I breastfed my oldest daughter for nineteen months. With a mother effing nipple shield. Eat that suckas! Well, not you, she did, and it worked well.
I don’t admit to it as much as I’d like to. I can stand up on the internet and say that part of getting better breastfeeding rates is for those of us who are committed to it (dude, I’m not even sure if I can write that anymore, I feel like I’m not part of the “club” anymore) need to be more open and honest about it. Making it an accepted part of society will remove the barriers that exist. However, I don’t really say much about it outside of the “safety” of the Internet community I’m a part of.
Now though, even in the safety of my Internet community, I feel like a fraud.
I know, in the part of my brain that handle logic, that I am not a failure. I know, in that part of my brain, that nine months is freaking awesome, and I’m not (totally) done yet either.
However, the second guessing, it never ends.
Was it not staying on Metformin, not figuring out how to get to see my old endocrinologist even though they moved, after H was born? I wasn’t on it with M, but maybe my PCOS was that much worse.
Did I take for granted my overproducing boobs?
Was it that I took for granted her status as the “easy” baby. She was so flexible I didn’t feed her enough?
How long was it that she had that ear infection? Did I chalk it up to being teething for too long? How long had she been not eating enough?
Was she just not as in to breastfeeding as I thought? Eating more at daycare when it came easy from a bottle?
I can’t stop going over it in my head. Where it went wrong, what I should have done differently. Regardless, one thing is clear, it will never go back to being as good as it was. It wasn’t just a matter of sleep. It isn’t a little formula until she gets back to “normal”. Normal is now as much as I can pump and still be able to feed her that one time a night, formula for the rest of the time. Normal is trying to regain some of my life. The part that I hadn’t realized I had given up when I was always worried about leaving to take time for me. When I knew something wasn’t right.
I regret all of those times when I judged, silently, what other did, what it turns out I’m doing now.
I am lucky, so lucky, to have others willing to make no excuses for making the best choice for their families. I am lucky to have been able to breastfeed at all.
As I sit here, trying to finish this, trying to feel sorry for myself just a little bit more, reality jumped in and kicked my ass.
Tonight on the drive home from daycare, there was a piece on NPR about a mission to Mercury by a spacecraft named Messenger. It was a woman talking about what they discovered. It made me think of Susan. Women in the planetary science are far too rare, and they all rock. Then I was on Facebook, and I’m never on Facebook, and someone mentioned seeing the planets tonight, then someone tagged Susan in a photo. I think the universe is trying to tell me something.
I am selfish to bitch, and moan and whine about my boobs. H will be fine. I will be fine. M needs to learn more about the stars and the planets.
“Adventurous Eater”
Our dog has been called by her Vet an adventurous eater. Her most interesting eat was a nearly two inch long piece of mulch, which she passed in its entirety. She only weighs 12 pounds. The most interesting and not remotely painful thing she eats is grapefruit, which she loves.
The baby seems to be learning from the dog. She like to chew on dirty socks, often taking hers off and gnawing on them. She will crawl around the floor with a toy in her mouth, making she carries it to her next destination. The baby is now known at the U of M vet center because my husband told the vet students that did the dog’s teeth about how the baby takes after her.
This morning, H seemed a little off. I chalked it up to a) teething, b) hunger, she’s apparently decided to start eating more since she is, cross my fingers, not sick for the first time in maybe two months. or c) she’s all about mama lately. However, daycare said she she was crying a lot, and when they looked in her mouth, there was something yellow and brown covering the entire upper palate. I know thrush can turn yellow and get huge, so I figure that it was likely that, but I wasn’t freaked out. We figured we’d go look at it at lunch. I screwed up my knee recently and a quick walk just isn’t in the cards for me. Meh, whatever. Then they called back again. She wasn’t sleeping, clearly was in pain, and could I please come and see it right away. Now, just so you know, I’ve missed so much work because of the ear infection that wouldn’t die, the stomach flu that got us an ER visit and IV in the middle of the ear infection that wouldn’t die, and yesterday I got the stomach flu, that I wasn’t keen on missing any more work. Right now I don’t have enough PTO for my own very needed surgery. I reluctantly went to daycare to check it out (A had a meeting, I did not and therefore drew the short straw), to arrive and find out she had thrown up. In fact, she had thrown up whatever was on the roof of her mouth. Everyone was freaked out. I got a rubber glove and took a look at it, then proceeded to laugh.
It was… an onion skin. She had eventually gagged enough to hork it out of her mouth. Then promptly went to sleep now that she felt better.
I don’t know what it is about those things, but I can’t seem to ever find them all, and she is like a moth to a flame. I take one out of her mouth it seems daily. The dog, also a fan. I think they fight over them.
Her poor teacher has been traumatized by the whole thing. I can imagine that on the roof of her mouth, completely plastered to her palate, being a different texture than a mouth should be, it would look positively ominous. I told her to think of it as an awesome story to tell about the oddest thing she’d ever seen as a daycare teacher.
H got sent home. Technicalities and all for gagging out an onion skin. The good news is she’s happy now. The bad news is I may never get my tonsils out.