My initiation into breastfeeding

The most fastidious of us prepare for the marathon of our first labor and birth, but still fail to wrap our minds around the unpredictable onslaught of intense sensations that breastfeeding brings. I knew that only a genuine catastrophe would prevent me from birthing my baby at home with a midwife, and I didn’t leave the prospect of using formula as a feasible outcome in any possible world. Despite this, I had no idea that my initiation into breastfeeding would amount to psychospiritual martyrdom.

The distinctively American cultural complaint that nursing women (or “chest-feeders” as we are now called) must not discuss the importance of breastfeeding from fear of offending formula users need not apply here, but the benefits of breastfeeding are numerous. It is no controversy that breastmilk builds a baby’s immune system and microbiome. Infant saliva on the nipple may even trigger production of specific cells and antibodies needed from mother’s milk, which protects offspring from the many illnesses and allergies formula fed babies are more prone to. Breastfed baby poop is much less offensive. Formula-fed babies consume huge amounts of fluoride, industrial seed oils, probably soy, glyphosate, chemical preservatives and highly processed cow’s milk (a potential allergen). Yet some women truly cannot breastfeed, and because we live in a barbaric culture that often doesn’t value women or babies, most American mothers cannot nurse their babies on demand every two to four hours. Working women determined to give their babies breastmilk have to pump it out in work closets like industrialized dairy cows. It’s a rough situation here, but I digress.

My mother, for whatever reason, did not produce a drop of breastmilk for any of her litter of six children. As a result, my karmic lineage entailed producing a truly massive amount of milk for my baby, who latched easily and immediately. Everyone from doctor friends to so-called doulas congratulated me on this galactic achievement. “Better to have too much than too little,” they said. I made so much that my baby gained two pounds in her first two weeks of life and I was still able to supply a postpartum friend who couldn’t lactate with a quart of milk. The technical term for this condition is “oversupply,” and just days into my postpartum “journey” I began to feel its ill effects. My swollen chest looked like a 1981 Playboy centerfold caricature. Until I learned to manage the constant stream of milk literally pouring out of my body, I couldn’t even wear a shirt. (Sometimes I wonder if the 400 gallons of raw milk I drank during pregnancy had anything to do with this.)

Before I gave birth, nobody mentioned what a clogged duct was, and I thought mastitis was a rare and dangerous condition where an infected breast develops abscesses and requires surgery if not treated with industrial-strength antibiotics at the first sign of fever. Not so. My first two months of breastfeeding brought the searing pain of blocked mammary ducts a dozen times. I came down with feverish mastitis twice and refused antibiotics, since I assumed (correctly) that it was inflammatory and not infectious. I researched these sordid topics so thoroughly that I became an expert on international lactation guidelines. When I finally spoke to a board-certified lactation consultant on the phone, she told me I should become licensed myself because I already knew everything she could recommend. Despite the excruciating hell I was in, I never once thought to stop nursing.

Thankfully with time, strong echinacea tincture and two drops of poke root extract twice daily, my milk supply regulated and I now reap the oxytocic, painless rewards of nursing my little milk-drunk daughter wherever, whenever she pleases. It is a precious gift to feed her literally anywhere, from the bed where we sleep to the mountainside — no bizarre pumps, bottles or formula necessary. Despite my vigorous hazing into the maternal world of milk-giving, I now assert there is no sweeter experience than providing life for a beautiful baby you love indescribably. My daughter, as Herman Melville describes in Moby-Dick, “will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time, while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2024 World edition.