Of all of my mom friends, there is only one who has had a simple, smooth and “fairy tale” breastfeeding journey, like the ones you see on Instagram. I mean fairy tale in a relative sense: she had no health complications, abundant milk supply from beginning to end, baby had perfect latch from day one, started and ended the journey on her own terms and no one else’s, and when she tells me about it, she calls it a great, wonderful experience, without any “buts” or “ifs”. It really was that happy for her, effortless almost. I have never heard my friend *Alexa complain about her breastfeeding journey with her daughter *Stella; her little girl is now three years old, and in the midst of her threenager phase. By all accounts, Stella is thriving.
Alexa breastfed her daughter for 18 months. She remembers those days much more fondly than I ever will. She is painfully aware that her experience is not the norm; I am but one among her friends who had repeated struggles with breastfeeding. She is something of a unicorn, really. I want to know what it was like for her: how was it so carefree and uncomplicated? I wanted to talk to her about her journey because hers was the only positive experience I knew: I promised ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’ for the Boob Talk series, and as far as I knew, Alexa fell into the ‘good’ category. And on the surface, she qualifies. My friend never had to seek help from a lactation consultant, a doctor, or any other health professional to nurse her daughter.
“There is so much pressure on women to breastfeed, so I went in with zero expectations”, Alexa says. “I’m not overthinking this, I’m not going to allow it to get in my head”, which is a surprising statement if you know her. I love my friend dearly, but she is, by her own admission, someone who needs to feel in control of her life at all times. So for her to actively avoid information that she could potentially use against herself in the form of failed expectations, was an impressive feat of self-awareness. And self-preservation. It turned out to be a smart strategy.
I can feel Alexa smiling hard over the phone when I ask what was her favourite thing about nursing. “It was the ultimate connection with my baby, it’s our thing, nobody else can have this”. The new mom was virtually alone with her daughter most days. Her husband was working 16-hour days regularly and her in-laws, like so many tend to do, were staying away to avoid babysitting such a young little thing. Her family lives on the other coast of Canada, so truly, she was on her own. “Thank god I had no problems breastfeeding”, referring to how complicated it would have been to get help on her own, otherwise. “Breastfeeding was the one thing I was good at, I was proud of myself.”
But every rose has its thorns.
See, the thing about being a mother that nobody warns you about, that no one seems to realize until it’s too late, is that no matter how hard you try, there will be expectations on how you’re supposed to do things. And if these requirements are not coming from the latest issue of Vogue or from your mother-in-law, they will sneak up on you from an unexpected direction. Such as from within. Motherhood has a way of exposing our deepest insecurities and past unresolved traumas.
As our conversation flows, I notice that we can’t seem to get away from one word: pressure. It starts creeping in slowly, uninvited; before long, Alexa is throwing the word around like $1 bills at a strip club. It strikes me as odd, as if conjuring the word itself so freely is proof that she is not bound to it.
“I’ve never really thought about it until now. Pressure. It’s not intentional pressure. My mother-in-law would talk about how much she enjoyed breastfeeding, and my father-in-law would reminisce about what a good job she did [what does that even mean?! But I digress]. Even my Nonna [Grandmother] way back when I was a kid, would tell me about how, in her native village in Italy, she had such abundant [breast]milk production that she would nurse her friends’ babies because they didn’t have enough milk”.
“I think from the time I was a kid it was instilled in me that this [breastfeeding] was an important practice and that I should be doing it. My stepmom told me, as a compliment, ‘I am so happy you are having such a wonderful experience. I think of your Nonna and that she is looking down on you and giving you this gift'”.
Powerful words, full of love, but that easily grow into a heavy burden. Suddenly there is an expectation, a “standard” to live up to; especially when you tie other family baggage into it.
Alexa has had a complicated relationship with her mother since she was a child. A loving one, but difficult; the kind that forces you to grow up and own your shit a lot faster than the average person. Let’s say it’s been an “unfair relationship” (my words, not hers).
“I always vowed to myself I would be a better mother to my children than my mother was to me. Something she would always say to us [Alexa and her two siblings], almost in a resentful way, ‘I breastfed all of you kids for three weeks, I just couldn’t do it, it was too much for me'”. While I don’t know what Alexa’s mother’s breastfeeding journey was like, and she may very well have needed to stop after three weeks for her own sake, it’s hard to listen to my dear friend and how those words have affected her. Particularly when her mother’s and grandmother’s experiences could not have been more different. And because her relationship with her own mother was strained, Alexa was on a mission to compensate for that with Stella. “I need to be doing this [breastfeed] because I need to be better than her [my mother]. The longer I went on breastfeeding, the more I thought, hey look at me, I’m a great mom”. Better than her mom, at any rate. Which was when I realized that Alexa’s pressure throughout her breastfeeding journey had been very real, albeit atypical. She was her own source for expectations; breastfeeding became her Litmus test for motherhood.
Shit hit the proverbial fan for Alexa once she started thinking about weaning Stella. “I was so in love with the idea of having those moments [bonding with my daughter through nursing] that I think it really fucked me up later on, and there was so much guilt associated with stopping breastfeeding and figuring out what was best for Stella. I felt a lot of anxiety at that point”.
“The breastfeeding aspect of it was perfect, better than I had ever imagined, but there were other things that played into my mental health, and I deteriorated in part because I was breastfeeding constantly. But in my role as a new mother, I thought this was something I needed to do.” This duty also included letting her daughter sleep on her for three to four hours at a time because the little babe would nurse to comfort, and to lull herself to sleep. It’s adorable, until it’s not because you are about to soak your rocking chair in your own urine, or you forgot to bring yourself a snack before the snoozefest started. For Alexa these moments carried a lot of weight, as if they were somehow going to define her as a mother: “I’m never going to get this time back, I’ll never be able to sit with my daughter like this again so I’m just going to let her sleep on me for 3-4 hours. It is what it is right now”. The constant breastfeeding came at a high cost: almost a year after giving birth, Alexa was diagnosed with postpartum depression. And while there are always multiple contributing factors to mental illness in new mothers, my friend knows that much of it came from her own expectations about breastfeeding and her self-imposed duty to continue it as long as possible.
“Part of me felt the obligation to keep doing it, part of me also loved doing it because it was this connection that we had, and then another part of me started to resent her a bit because I was so overstimulated and so tired of being touched. I lost all interest in being touched, sexually and in any way, so all of it tied into my anxiety and postpartum depression. It made me lose myself in becoming a new mom. Looking back, towards the end [of breastfeeding], I think it was a huge contributing factor to my postpartum depression”.
This is the first time Alexa articulates all of this out loud. The symptoms of postpartum depression were easily identifiable, and she worked on fixing those the past couple of years: speaking her truth, making time for herself, taking prescription drugs, and recalibrating her perspective towards gratitude. These are all your run of the mill fixes and they are a crucial part of the healing process. But like me, Alexa always knew that her depression was a sort of dark phoenix of past, unresolved issues. It rises from the ashes of the person you were before becoming a mother and feeds off your insecurities in this new and gargantuan endeavour. It takes root deep within your fears of inadequacy, and your thoughts of never being good enough are a supersized steroid cocktail for this malevolent bird.
The expectations placed upon ourselves to breastfeed exclusively, and then to stop after X months, or not; to produce so many ounces every day, or to have the perfect nipples for breastfeeding. All of these ridiculous and overblown pressures that befall on mothers like Alexa are suffocating. And even when we think we outrun them, they find us and weigh us down with the force of a falling asteroid. Alexa fought so hard to protect herself from the insidious expectations on the outside, that she was blindsided completely when they took hold from within. “It’s not just breastfeeding”, she blurts out, and I am floored.
How could something that creates such intimacy between a mother and her baby, that requires a mother to bare herself, expose her raw and infinite love for her child, how could it ever be “just breastfeeding”? How could it not wreak complete and utter havoc on a newborn mother’s emotions and on her mental fortitude? It’s like releasing lost relics from lifetimes ago at the bottom of the ocean.
Your love for your child, this ocean, this infinite, moving, ever changing but ubiquitous, powerful mass of waves. And in its deepest trenches, the abyss of your fears, your demons: banished, buried away from the light of day. You want to keep it all away from yourself and your baby, lest it taints your beautiful waters. But shit happens. Earthquakes loosen things up every now and again: skeletons and shipwrecks find a way to the surface, sooner or later. And what is breastfeeding, if not a soul-shaking experience that violently uproots us through all of its incredible highs and lows?
As Alexa discovered, the beauty of breastfeeding can come with a hefty price tag. In order to truly give yourself to the intimacy and the closeness of that nursing bond with your baby, you need to expose your deepest and most vulnerable self. And hopefully make peace with it, in time. Alexa is still working through her demons, even now that breastfeeding is a closed chapter for her and Stella.
If we learn anything from my friend’s story, it’s that breastfeeding is much more than skin deep. File this under reason #54378 why you should never judge another woman’s nursing journey: things are never as they seem.
*Names have been changed for privacy reasons.
