If I am lost in a dark forest, then my daughter is leaving me breadcrumbs, leading me, if not to safety, then to a place of familiarity. From the moment of her birth, it is apparent that my daughter is sensitive like me. This is a breadcrumb. She is unusually alert. She tracks me with her eyes. I notice other newborns, who all seem to sleep in a stupor. They seem foggy and not of this earth. My daughter is a week old when my husband lies with her on his chest. She is on her stomach and lifts her head to coolly look about the room, inspecting everything. She appears to have lived several lives already. My sister-in-law tells me babies can’t see much at this age, they are just non-sentient blobs, but my daughter stares at the little green light on the smoke detector on the ceiling in the bedroom. She stares at that little green light instead of falling asleep until my husband puts layers of electrical tape over it. We put tape over the humidifier. We install blackout curtains.
My birthing instructor comes to visit and notes how alert my daughter is. This woman has three girls, so she would know what is typical and what is atypical. During this visit, I explain how my daughter is so alert she can’t settle to sleep. Getting her to fall to sleep takes hours of bouncing and nursing, requiring me to contort into an awkward position as I cradle a tall newborn who is latched to my breast while I bounce on a yoga ball. My neck and shoulders are on fire. My back is locked up with tension. My hips hurt. But my daughter only wants to nurse. There is no end to the nursing sessions. Nursing just leads to more nursing. She nurses all night, my nipple in her mouth like a pacifier, another awkward arrangement that is hard on my back because I have small breasts. I arch my back while lying on my side with my daughter propped on her side. Because my breasts are so small, my nipple slips out of her mouth easily, which wakes her. I am not really sleeping. I wish my breasts were larger. My body is wrong.
My mother’s voice plays in my ears, teasing me for being flat-chested and for having inverted nipples. The inverted nipples cause me so much shame that I begin hunching in high school to hide the outline of my breasts that no one is looking at. I wear bralettes with pads inside to mask what I think is the outline of my horrifying nipples. I avoid the few pool parties I am invited to. When I become sexually active, I hide my chest from partners.
My husband, an acupuncturist by training, informs me that the pericardium channel runs next to the nipples. The pericardium channel corresponds with the protective membranes surrounding the heart and functions to protect the heart and regulate emotional balance. It is no surprise, my husband tells me, that my nipples go in. My heart is wounded. As I nurse, my shameful nipples at least doing some good for once, I remember a scene from my family’s summer house. I am grown, maybe in college. My younger brother is furious with me. He yells that I get away with murder in this family. I am out of control and insolent, he snaps. I can’t remember the details of my infraction. All I remember is that I have failed to agree with my mother, a penultimate sin. I have defied her, I have called her abusive, I might have laughed at her, and I am refusing to comply with one of her demands. In short, I am rebelling. My mother is doing her crying routine, where she plays the victim whose children don’t love her enough to do her bidding.
My younger brother takes up my mother’s defense while she cries, calling me names. He reaches out and pinches my nipple, twisting hard. That’s what you get, he says, his face contorted with anger. To this day, I can feel it. I can feel the ugly weight of this violation, a minor violation in comparison to so many others, and yet it’s this minor one that stands out. Merely writing this sentence invokes the sensation. I remember multiple occasions where one or both of my brothers gave me what they called titty twisters. As the name implies, it’s just a game. It’s all in fun. It’s a fair punishment for my grave offense. Yes, I see it now. It’s no wonder my nipples retreat inwards. My body was in survival mode.
***
Seconds after delivery, my daughter locks eyes with me as if she has met me before. Hello, it’s you again, she seems to say. Her gaze is uncanny. After the home birth midwives weigh her and look her over, she is handed to me. One of the midwives squeezes my breast and puts the baby’s mouth to my nipple. My legs still shake with adrenaline. No one present is asking if they can touch me before they touch me. I am reduced to a piece of meat. Despite taking a course on natural birth and reading about the labor and delivery process, my home birth experience has left me feeling like a cow on a slaughter line. One midwife is still squeezing my breast with a great deal of pressure. Another appears to be inspecting my vagina. The one between my legs lifts her head and announces to the room that my vagina has no damage. The vagina is good! I am blown back and dazed, as if I was just hit by a semi-truck and then walked ten miles to the nearest hospital in bare feet. I had expected a certain degree of gentleness and bedside manners from home birth midwives. A suspicion creeps into my consciousness that I have traded the thuggish interventions of a medicalized hospital birth for the equally crude interventions of know-it-all midwives. I had wanted to avoid a hospital due to my crippling aversion to doctors, but now I’m not sure I made the right decision.
Given my propensity to dissociate and my history of chronic discomfort that I have trained myself to ignore, I have a high threshold for pain. However, labor is different. The pain is more intense, and nothing like the birthing class and home birth books described. I spend many hours stuck in the intense and excruciating transition phase, where the baby has descended into the pelvis and in position to be pushed out. The birthing course had described this phase as the most painful but mercifully brief. Mine lasts hours. I suspect that something is wrong, that my daughter is poorly positioned. When the contractions rocket through me, my body wants to push yet meets continual resistance, as if I am pushing against a brick wall. Swallowed alive by pain, I throw up in the shower. I throw up on my husband. I am unable to drink. I am no longer human. I want hard drugs, and I want out. In the shower, I visualize crawling out of my skin and escaping the pain. Later, I’m in the hallway, unable to stand and preparing for my impending death, when I catch sight of the midwives sitting on the sofa eating Subway sandwiches while staring at their laptops. One brushes crumbs from her lap and onto my sofa. They do not make eye contact with me. They ignore me.
In fact, throughout the labor they touch me very little. While I appreciate not having a doctor place his or her fist inside my body, a little supervision would be appreciated. I feel lost from pain. My husband is by my side. He never leaves my side. However, I had expected the midwives to help with positioning. I had expected them to use rebozos to help diminish the pain. I expected them to place cool washcloths against my forehead and whisper soothing mantras. A secondary midwife comes and goes. Only she touches me, rubbing my back to alleviate the pain that is now ripping through me and causing intense, unrelenting nausea. While she rubs my back, the pain momentarily abates. When she walks away, I nearly cry. Eventually, the midwife who rubs my back suggests that my daughter’s hand might be raised, blocking her descent. I had raised this very possibility about two hours before and was ignored. The nice midwife pushes up on my stomach with each contraction and the tides inside me shift. My daughter is soon born after a couple pushes.
I will learn later from another client of these midwives that not touching or interfering with a birthing mother is their modus operandi. They want women to experience the full spectrum of their body’s power. By ignoring women in physical and mental anguish, they are allowing women to feel empowered in their bodies. I want to murder these midwives. I have paid them to haze me. They have left me to suffer cruelly in tremendous pain. They did not explain this policy upfront. I conclude that all doctors and nurses, even the ones who practice so-called natural care, many of whom are women themselves, are untrustworthy sadists who care nothing about women’s pain. When I said something was wrong, that my daughter’s hand was in the way, did they listen? No, they did not listen. They parked their asses on my sofa and ate their Subway sandwiches and left crumbs on the floor. Nothing about this home birth experience was empowering. When women ask me how the birth went, bracing for the horror story, I simply say that I was bamboozled.
I settle into a routine with my daughter that involves not sleeping and nursing a lot. When I suggest to my birthing instructor that I might evaporate from exhaustion and over-touch if the baby does not sleep for at least a couple hours without gumming my nipple, admitting that I am contemplating offering her a bottle, anything at all to give myself a reprieve, the birthing instructor’s face contorts with displeasure. She discourages me from using a bottle. My daughter is eating too much. Her tummy is full. I need to keep nursing in moderation. I need to put her on a schedule, unless she is cluster feeding, in which case there is no schedule. Of course. I am accustomed to doubting my instincts and abandoning my needs for the pleasure of others, so her answer makes perfect sense. I am sandbagged with exhaustion and despair, certain I may never sleep again, but I don’t question this woman’s advice. I continue to nurse. My daughter continues to resist sleep, sleeping and waking in forty-five-minute cycles that most people assure me will end, just as soon as I figure out how to be a better mother.
Her sleep challenges are clearly my fault. Faulty breasts. Faulty nipples. Faulty sleep environment. When I take my daughter to story time at the local library and confess to other new mothers our challenges with nursing and sleep, these women are not sympathetic. They are smug. Their baby sleeps great. They stick to a routine. Don’t I have her on a routine? Maybe you should add blackout curtains to her room, one mother adds. I know which car this woman drives because I pulled in next to her in the parking lot. I smile at her suggestion while I visualize keying dumb cunt into the paint of her brand-new Lexus. When I leave the library, I eye the Lexus still parked next to me and wonder how quickly I could slash four tires.
I hate these story time mommies. My fury over my situation is a wildfire that quickly jumps to new targets. Other mothers become my target. They judge me, and I scorn them. I conclude that my baby is different, just like I am different, and these women are standard women with standard, predictable babies.
I take my daughter to the pediatrician and ask her if my baby is autistic. She doesn’t play with baby toys. She grabs at sunlight and plays with household objects. She is dreamy. She stares off into space. She does not sleep. She is agitated around crowds of people. She does not go willingly to other people. She tolerates my husband. Mostly, she lives for my nipples. The pediatrician laughs at me. Of course she’s not autistic, the pediatrician says with authority. She is smart and highly observant, which makes her a touch on the sensitive side. Look at yourself, the pediatrician says, disarming me with a compliment about my intelligence. The good doctor assures me my daughter’s exacting curiosity are signs of heightened sensitivity and intelligence. She’s not like other babies because she’s exceptionally smart.
This explanation sits well with me, even as I doubt it’s a full explanation for what is happening. I know many women with smart children, and they do not report the same challenges in early motherhood. But, of course, there’s an explanation for that as well, which I realize as I clip my daughter into her car seat after the doctor’s appointment. The explanation is me. I am a bad mother. Other smart women mother smart babies just fine. I am having a hard time with it because something is wrong with me, just like my mother said. As demoralizing as it is to conclude that I am a terrible parent, I derive a euphoric thrill from knowing that those other mothers who snubbed me at story time just have dumb, vacant babies. Yes, their babies sleep through the night because they are stupid.
In these early weeks, my daughter gums layers of skin off my nipples until they crack and bleed. My nipples look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’s nose. I visit a lactation consultant, who makes me take my shirt off and nurse in front of her so she can assess my daughter’s latch. Naked from the waist up, I once again feel like a piece of meat. A doctor comes by and knocks on the door. The lactation consultant opens the door, exposing my Rudolph nipples to everyone in the hallway. I get the sense I am supposed to be fine with this, that not being fine with this is a sign of insecurity and shallowness. This situation evokes the power dynamics of elementary school, when cool girls would manipulate me to do things that I was uncomfortable with because failing to do so would make me uncool. My daughter unlatches. There is blood around her mouth, like Mommy’s little vampire. The lactation consultant concludes her latch is shallow, meaning she is rubbing the skin off my nipples each time she nurses, which is mostly every minute of every day and every night. The lactation consultant is appalled that my homebirth midwives, who presented themselves as breastfeeding experts, failed to notice a severe tongue and lip tie. The lactation consultant is a brisk German woman who has no time for human incompetence.
How could the midwives have missed this? The lactation consultant tuts and informs me that my daughter’s tongue and lip ties will need to be detached with a laser, an unsettling prospect for an anxious new mother. After consulting my husband, we decide to go through with the procedure. After all, the lactation consultant has told me that an untreated oral tie can lead to jaw deformity in a baby, in addition to the extreme discomfort of the nursing mother. When I dare to suggest to the lactation consultant that I could just bottle feed, the woman looks at me as if I were a monster. I have sickened her with this suggestion. My daughter’s pediatrician performs the procedure, and my daughter barely reacts. I assume this is the end of our troubles, although it is not. It is just the start.
***
By the time my daughter reaches four months old, I am back to work and not functioning. I am subhuman. My husband sleeps in a different room to give me space to perform the nursing-to-sleep theatrics each evening. Sometimes it helps to bounce on a yoga ball and tap my daughter’s back while she nurses. Other times this incenses her. Sometimes I have to hum and rub her cheek gently in circular motions with my thumb while she nurses. The only constant is that what works one night will not work another.
My husband is desperate to help and take the load off me, so he does all the cooking and cleaning. He fetches me books and my glasses and phone chargers and my phone. He downloads podcasts for me so that I have something to listen to while my daughter colonizes my body to soothe herself. He decides to stay home and watch her while I work. We conclude that this baby cannot be left in the hands of some daycare lackey. He forfeits his career to become a stay-at-home parent. He bundles her into her stroller for long walks where he narrates the scenery aloud to her. When she’s old enough for solid foods, he roasts a chicken each week, using the bones for chicken stock. After winter walks, he gives her sips of bone broth to warm her up before they read together. He carries her around the house in a carrier, facing out, again narrating the day for her.
But our daughter only lives for one thing. She wants my nipples. At work, my days revolve around an increasingly impossible and exhausting series of meetings, around which I must reserve a lactation room to siphon the loads of breastmilk that my breasts continue to churn out. My breasts are mighty little milk factories. I can barely fill an A-cup and typically forgo a bra for this reason, but lo, my chest cranks out so much milk that the lactation consultant explains I might have an oversupply problem. The nursing books I read informed me that breastfeeding is natural. It is how women’s bodies are designed, yet my body can’t seem to figure it out.
This makes work even more stressful. I often forget the pump parts at home, necessitating emergency runs to the nearby Target to buy replacement tubes and flanges. Then I rush back to my office or the lactation room, which must be reserved in advance and is not always available when I need it, where I desperately try to relax so the knots of milk that are gathering well up into my armpits can be released before my next meeting. I suffer from chronic clogged ducts. I shove food into my face as I run to and from meetings, not having time to sit and eat a meal. My supervisor is kind and compassionate, a mother herself, but I am aware that I look and act like a wreck. Breast milk leaks from me at the end of meetings. Forming entire sentences is an effort so monumental that I could at any moment cry. A fog blankets my brain. I have lost the ability to speak coherently, let alone perform at my typical exceptional standard. I am not allowed to be less than lethally perfect; I have developed a reputation for myself. I no longer make jokes, except at my own expense.
My coworkers are either very polite or very unobservant. They keep telling me how good I look. How I got my body back so quickly. Female coworkers gush over my body’s ability to return to its pre-pregnancy shape and size. I suppose I should be grateful for this, but I just want to sleep. I often fantasize about sleeping naked in a darkened, quiet room for hours where no one can reach me. I want to live on a desert island. I want to go months without speaking. At times, while sitting in the lactation room pumping, I dissociate to the sound of the pump. Sometimes I just sit in the room after I’m done pumping, enjoying the silent freedom this windowless room offers me. This room demands nothing from me. I stare at the pattern on the ceiling tiles. I close my eyes and listen to the buzzing of the overhead lights. A knock startles me. Another woman has come to siphon her breasts that, unlike mine, probably make the right amount of milk. I pack up my pump and leave.
I grow desperate. I ask other mothers for help and feedback. Some say to let her cry herself to sleep, which strikes me as cruel and unlikely to work. I’m starting to realize that conventional baby advice doesn’t apply to my baby. She is, as my pediatrician acknowledges, different from the norm. Some women I consult act as if I’m overreacting. Everyone is tired, they say. I’m just acting like a baby because I’m unaccustomed to the rigors of parenthood. Wait till you have another one, an older coworker tells me. One woman tells me to keep nursing. Another woman tells me to give my daughter a bottle. Everyone tells me to buy a pacifier, not the ten ones I have, but a different one, this brand and shape here that worked wonders for their children. My daughter spits every pacifier out of her mouth, offended that I would even offer her such an unnatural alternative. She is no dummy. She knows a real nipple from a fake nipple. Every woman in my orbit seems to have advice for nursing and sleep. This advice is conflicting, and none of it works. I am a human pacifier. This is my fate.
Only my supervisor and another coworker listen. They tell me they had difficult daughters who were impossible to settle. They don’t have any advice because nothing worked for them except time. Eventually, babies sleep. Until they sleep, they don’t sleep. This comforts me because it means there is nothing wrong with me as a mother, although it also means there is nothing I can do.
The sleep deprivation is so consuming that I begin to slip into my sunken place. Already prone to anxiety and low mood, what I will later learn are the symptoms of complex PTSD, sleeping several broken hours a night for months and then years while breastfeeding around the clock takes a toll on my physical and mental wellbeing. Looking back, I see I was snowed under with the aftershocks of trauma well before my daughter’s birth. The anxiety, the depression, the hopelessness, the dissociation, the nightmares, the hypervigilance, the exhaustion, the exhaustion that bleeds into the bones to become fatigue, the headaches, the chronic pain, the irritability, and most of all, the anger. The black and murderous fury that what happened to me was an injustice that can never be righted. My innocence, my youth, my agency to speak, my ability to feel and express joy, to love and be loved, to look in the mirror and see my body without flinching—all this was stolen from me. The anger seeded early, and left unchecked, it metastasized.
As a mother, I have little outlet for this rage. I must remain stoically vacant like the story time mommies. I am a sacred Mother walking the path of so many women before me. I am a woman, so my anger has no home. I fantasize about slashing tires. I am fascinated with true crime. I binge on serial killer podcasts while my daughter nurses. I listen to true crime while I walk her in her stroller. I want to maim and disfigure the other mothers I see on the trail, who strut about in designer leggings, looking as if they have just woken from a three-hour nap. At times, I overhear one of these women talking to a friend about how her parents have come for the weekend, the month, the year. They’ve moved in next door. Isn’t it so great to have help even though it’s also a little annoying! My mom keeps making Costco runs and organizing the pantry! These women coo to one another while I visualize slitting their throats and letting them bleed out all over their Lululemon workout tops.
***
My daughter is three or four when it becomes apparent that her bite is off. I take her to a specialist, one of the few in the area. He informs me that she has a posterior tongue tie and lip tie. He is not surprised by this. He tells me most lactation consultants aren’t trained to spot posterior ties. Her bite misalignment impacts her airways and most likely contributes to her sleep challenges. To summarize, a team of midwives presenting themselves as breastfeeding experts, a pediatrician, and a certified lactation consultant missed this. If I wasn’t so exhausted by doctors and their incompetence, I would call up each of these practitioners and let them know of their mistake and what it has cost me and my daughter. I don’t, though. I do what my mother taught me to do: I silently seethe.
Keti Shea
Nipples
If I am lost in a dark forest, then my daughter is leaving me breadcrumbs, leading me, if not to safety, then to a place of familiarity. From the moment of her birth, it is apparent that my daughter is sensitive like me. This is a breadcrumb. She is unusually alert. She tracks me with her eyes. I notice other newborns, who all seem to sleep in a stupor. They seem foggy and not of this earth. My daughter is a week old when my husband lies with her on his chest. She is on her stomach and lifts her head to coolly look about the room, inspecting everything. She appears to have lived several lives already. My sister-in-law tells me babies can’t see much at this age, they are just non-sentient blobs, but my daughter stares at the little green light on the smoke detector on the ceiling in the bedroom. She stares at that little green light instead of falling asleep until my husband puts layers of electrical tape over it. We put tape over the humidifier. We install blackout curtains.
My birthing instructor comes to visit and notes how alert my daughter is. This woman has three girls, so she would know what is typical and what is atypical. During this visit, I explain how my daughter is so alert she can’t settle to sleep. Getting her to fall to sleep takes hours of bouncing and nursing, requiring me to contort into an awkward position as I cradle a tall newborn who is latched to my breast while I bounce on a yoga ball. My neck and shoulders are on fire. My back is locked up with tension. My hips hurt. But my daughter only wants to nurse. There is no end to the nursing sessions. Nursing just leads to more nursing. She nurses all night, my nipple in her mouth like a pacifier, another awkward arrangement that is hard on my back because I have small breasts. I arch my back while lying on my side with my daughter propped on her side. Because my breasts are so small, my nipple slips out of her mouth easily, which wakes her. I am not really sleeping. I wish my breasts were larger. My body is wrong.
My mother’s voice plays in my ears, teasing me for being flat-chested and for having inverted nipples. The inverted nipples cause me so much shame that I begin hunching in high school to hide the outline of my breasts that no one is looking at. I wear bralettes with pads inside to mask what I think is the outline of my horrifying nipples. I avoid the few pool parties I am invited to. When I become sexually active, I hide my chest from partners.
My husband, an acupuncturist by training, informs me that the pericardium channel runs next to the nipples. The pericardium channel corresponds with the protective membranes surrounding the heart and functions to protect the heart and regulate emotional balance. It is no surprise, my husband tells me, that my nipples go in. My heart is wounded. As I nurse, my shameful nipples at least doing some good for once, I remember a scene from my family’s summer house. I am grown, maybe in college. My younger brother is furious with me. He yells that I get away with murder in this family. I am out of control and insolent, he snaps. I can’t remember the details of my infraction. All I remember is that I have failed to agree with my mother, a penultimate sin. I have defied her, I have called her abusive, I might have laughed at her, and I am refusing to comply with one of her demands. In short, I am rebelling. My mother is doing her crying routine, where she plays the victim whose children don’t love her enough to do her bidding.
My younger brother takes up my mother’s defense while she cries, calling me names. He reaches out and pinches my nipple, twisting hard. That’s what you get, he says, his face contorted with anger. To this day, I can feel it. I can feel the ugly weight of this violation, a minor violation in comparison to so many others, and yet it’s this minor one that stands out. Merely writing this sentence invokes the sensation. I remember multiple occasions where one or both of my brothers gave me what they called titty twisters. As the name implies, it’s just a game. It’s all in fun. It’s a fair punishment for my grave offense. Yes, I see it now. It’s no wonder my nipples retreat inwards. My body was in survival mode.
***
Seconds after delivery, my daughter locks eyes with me as if she has met me before. Hello, it’s you again, she seems to say. Her gaze is uncanny. After the home birth midwives weigh her and look her over, she is handed to me. One of the midwives squeezes my breast and puts the baby’s mouth to my nipple. My legs still shake with adrenaline. No one present is asking if they can touch me before they touch me. I am reduced to a piece of meat. Despite taking a course on natural birth and reading about the labor and delivery process, my home birth experience has left me feeling like a cow on a slaughter line. One midwife is still squeezing my breast with a great deal of pressure. Another appears to be inspecting my vagina. The one between my legs lifts her head and announces to the room that my vagina has no damage. The vagina is good! I am blown back and dazed, as if I was just hit by a semi-truck and then walked ten miles to the nearest hospital in bare feet. I had expected a certain degree of gentleness and bedside manners from home birth midwives. A suspicion creeps into my consciousness that I have traded the thuggish interventions of a medicalized hospital birth for the equally crude interventions of know-it-all midwives. I had wanted to avoid a hospital due to my crippling aversion to doctors, but now I’m not sure I made the right decision.
Given my propensity to dissociate and my history of chronic discomfort that I have trained myself to ignore, I have a high threshold for pain. However, labor is different. The pain is more intense, and nothing like the birthing class and home birth books described. I spend many hours stuck in the intense and excruciating transition phase, where the baby has descended into the pelvis and in position to be pushed out. The birthing course had described this phase as the most painful but mercifully brief. Mine lasts hours. I suspect that something is wrong, that my daughter is poorly positioned. When the contractions rocket through me, my body wants to push yet meets continual resistance, as if I am pushing against a brick wall. Swallowed alive by pain, I throw up in the shower. I throw up on my husband. I am unable to drink. I am no longer human. I want hard drugs, and I want out. In the shower, I visualize crawling out of my skin and escaping the pain. Later, I’m in the hallway, unable to stand and preparing for my impending death, when I catch sight of the midwives sitting on the sofa eating Subway sandwiches while staring at their laptops. One brushes crumbs from her lap and onto my sofa. They do not make eye contact with me. They ignore me.
In fact, throughout the labor they touch me very little. While I appreciate not having a doctor place his or her fist inside my body, a little supervision would be appreciated. I feel lost from pain. My husband is by my side. He never leaves my side. However, I had expected the midwives to help with positioning. I had expected them to use rebozos to help diminish the pain. I expected them to place cool washcloths against my forehead and whisper soothing mantras. A secondary midwife comes and goes. Only she touches me, rubbing my back to alleviate the pain that is now ripping through me and causing intense, unrelenting nausea. While she rubs my back, the pain momentarily abates. When she walks away, I nearly cry. Eventually, the midwife who rubs my back suggests that my daughter’s hand might be raised, blocking her descent. I had raised this very possibility about two hours before and was ignored. The nice midwife pushes up on my stomach with each contraction and the tides inside me shift. My daughter is soon born after a couple pushes.
I will learn later from another client of these midwives that not touching or interfering with a birthing mother is their modus operandi. They want women to experience the full spectrum of their body’s power. By ignoring women in physical and mental anguish, they are allowing women to feel empowered in their bodies. I want to murder these midwives. I have paid them to haze me. They have left me to suffer cruelly in tremendous pain. They did not explain this policy upfront. I conclude that all doctors and nurses, even the ones who practice so-called natural care, many of whom are women themselves, are untrustworthy sadists who care nothing about women’s pain. When I said something was wrong, that my daughter’s hand was in the way, did they listen? No, they did not listen. They parked their asses on my sofa and ate their Subway sandwiches and left crumbs on the floor. Nothing about this home birth experience was empowering. When women ask me how the birth went, bracing for the horror story, I simply say that I was bamboozled.
I settle into a routine with my daughter that involves not sleeping and nursing a lot. When I suggest to my birthing instructor that I might evaporate from exhaustion and over-touch if the baby does not sleep for at least a couple hours without gumming my nipple, admitting that I am contemplating offering her a bottle, anything at all to give myself a reprieve, the birthing instructor’s face contorts with displeasure. She discourages me from using a bottle. My daughter is eating too much. Her tummy is full. I need to keep nursing in moderation. I need to put her on a schedule, unless she is cluster feeding, in which case there is no schedule. Of course. I am accustomed to doubting my instincts and abandoning my needs for the pleasure of others, so her answer makes perfect sense. I am sandbagged with exhaustion and despair, certain I may never sleep again, but I don’t question this woman’s advice. I continue to nurse. My daughter continues to resist sleep, sleeping and waking in forty-five-minute cycles that most people assure me will end, just as soon as I figure out how to be a better mother.
Her sleep challenges are clearly my fault. Faulty breasts. Faulty nipples. Faulty sleep environment. When I take my daughter to story time at the local library and confess to other new mothers our challenges with nursing and sleep, these women are not sympathetic. They are smug. Their baby sleeps great. They stick to a routine. Don’t I have her on a routine? Maybe you should add blackout curtains to her room, one mother adds. I know which car this woman drives because I pulled in next to her in the parking lot. I smile at her suggestion while I visualize keying dumb cunt into the paint of her brand-new Lexus. When I leave the library, I eye the Lexus still parked next to me and wonder how quickly I could slash four tires.
I hate these story time mommies. My fury over my situation is a wildfire that quickly jumps to new targets. Other mothers become my target. They judge me, and I scorn them. I conclude that my baby is different, just like I am different, and these women are standard women with standard, predictable babies.
I take my daughter to the pediatrician and ask her if my baby is autistic. She doesn’t play with baby toys. She grabs at sunlight and plays with household objects. She is dreamy. She stares off into space. She does not sleep. She is agitated around crowds of people. She does not go willingly to other people. She tolerates my husband. Mostly, she lives for my nipples. The pediatrician laughs at me. Of course she’s not autistic, the pediatrician says with authority. She is smart and highly observant, which makes her a touch on the sensitive side. Look at yourself, the pediatrician says, disarming me with a compliment about my intelligence. The good doctor assures me my daughter’s exacting curiosity are signs of heightened sensitivity and intelligence. She’s not like other babies because she’s exceptionally smart.
This explanation sits well with me, even as I doubt it’s a full explanation for what is happening. I know many women with smart children, and they do not report the same challenges in early motherhood. But, of course, there’s an explanation for that as well, which I realize as I clip my daughter into her car seat after the doctor’s appointment. The explanation is me. I am a bad mother. Other smart women mother smart babies just fine. I am having a hard time with it because something is wrong with me, just like my mother said. As demoralizing as it is to conclude that I am a terrible parent, I derive a euphoric thrill from knowing that those other mothers who snubbed me at story time just have dumb, vacant babies. Yes, their babies sleep through the night because they are stupid.
In these early weeks, my daughter gums layers of skin off my nipples until they crack and bleed. My nipples look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’s nose. I visit a lactation consultant, who makes me take my shirt off and nurse in front of her so she can assess my daughter’s latch. Naked from the waist up, I once again feel like a piece of meat. A doctor comes by and knocks on the door. The lactation consultant opens the door, exposing my Rudolph nipples to everyone in the hallway. I get the sense I am supposed to be fine with this, that not being fine with this is a sign of insecurity and shallowness. This situation evokes the power dynamics of elementary school, when cool girls would manipulate me to do things that I was uncomfortable with because failing to do so would make me uncool. My daughter unlatches. There is blood around her mouth, like Mommy’s little vampire. The lactation consultant concludes her latch is shallow, meaning she is rubbing the skin off my nipples each time she nurses, which is mostly every minute of every day and every night. The lactation consultant is appalled that my homebirth midwives, who presented themselves as breastfeeding experts, failed to notice a severe tongue and lip tie. The lactation consultant is a brisk German woman who has no time for human incompetence.
How could the midwives have missed this? The lactation consultant tuts and informs me that my daughter’s tongue and lip ties will need to be detached with a laser, an unsettling prospect for an anxious new mother. After consulting my husband, we decide to go through with the procedure. After all, the lactation consultant has told me that an untreated oral tie can lead to jaw deformity in a baby, in addition to the extreme discomfort of the nursing mother. When I dare to suggest to the lactation consultant that I could just bottle feed, the woman looks at me as if I were a monster. I have sickened her with this suggestion. My daughter’s pediatrician performs the procedure, and my daughter barely reacts. I assume this is the end of our troubles, although it is not. It is just the start.
***
By the time my daughter reaches four months old, I am back to work and not functioning. I am subhuman. My husband sleeps in a different room to give me space to perform the nursing-to-sleep theatrics each evening. Sometimes it helps to bounce on a yoga ball and tap my daughter’s back while she nurses. Other times this incenses her. Sometimes I have to hum and rub her cheek gently in circular motions with my thumb while she nurses. The only constant is that what works one night will not work another.
My husband is desperate to help and take the load off me, so he does all the cooking and cleaning. He fetches me books and my glasses and phone chargers and my phone. He downloads podcasts for me so that I have something to listen to while my daughter colonizes my body to soothe herself. He decides to stay home and watch her while I work. We conclude that this baby cannot be left in the hands of some daycare lackey. He forfeits his career to become a stay-at-home parent. He bundles her into her stroller for long walks where he narrates the scenery aloud to her. When she’s old enough for solid foods, he roasts a chicken each week, using the bones for chicken stock. After winter walks, he gives her sips of bone broth to warm her up before they read together. He carries her around the house in a carrier, facing out, again narrating the day for her.
But our daughter only lives for one thing. She wants my nipples. At work, my days revolve around an increasingly impossible and exhausting series of meetings, around which I must reserve a lactation room to siphon the loads of breastmilk that my breasts continue to churn out. My breasts are mighty little milk factories. I can barely fill an A-cup and typically forgo a bra for this reason, but lo, my chest cranks out so much milk that the lactation consultant explains I might have an oversupply problem. The nursing books I read informed me that breastfeeding is natural. It is how women’s bodies are designed, yet my body can’t seem to figure it out.
This makes work even more stressful. I often forget the pump parts at home, necessitating emergency runs to the nearby Target to buy replacement tubes and flanges. Then I rush back to my office or the lactation room, which must be reserved in advance and is not always available when I need it, where I desperately try to relax so the knots of milk that are gathering well up into my armpits can be released before my next meeting. I suffer from chronic clogged ducts. I shove food into my face as I run to and from meetings, not having time to sit and eat a meal. My supervisor is kind and compassionate, a mother herself, but I am aware that I look and act like a wreck. Breast milk leaks from me at the end of meetings. Forming entire sentences is an effort so monumental that I could at any moment cry. A fog blankets my brain. I have lost the ability to speak coherently, let alone perform at my typical exceptional standard. I am not allowed to be less than lethally perfect; I have developed a reputation for myself. I no longer make jokes, except at my own expense.
My coworkers are either very polite or very unobservant. They keep telling me how good I look. How I got my body back so quickly. Female coworkers gush over my body’s ability to return to its pre-pregnancy shape and size. I suppose I should be grateful for this, but I just want to sleep. I often fantasize about sleeping naked in a darkened, quiet room for hours where no one can reach me. I want to live on a desert island. I want to go months without speaking. At times, while sitting in the lactation room pumping, I dissociate to the sound of the pump. Sometimes I just sit in the room after I’m done pumping, enjoying the silent freedom this windowless room offers me. This room demands nothing from me. I stare at the pattern on the ceiling tiles. I close my eyes and listen to the buzzing of the overhead lights. A knock startles me. Another woman has come to siphon her breasts that, unlike mine, probably make the right amount of milk. I pack up my pump and leave.
I grow desperate. I ask other mothers for help and feedback. Some say to let her cry herself to sleep, which strikes me as cruel and unlikely to work. I’m starting to realize that conventional baby advice doesn’t apply to my baby. She is, as my pediatrician acknowledges, different from the norm. Some women I consult act as if I’m overreacting. Everyone is tired, they say. I’m just acting like a baby because I’m unaccustomed to the rigors of parenthood. Wait till you have another one, an older coworker tells me. One woman tells me to keep nursing. Another woman tells me to give my daughter a bottle. Everyone tells me to buy a pacifier, not the ten ones I have, but a different one, this brand and shape here that worked wonders for their children. My daughter spits every pacifier out of her mouth, offended that I would even offer her such an unnatural alternative. She is no dummy. She knows a real nipple from a fake nipple. Every woman in my orbit seems to have advice for nursing and sleep. This advice is conflicting, and none of it works. I am a human pacifier. This is my fate.
Only my supervisor and another coworker listen. They tell me they had difficult daughters who were impossible to settle. They don’t have any advice because nothing worked for them except time. Eventually, babies sleep. Until they sleep, they don’t sleep. This comforts me because it means there is nothing wrong with me as a mother, although it also means there is nothing I can do.
The sleep deprivation is so consuming that I begin to slip into my sunken place. Already prone to anxiety and low mood, what I will later learn are the symptoms of complex PTSD, sleeping several broken hours a night for months and then years while breastfeeding around the clock takes a toll on my physical and mental wellbeing. Looking back, I see I was snowed under with the aftershocks of trauma well before my daughter’s birth. The anxiety, the depression, the hopelessness, the dissociation, the nightmares, the hypervigilance, the exhaustion, the exhaustion that bleeds into the bones to become fatigue, the headaches, the chronic pain, the irritability, and most of all, the anger. The black and murderous fury that what happened to me was an injustice that can never be righted. My innocence, my youth, my agency to speak, my ability to feel and express joy, to love and be loved, to look in the mirror and see my body without flinching—all this was stolen from me. The anger seeded early, and left unchecked, it metastasized.
As a mother, I have little outlet for this rage. I must remain stoically vacant like the story time mommies. I am a sacred Mother walking the path of so many women before me. I am a woman, so my anger has no home. I fantasize about slashing tires. I am fascinated with true crime. I binge on serial killer podcasts while my daughter nurses. I listen to true crime while I walk her in her stroller. I want to maim and disfigure the other mothers I see on the trail, who strut about in designer leggings, looking as if they have just woken from a three-hour nap. At times, I overhear one of these women talking to a friend about how her parents have come for the weekend, the month, the year. They’ve moved in next door. Isn’t it so great to have help even though it’s also a little annoying! My mom keeps making Costco runs and organizing the pantry! These women coo to one another while I visualize slitting their throats and letting them bleed out all over their Lululemon workout tops.
***
My daughter is three or four when it becomes apparent that her bite is off. I take her to a specialist, one of the few in the area. He informs me that she has a posterior tongue tie and lip tie. He is not surprised by this. He tells me most lactation consultants aren’t trained to spot posterior ties. Her bite misalignment impacts her airways and most likely contributes to her sleep challenges. To summarize, a team of midwives presenting themselves as breastfeeding experts, a pediatrician, and a certified lactation consultant missed this. If I wasn’t so exhausted by doctors and their incompetence, I would call up each of these practitioners and let them know of their mistake and what it has cost me and my daughter. I don’t, though. I do what my mother taught me to do: I silently seethe.