Life as a boob

On the pressure to breastfeed, "militant lactivism," the banality of bleeding nipples, and my evolving relationship with my breasts

Until a few weeks ago, I never paid much attention to my boobs. An unremarkable B-cup on a good day, I’ve never viewed my boobs as a defining feature of my physical appearance, let alone relied upon them for sex appeal. Most days I have been happy to be generally unencumbered by my breasts—to be able to go braless under sundresses is a sort of privilege, as is not needing to wear anything more supportive than a stretchy wireless bra. My boobs might fill out some dresses better than others, but the silver lining is that I don’t know what it feels like to have a man look at my chest instead of my face. In fact, I don’t think my breasts have ever been all that interesting to anyone who wasn’t already interested in me from a personality standpoint. Aside from a passing desire for a more dramatic decolletage in certain outfits, I’ve never focused my otherwise harsh inner critic on my breasts. I guess I’m not a tits guy.

Until a few weeks ago, I nevertheless primarily understood breasts as a visual accessory—a hypothetical feast for the eyes that could enhance one’s appearance or desirability—as well as a source of sexual pleasure for both parties. But I had no occasion to relate to my breasts as mammalian organs with an essential life-giving function.

My first exposure to my breasts’ potential came a few weeks before my daughter was born, in a workshop with a lactation consultant who showed me how to hand-express colostrum.¹ (Another thing I learned was that pregnant women can “harvest” colostrum in the weeks leading up to birth to accumulate a bank of the nutrient-rich droplets just in case. Yes, “harvest” is the official term. ) As the lactation consultant gently rolled my areola between her thumb and index finger, I was startled to see little golden beads of liquid emerge from my nipples. There was milk in there? Stranger still, I was being milked?

I’d gone through pregnancy doubting my ability to breastfeed, having been raised on my mother’s narrative that she couldn’t breastfeed me or my brother because her milk never came in. For my mother, her inability to breastfeed was a personal failure. She would be the first to admit that, for years, she blamed our “weak constitutions” (i.e., [mild seasonal] allergies and susceptibility to the common cold) on her inability to transfer us antibodies in our first months. Without knowing whether productive mammary glands are hereditary, I assumed that my body would also struggle to produce breast milk. It wasn’t until I shared my concern with a lactation consultant during a prenatal appointment that I learned—and explained to my mom—that tiny early babies like myself often struggle to latch, meaning that a mother’s milk won’t come in unless the breast receives a lot of stimulation and the mother receives a lot of lactation support. In 1988, my mother just received the advice “try harder” from the La Leche League,² and lacked the benefit of an electric hospital grade pump to help stimulate her milk production. Today, a mom with an early baby can rent such a pump and can bottlefeed her baby breastmilk by enduring a strenuous round-the-clock pumping regimen to stimulate her milk production until her baby is strong enough to latch; lactation support is also likely covered by insurance, as are a variety of electic pumps.

So yes, I was surprised to find that my boobs not only contained colustrum, but that in the subsequent weeks leading up to birth, they started to leak colostrum. (My one attempt to “harvest” it ended in me realizing that there was no way I could wield a syringe in one hand and successfully scoop up the microscopic beads of colustrum I was handexpressing with the other without the help of my husband.) I was nevertheless trying to prepare for not being able to breastfeed. I asked our pediatrician and a lactation consultant what kind of formula we should have on hand just in case. I was surprised to be told “not to worry about it,” and that we could “cross the bridge if necessary,” as if it is not in the nature of a Type-A lawyer to require a contigency plan for feeding her child. Part of the pro-breastfeeding curriculum, I quickly learned, is optimism. When I shared my mom’s experience and expressed my concerns about breastfeeding, I repeatedly heard the refrain “Everyone can breastfeed.” While not exactly the same as the “try harder” refrain that my mother received, I was taken aback that the messaging around breastfeeding had not evolved further in the intervening 35 years.

Instead, it quickly became apparent to me that the medical establishment has doubled-down on breastfeeding since the 80s. The hospital where I gave birth is designated a “baby-friendly” hospital³ which, among other things, means that at every point in our stay at the hospital, it was assumed that I should breastfeed, that I would breastfeed, and that there are no alternatives to breastfeeding. Within minutes of birth, a baby is placed on her mother’s chest and encouraged to latch; babies are roomed in with their mothers instead of sent to a nursery; lactation consultants visited us in the hospital more frequently than doctors; I was encouraged to “hand-express” on top of breastfeeding after every feed; my husband was taught how to hand-express, and in my middle-of-the-night postpartum exhaustion, I consented to being milked. At our first pediatrician visit, instead of being screened for post-partum depression, I answered a questionnaire about how breastfeeding was going.⁴

While I intended to breastfeed and was aware of its benefits, I also knew that there are few serious drawbacks to a baby of being fed formula. (I was a formula-baby and was just fine.) And yet, I don’t think the “f-word” was ever uttered by a professional while we were in the hospital. I suppose I was lucky in that my daughter latched within minutes of being on my chest. But I spent my time in the hospital recovering from severe preeclampsia, a hemorrhage that required a blood transfusion, severe anemia, and a third-degree tear. At no point was I ever given the option of resting, let alone encouraged to do so. The absence of choice in this arena all seems strangely anti-feminist. But breastfeeding seemed to be working, despite the fact that I have never been so physically depleted in my life. My daughter ate and I got maybe two hours of sleep in my 48 hours on the postpartum recovery floor. Welcome to motherhood?

It wasn’t until we got home from the hospital that my nipples started to crack and bleed, and my wrists and forearms and shoulders began to ache from mashing my daughter’s face into my boob with one hand and supporting her vagina-tearing head with my other. My relationship with time changed. The two or three hours between feeds — counted from the beginning of the last feed — felt like 20 minutes, barely enough time to take a shower and put on pants. Within a day of being home, breastfeeding was excruciating. I cried before every feed, winced with every latch. Clenching through the pain only exacerbated my achiness. There were many desperate Target mobile orders, picked up by angelic friends — nipple shields and saline solution and lanolin and non-lanolin balms. Nothing really worked, until one friend recommended soaking my nipples in shot glasses full of warm salt water. Past the shot glass era of life, I turned to neighbors, who ran over sake cups.

Lactation consultants are known to say that if you’re breastfeeding correctly, it shouldn’t hurt. While it is true that painful breastfeeding can indicate a bad latch, a plugged duct, or something else seriously wrong, missing from the official breastfeeding propaganda packets is the somewhat crucial fact that the first few weeks of breastfeeding are just plain painful no matter what. Having a newborn drink—and attempt to drink—from your virgin nipples round the clock is inevitably going to rub them raw. I sent desperate texts to friends around the country asking how long it had taken for breastfeeding to not feel excruciating—a few weeks, most responded. In my 34 years, how had I never heard that breastfeeding can be painful … even if it is working, which by all accounts it was? How had I purchased nipple balm on prenatal trips to Target without asking the hard question of what exactly it was for? The dark side of breastfeeding felt, like pregnancy, like a part of the maternity experience that society had sheltered me from, as part of a vast conspiracy to convince me to do it.

I’ve now been exclusive breastfeeding (and bottlefeeding pumped milk) for six weeks. I’ve stuck with it though, around the two week mark, I confessed to my husband and friends that I hated it. I hated how it felt, I hated that I was so tense and miserable when holding my daughter, I hated that it was interfering with my ability to bond with her. The sensation of her latch made me want to crawl out of my skin. I tried exclusively pumping for 24 hours, and I hated that too. I confessed all of this at an emergency session with a really great lactation consultant, who thankfully recognized my tears and gave me the permission I realized I needed to feed her how I ever I wanted. Being offered permission to choose was paradigm-shifting. This session was the first time I was asked by a professional whether I even wanted to breastfeed. For the first time I realized that it didn’t have to be all or nothing. I could breastfeed when I wanted to breastfeed and pump when I wanted to pump. Formula was there whenever I needed it.

Four weeks later, my baby is receiving her first full bottle of formula from her father, as I write. (As I write, I am also pumping.) Until tonight, there has always been enough pumped milk in the fridge whenever I need a break and want my daughter to have a bottle. Tonight, however, my stash ran low and it just made sense to feed her before I had a chance to pump more tonight. Tonight I am handling the formula substitution better than I did on Friday night, when she was still hungry after a feed and we decided to give her an ounce of formula to see how it went down. I had been preparing for this scenario for weeks, hauling the tub of formula handed down from a friend out of the cabinet and placing it on the counter each night before bed, expecting to have to dip into it to satisfy my infant’s ravenous appetite. On Friday night, I cried as my husband prepared the bottle. He asked if I wanted to watch her get the bottle. I didn’t.

When had I become someone who was emotionally attached to some stupid breastfeeding ideal, someone who was apparently subconsciously clinging to the notion that her baby would receive exclusively breast milk for some undetermined number of weeks? Before she was born I had assumed I would have to give her formula. Before she was born, I was trying to buy formula. Before she was born I counseled numerous friends through their decision to stop breastfeeding. Now I was weeping in the kitchen because I didn’t have enough breast milk tonight to make my baby stop screaming.

Some of my reaction was surely hormonal. But in the last six weeks, despite the non-judgmental lactation consultant and countless conversations with friends who have had their own struggles around breastfeeding, I had clearly internalized the notion that being unable to feed my baby with breast milk made me a failure. In the era of power pumping, not having enough milk can make you feel like you’re not trying hard enough. Even as I know this is irrational, I sit here pumping, using some Internet regimen to try to boost my supply, so that I won’t have to turn to formula to supplement, even as I know supplementing formula is not going negatively impact my child in any way. This is about me, and my ego.

Even as I feel enormous pressure to give my child as much breast milk as possible, I am grappling with the extent to which my experience as a mother so far is tied to my experience of feeding my daughter. It feels like it is all I do. I love her ,but I don’t love this. Claire Dederer begins her review of Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery in The New York Times with one of my favorite quotes from the book: “I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.”⁵ In The Nursery, the narrator describes the dream state that is the first few hazy, unshowered, milk-stained days home alone with her newborn. I too feel like a milk bar. I am instructed to “feed on demand.” Feeding my daughter often takes an hour. She throws her head at my boob and latches onto my nipple with all of the viciousness of a barracuda. Today she grabbed my nipple with her little hand for the first time, causing me to yelp in pain. She never wants to stop eating. Compared to my husband, it is often impossible for me to soothe her, because as soon as she is on me and recognizes my milky scent, she fusses and tries to wriggle her way down to my breasts. When I try to kiss her cheek, she turns her head and tries to latch on my mouth. What a metaphor for motherhood—the locus of self-expression and self-sustenance suddenly mistaken for a nipple.

Motherhood demands a person become a human boob—a source of comfort, of softness, of nourishment. My boobs, previously an afterthought, now give and give and give. It is amazing that they are this conduit through which my daughter and I remain connected, that I continue to be the near-exclusive fuel for her growth and development. There are moments when she is on my breast and I look down at her and think I have never felt so much love in my life. But I sense it will take me months, if not years, to disentangle the biological and social pressures to continue to feed my daughter in this way, and to parse whether I would have chosen to dedicate my boobs to this purpose if anyone in a position of expertise or authority had offered me an alternative.

1. Colostrum, one of many words I had never heard before my final month of pregnancy, is the thick, sticky fluid produced by the breasts before, and immediately following, birth. Rich in nutrients, a newborn needs only a few drops at a time in the first days of life. Colostrum is what sustains a breastfeeding baby until a mother’s milk comes in.

2. La Leche League is an international nonprofit breastfeeding organization that offers free breastfeeding support. They have a reputation as being rather zealous in pushing breastfeeding on new mothers. In writing this essay, I stumbled across a book about members of La Leche League called Militant Lactivism.

3. https://www.babyfriendlyusa.org/

4. I could go on and on about how the pro-breastfeeding push in the hospital and at the pediatrician is something of a farce given the reality that most new mothers in this country don’t receive any kind of paid parental leave. But that’s a different essay.

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/books/review/the-nursery-szilvia-molnar.html