your breasts used to be, your milk will have arrived.

  And that is when it will hurt, like really hurt, like, when your baby starts crying, you may start crying too, because you so dread what is coming next.

  I was furious that no one had prepared me for any of this. There was evidently a vast conspiracy of silence prohibiting anyone from telling pregnant women how hard breastfeeding would be. If we were told the whole truth, none of us would have even attempted it. This added the rage of betrayal to the soup of leaking, postpartum emotions I had become.

  I was cut off even from a new mother’s most obvious means of support: my baby’s grandparents, who stood around our living room not knowing what to make of all this. My mother watched me struggle to latch Connor on to my engorged breast, wincing whenever I did. “You mean he never gets a bottle?” my mother-in-law asked, wondering how she would ever bond with her grandson. My poor father-in-law was unsure where he should look, since I was sitting around our apartment half-naked. I had no shame—I had left my dignity on the delivery room table a week earlier—and the thought of any fabric touching my nipples between feedings was more than I could bear. At least I was extra-dressed below the waist: I left the “My Brest Friend” positioning pillow Velcro’d around me at all times since I was just going to have to strap it back on soon enough anyhow. “Man overboard!” my father-in-law said, attempting a kindly joke as I hobbled to the bathroom. I didn’t see anything funny about it.

  It was a vast twilight of uncertainty. David’s Aunt Carol came over, watched me breastfeed her new great-nephew, then asked me how many ounces he had just drunk. “I don’t know,” I answered. Aunt Carol blanched visibly: “What do you mean you don’t know?” My God, I thought. She has a point! I had no proof, other than the occasional wet diaper, that he was getting anything to eat at all, and that meager evidence did not really allay Aunt Carol’s apprehensions. Or mine. All of our relatives knew better than to come out and actually say this breastfeeding stuff was utterly cockamamie, though I would not have blamed them if they had.

  Then a light dawned. I took Connor to his two-week doctor’s appointment, and when they put him on the scale, he had gained a pound. A pound! Here was the proof I needed: my body was keeping another body alive! “Nice job, Mommy!” his pediatrician said. I strutted down the street pushing Connor’s stroller home. I was a cave woman, a primal superheroine: Thor Girl, with Jugs of Power. Me make baby fat!

  Not long after that, nursing started to hurt less, then not at all. My breasts stopped billowing to a frightening size every two hours. Connor no longer needed three or four agonizing attempts to latch on correctly. I could pull up my shirt and pop Connor on without even looking down at him. But I spent most of my time doing just that, meeting the gaze of his old-soul eyes as he drank, the oxytocin my body released along with the milk making both of us pleasantly sleepy. Sitting there with Connor, lit by the night-light as we rocked back and forth, had become something heavenly.

  This miraculous change of events so surprised me that I brought Connor to a local breastfeeding support group. Back when I actually needed it, I had felt too overwhelmed to leave the house. Now, perhaps I could be of help, offering encouragement that it could get better to new mothers who were either struggling or ready to throw in the towel. And indeed there were a dozen frazzled-looking women there, weaving horrifying tales of chronic mastitis and of thrush, a yeast infection requiring an already-exhausted mother to boil everything she and the baby wore. The moderator of the group, a serious woman with short hair and no makeup, was not exactly warm and fuzzy, but the depth of her knowledge was reassuring. She told one weeping mother that the scale proved her pediatrician wrong: she could make enough milk for her baby. She made one small adjustment on another baby’s positioning, and the mother’s pain went away entirely. Then it was my turn.

  ME: Oh, I’m just here to listen. Things are really going very well for us!

  MODERATOR: That’s great to hear. Do you have any questions?

  ME: Well. I guess there is one thing. I’d like to introduce a bottle of breast milk at night. How should I go about that?

  An Icelandic chill came over the room. The moderator narrowed her eyes.

  MODERATOR: Why?

  ME: Why what?

  MODERATOR: Why would you want to introduce—a bottle?

  She fairly spit this last word. All the other mothers stared at me.

  ME: Well. It’s just that I have to do all the night feedings, and I thought maybe my husband could take? a? turn?

  I looked to the other mothers for support. One woman in braids shook her head at me, an almost imperceptible warning.

  MODERATOR: Bottles taint breast milk with bisphenol A and phthalates. Bottles cause nipple confusion.

  ME:…Oh.

  MODERATOR: Do you want your baby to have nipple confusion?

  This question was rhetorical, of course. I was not sure what exactly “nipple confusion” might be, but I thanked my lucky stars I had attended this support group before I crippled my innocent son with a lifetime of it.

  With breastfeeding, as with all things a modern mother attempts, expectations are exceedingly high. Even one bottle, a mother is told, might destroy everything she has worked so hard to attain. A mother must nurse exclusively and indefinitely, even if she has raging fevers and never sleeps, even if she has to pump incessantly and feed her infant with an eye-dropper. Anything less is not good enough. And so a nursing mother who plays by these rules must bring the baby wherever she goes, or else stay home. And when the baby wants to eat, on an airplane, in church, in a mall, she must endure the censorious stares of those who think she is doing something gross. My friends who formula-fed their babies told me they felt judged every time they whipped out the Enfamil. Perhaps they were, but I felt judged whenever I dared to nurse my baby where someone might see us. When a breastfeeding mother adheres to what she has been told—that there is one correct way to feed her baby—she is then told by security guards at the food court that she cannot feed her baby that way, not unless she throws on a humiliating “Hooter Hider” first. On either side are people equally inflexible in their thinking. The mother is stuck in the middle.

  I dutifully followed the instructions of the lactation consultant and breastfed Connor for a year without a bottle ever touching his lips. When my second child was four weeks old, my mother-in-law (seeing that I was ready to drop) offered to get up with baby Seamus one night and let me sleep. I was too weak to resist. To my shock, not only did Seamus sleep five hours straight after that first grandmother-administered formula, but the dreaded “nipple confusion” did not descend upon him after all. Seamus switched happily between bottle and breast for the rest of his infancy, I got to sleep five hours in a row once in a while, and I was unquestionably a better mother for it, not a worse one.

  Since then, I have polled enough other mothers to believe that the legendary “nipple confusion” is somewhat like the Yeti: while many of us have heard tell, no one has ever been an eyewitness. If anyone has nipple confusion, it is the mother, who gets thrown into the deep end with breastfeeding, seeks help, and often gets misled or frightened instead. Is it any wonder so many mothers stop after a week or two? Certainly there are myriad good reasons: premature babies, poor suck, postpartum depression, low milk supply, and going back to work, to name a few. But some mothers might give up simply because it sucks, and they have been told that it’s all or nothing, and they do not know that it just might, suddenly, get better.

  In the end I estimate that I, who was once completely skeeved out by the very notion, nursed my three children a total of 4,325 times. I am glad that I felt the pressure to breastfeed that I did. I would never have given it a shot otherwise. And what I never could have predicted was that I would love it, and be good at it, and that it would even become easy. The blocked duct or infection that I was awaiting after Connor was born—just so I could quit—never materialized. I realize how fortunate I am to be saying that: for most women, breastfeeding is either a breeze or utter torture, but rarely anything in between. And despite swearing I’d bail at the first sign of trouble, I think I would have ridden the Feel-Bad Trolley all the way to the Supplemental Nursing System, to chronic mastitis and far beyond, rather than ever admit that I had failed. This would not have been a good thing. I admire the mother who knows when to stop doing something that really hurts, or isn’t nourishing her baby sufficiently, or is making her terribly unhappy, no matter what anyone says. Every mother is different, and so is every child. How best to feed that child is something decreed by a set of circumstances that, planning and overachieving be damned, are what they are.

  In my own life, breastfeeding was a gift, all three times. Despite my apprehension before I began, it became the thing about parenting I was most sure I could do well. My children remember none of our countless hours together, rocking in the glider, their little hands holding on to my breast as they drank. But I remember. For those first twelve or so months of their lives, whether my babies were hungry or sad, tired or hurt, my breasts could make everything better. If only it were all that easy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Bouncing Baby Boy

  One night about two weeks after Connor was born, I was nursing him on the couch, a Law & Order rerun burbling from the television as David and I lay there exhausted but content. The relatives, friends, and grandparents had come and gone; my breasts were no longer threatening to explode; we were, to my pleasant surprise, actually doing this. We were parents.

  Then Connor stiffened his back, arched away from my breast, and let out a red-faced, four-alarm scream. “Connor! What is it?” I asked him, as if he could answer me, while David yelled, “What did you just do?” I remembered that one of my younger sisters had screamed like this once when I accidentally stuck her with a diaper pin while changing her. Connor wore Huggies. I checked anyway. Then I tried to nurse him again. Connor just turned his head away, still screaming. With growing panic, we swaddled him, unswaddled him, bicycled his little legs, walked him up and down. The screaming continued unabated. Just before calling 911, I offered him my breast one last time. This time, he hungrily accepted it, resuming nursing as if the previous bloodcurdling ten minutes had not occurred. David and I sank back onto the couch, looking at each other. Without each other as witnesses to what had just taken place, either of us might have thought we had merely imagined it. We hadn’t.

  From that evening on, my content newborn had a sudden change of disposition. The new Connor slept never and screamed always. His was no longer the typical newborn mewing, which sounds kind of cute (unless you are an engorged mother anticipating the next latch-on as one might an umpteenth waterboarding session). Connor’s crying had become a piercing, unholy screech that would send him post-haste from anyone else’s arms back into mine. “I think he’s hungry,” they’d say. “But he just ate,” I’d answer, angling for just a few more moments of freedom. I never got it. Whoever was holding him could not wait to be rid of him, assuming that I, as his mother, would know how to make him stop screaming. Which I didn’t.

  A few days after Connor’s new temperament revealed itself, David went back to work and left the two of us home alone for the first time. Connor and I were now on a ninety-minute loop, day and night, during which he would eat for thirty minutes, cry for about thirty-seven, then sleep for twenty-three. Since I was breastfeeding exclusively, no one else could take a shift, even if anyone had offered. I had therefore been managing about eighteen minutes of sleep at a time, unless something pesky like a trip to the bathroom or the intake of nourishment took up my entire allotment of sleep time for that cycle.

  I figured my baby’s incessant crying had to be due to something I was doing. Maybe Connor had colic, which some books suggested was a manifestation of maternal anxiety. Of course, his screaming was why I was so anxious, and I wasn’t sure I could help that. On the other hand, maybe it was something I was not doing. Maybe I wasn’t feeding him enough. Since I couldn’t quantify my breast milk in terms of ounces served, and since nursing mothers are told to feed the baby according to his demands rather than on some draconian clock-based schedule, I could never rule hunger out. I began popping Connor back on the boob whenever he cried, even if it was three minutes after he had just finished. Sometimes he’d calm down and eat more. Maybe he had only been hungry. Maybe he was failing to thrive! Then he’d spit up all the milk from the top-off he hadn’t needed after all and screech even more loudly, giving me equal conviction that I was overfeeding him. Sometimes Connor would stop right in the middle of a feeding to cry inconsolably. Well, what the hell did that mean? Did other babies cry this much? What was I doing wrong? Connor was a baby I had desperately longed for, and even when he screamed, I still adored him. But I could not ease his suffering. I was a mother who did not know how to soothe her own child.

  After one particularly difficult night, I swaddled Connor and lay him in his bassinet after his 8:00 A.M. feeding. The two of us had been up the night before from 10:00 P.M. to 12:30 A.M., 2:00 to 3:30, 4:30 to 6:00, and then up at 6:30 for the day. At that point, I was hallucinating. When I put Connor down at 8:00, I was at least cogent enough to reason that if I went back to bed right then, Connor might give me a full ninety minutes, as tired as he was. Instead, I got ten minutes, at which point a ray of morning sunlight shone through the nursery’s eastern-facing window and hit his bassinet with the focus of a magnifying-glass-wielding Webelo Scout. I called David at work, gasping, barely able to get the words out as Connor screamed in my arms. “And heee…he wa-as just a-sleep…an-d then…the sunliighht hit hi-i-is criiibbb…” David just listened. I can’t do this, I said, doing a sort of daven, Connor held tight to my chest. I can’t do this. David didn’t say anything. There was nothing he could say.

  The one place Connor could find an uneasy peace was in his car seat, which I could fit into his portable “Snap N Go” carriage as well as into our car. It took me a while to realize this, since it was a snowy January, the sidewalks virtually impassable for a plastic-wheeled stroller. But eventually I noticed that if Connor fell asleep in his car seat, he might nap for forty-five minutes instead of twenty-three. Since this was a nearly 100 percent improvement, Connor began taking all his naps this way, even when we were home. At night, I swaddled him tightly, plopped him in his car seat, and hoisted the whole thing into his crib, dreaming of someday stretching his nighttime rest periods to a full hour (bliss!) or more.