Honestly sir, it's only a few ounces of formula...I wasn't intending to sell it...

When I was pregnant with my second child — Bubba, our only living child — I worried from the point of conception onward. Hell, I worried BEFORE the point of conception, about whether I'd make a follicle large enough to be fertilized, whether J.'s sample would be good enough, whether the timing would be right.

I spent 34 weeks just waiting for the point in time when it would be safe for Bubba to leave my body. It wasn't safe in there, I surmised. At six weeks, I'd had a big bleed and major cramps that convinced me I was miscarrying. At 11 weeks, there was a concern about low amniotic fluid, and we wouldn't know for sure if our baby had kidneys until the 20 week ultrasound.My cervix could give out at any moment, as we'd experienced with Hope, so every day I had with Bubba safely in my uterus felt like borrowed time. At 30 weeks, it started to go, and I had steroid shots to try to get his lungs developed as much as possible. At 31 weeks I was put on modified bedrest, at 32 weeks put on full bedrest, at 33 weeks admitted to the hospital for full bedrest at 8 cm. dilated. At 34.5 weeks the inevitable finally happened.

When I started having contractions the week he was born, the nurses, as a matter of course, started talking about starting up the "terb" -- terbutaline, a tocolytic drug to stop contractions. I'd had some terb a few times already, and it always quieted things down without much in the way of side effects for me. But at 34.5 weeks, I said no. I also said no to bedpans and, when the nurses were gone, I would get up and walk around my room a few times, or even sneak out to get a soda from the snack station on the floor. Countless times the nurses gave me the speech: "Every day inside you is better for the baby." But I never felt that way. I knew he needed to be in there for a reasonable length of time, but at 34.5 weeks, I felt it would be safer for him to be on the outside, where umblical cords couldn't wrap around his neck, where his heart couldn't just stop beating without someone knowing about it, where he couldn't suffer birth trauma or detached placenta or any of the mysterious and fatal complications of coming into this world. I had zero faith in my body.

When he was finally out -- at a healthy 7 lbs. 12 oz. -- and off the oxygen within 24 hours, I relaxed briefly in the knowledge that at least I had finished this part successfully. At least I had managed to carry our baby long enough for him to make it in this world.

Like most other women today, I started off with grand illusions of how life would be with my long-wanted, finally-here little baby. Breastfeeding was important to me. I never got to go to any of the classes because I was on bedrest during the time we'd signed up for them, but I figured the hospital's lactaction consultants could help me out and I'd done my reading. I figured that it had been done for how many thousands of years--it couldn't be that hard, right?

Well, all my breastfeeding expectations pretty much went out the window within the first 24 hours. Bubba needed oxygen to live, so he didn't get to "crawl" up to my breast and start happily nursing within minutes of birth. The nurses gave him a pacifier before I got down to see him the next morning, and instead of being pissed I was just happy to see that he was sucking it, because sometimes premature babies don't really have the sucking reflex down yet. I tried nursing for the first time about 24 hours after he was born. His method was suck, suck, sleep. And I mean sleep. He had jaundice, so he was tired. No amount of cold washcloths on his head, baby sit-ups, foot-tickling, nipple-forcing or jostling could bring him out of it.
After the lactation consultants had run out of ideas, they got me nipple shields, which seemed promising at first but alas were not enough. Bubba was just too damn tired and lazy to do it, and you know what? So was I.

The scene at home was this. Bubba wakes up screaming, hungry. I try to breastfeed. He resists, shaking his head from side to side. Squirt milk onto lip as enticement. Bubba latches on to the very end of my nipple--not nearly enough to do the job. Detaches and cries. Finally, with much forceful nipple-pinching and shoving on my part, manage to get the gargantuan thing into Bubba's mouth. Suck, suck, sleep. Or, suck, suck, detach, scream. Get out Lanolin and stick nipple shields on and try it again. Same story as above. Try this for 1/2 hour to 45 minutes. Warm up bottle of pumped breastmilk. Feed Bubba. Pump breasts for another 1/2 hour. Maybe an hour off, and then....start all over again.

After about 3 weeks of this, I gave up on trying to get him to suckle. I decided I would just pump and give him that in a bottle. Bubba loved his bottle. He sucked it right down without issue. Every now and then I'd try to stick him back on the boob, only to meet with severe protest. During the day, when I was home alone with Bubba, I'd have to somehow figure out how to pump for half an hour several times a day, being unable to pick him up if he cried or change his diaper unless I stopped the pumping session and tried to resume later, knowing that this was not good for my milk supply. I clearly remember trying to hold both boob cones over my breasts with one hand while holding a crying Bubba on my lap with the other...and I think I was crying as well.

I really did mourn my inability to feed my son. I remembered when I first got the news that I would lose Hope and the ob/gyn was explaining to me what would happen afterwards. My tears finally made their way through my shock as she told me my milk would still come in, even though there would be no baby to drink it. When that did indeed happen, it was possibly the most difficult part of the whole experience -- having milk but no baby. Now, with Bubba, I had a baby but he wouldn't do it, and this was probably my only chance. Yes, I did feel like a failure. So many other women seemed to have enough tenacity or patience or whatever it took to make it through the adjustment phase and go on to nurse their kids until kindergarten.

When Bubba was six weeks old, and my postpartum depression was in full swing, I had started becoming lazy about my pumping sessions. I started stretching out the night sessions to two a night, then one a night, then just doing it before I went to bed and when I got up. Needless to say, my supply went down. I panicked a little for a few days and pumped with renewed vigor, but still Bubba started getting more and more formula, and he didn't seem to notice the difference. My conviction was waning.

Then I got sick. Just a bad cold, but it made me feel like crap. I was also still bleeding from childbirth; still lactating, however feebly; still pumping half-heartedly; getting up at night with Bubba (although J. did A LOT of that); staying home all day with the baby and not realizing just how bad my postpartum depression was, figuring I was just a freak for not being able to TAKE IT when Bubba would cry for hours at a time from gas or hunger or general dissatisfaction. I was, in a word, a mess. One night I stumbled out to the living room in my sour-milk-smelling shirt that I'd had on for two days, tissues in hand to mop up the snot that was streaming out of my nose, a feverish sweat on my brow, and just stood there looking at that goddamned pump. I could not do it. I could not hook myself up to the milking machine one more time.

Of course, I did, a few times over the next week when I would get engorged. But that really was the end. Bubba would be a formula baby. I had only lasted six weeks.

But I guess I can feel shitty about it forever. Check out this article in the New York Times. Looks like Bubba will likely suffer from any number of ailments, from lower IQ (funny how they don't mention how much lower, huh?) to diabetes to asthma. Shit, I might as well have just fed him "New Shitty Mom Formula from Enfamil, Now With Traces of Cyanide and Mercury!"

I know there are women out there who absolutely cannot nurse. They've had mastectomies, maybe, or they really don't make enough milk. Or, heaven forbid, they've adopted a child. I guess all parents who create their families through adoption get to feel crappy too? Then there are those of us out there who could have done it, if only we'd been selfless, heroic, tenacious, and GOOD enough to do it. I fall into that category.

I am so sick of feeling bad about this, but I know I will. Forever. I mean, it doesn't keep me up at night, but when I come across an article like that, I get defensive, I get angry, and I get guilty. And I wonder why I hear so many articles trumpeting the benefits of breastfeeding and so few--hardly any, in fact--about other factors that affect a child's IQ and health, such as having their fathers involved in their lives, or having quality, affordable daycare.

Look, we all know at this point that "breast is best." It's been shoved down our throats as much as the babies'. If the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is so set on making sure that all babies are breastfed,to the point where it compares formula feeding to falling off a bucking bronco in a bar while 9 months pregnant, then it had better start putting forth some options for the milk machines--oh, I mean mothers--who need help. I'd start by sending out a nurse for a home visit, maybe. Or how about lactation consultants who actually have something worthwhile to suggest? How about decent PAID maternity leaves so women wouldn't have to worry about that part of the equation while try to exclusively feed their children, or even subsidized daycare near every workplace so it would be logistically possible to do it after a mother returns to work. Just as likely to happen is this idea: maybe the government could set up a wet-nurse program, or even employ a legion of super-producer lactating moms whose milk could be sold in the grocery store alongside the formula. Or better yet, why not have the government just pull formula off the shelves? That would force the issue, wouldn't it?

Then, once they've guilted/forced every mother into nursing her child, the U.S. government can start figuring out how to make sure each nursing mother is eating a healthy diet, not smoking, and not taking any sort of prescription or illicit drugs that might harm her baby. Or making sure that mothers of babies with wheat or dairy allergies aren't sneaking in a pancake or a scoop of ice cream now and then.

Yep, I'm bitter. I'm sick of living in a country where the government feels it is accceptable to use guilt and shame to coerce women into a desired behavior. Women are more than vessels and feeding machines for babies. But in the long run, when it comes down to it, that's pretty much how our government looks at us. I wonder how much of our guilt complexes can be traced back to the paternalism and judgment rained down on us from our government. Ever notice men don't feel this way? Think about it--have you ever seen a public service announcement showing little orphaned children whose fathers died because they didn't check their nuts for cancer? Or children failing at school because their fathers didn't have a clue what was going on in their kids' classrooms? Or a PSA about how children whose fathers didn't support their mothers are however many percents more likely to fail in life?

That's my rant for today.