Posted By Daisy on July 13, 2010

Everyone’s first months with a baby is a blur.  It’s the sleep deprivation haze combined with the military seriousness of having a tiny life to defend.  I am not one of those moms that experienced love at first sight with my little guy.  But, I took the responsibility of motherhood exceptionally seriously.   Maybe too seriously.   My own mother, looking back, laughs at me and my husband and says we approached caring for our baby like a science project.  She remembers watching us bathe him, piece by piece, consulting an AAP manual the entire time, and also swaddling with a rigor she found hysterical.  She’s right, we were funny — overeducated and over-read, we assumed a clinical “right” way to perform every parenting task.  We fretted over every developmental milestone, bought high-end toys, worried about tummy time.    In some ways we were fortunate to have a premie — our intensity didn’t seem quite so crazy in that context, and we had the safety net of very frequent appointments with the doctor experts those first weeks.

Nursing was a challenge.  It’s bizarre to me that it was.  If anything associated with parenting should come from pure primal instinct, it seems breastfeeding would fit the bill.  Yet and still, we needed consultants to help us with latching difficulties, to learn techniques for keeping baby awake when he stopped sucking too soon, and even to bestow us with a complicated bottle/torture-device to ensure baby was still “practicing his technique” when he had the luxury of a break from me to be supplemented with a bottle.  We followed doctor’s orders to the letter on spacing out feedings, and my days went something like this for several months:  Nurse for 40 minutes.  Hand baby to husband, who bottle-fed expressed milk.  Pump with a hospital grade pump for 30 minutes.  Take a 45 minute break to pee, check the internet, and/or be catatonic.  Wash, rinse, repeat.   Sometimes we supplemented with formula (dun dun DUN!!) when my expressed milk wasn’t enough, but he was essentially breastfed.   At one point I cracked and told our doctor I would continue to pump, but just couldn’t handle the constant struggle of trying to get nursing “right.”  I really did take a one-week sabbatical of sorts during which I pumped mostly and only tried actual nursing on those occasions I was feeling most relaxed and up to it.  Although I was warned that my decision to take this break might mean a shortened nursing relationship with my son, I think it actually saved me.  When I was ready to try again he was bigger and stronger, I was less freaked out, and it all seemed to come together.

During those first months, I probably had a mild touch of PPD, and we certainly spent a lot of time objectifying our son despite all the “attachment parenting” type behaviors we were using.  For some of us, a baby really does seem more object than person — at least during the nothing but pee-poop-eat-sleep phase, the “science experiment” phase.  The experiences of women who instantly felt bonded to their babies are as foreign to me as my feelings of detachment are to them.   When I did fall in love with my son, finally, it was a very powerful thing.  I can’t say the delay made it sweeter because I’ve got nothing to compare it to.   But, for any mom who is feeling rather mechanical after childbirth or worrying about her attachment or her skills or value as a mother, believe me, you aren’t alone and it doesn’t signal the entire future of your relationship with your child.

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Categories: Daisy's Story
Tags: attachment parenting, breastfeeding, nursing, post partum depression