Sanity Checked

by Laura Mullen

I returned from work to find my nanny emptying an unfinished bottle of breast milk down the drain. I felt I was witnessing a horrible crime, an act of desecration.  I left the room abruptly and locked myself into the nursery, trying to breathe through the waves of rage that poured through me. When my husband found me, I could not even look him in the eye, ashamed of my reaction yet unable to control it. I was close enough to sanity to recognize when I was being insane.

“She threw away four ounces of milk. And yesterday she threw away three.  She’s pouring my work, hours of my life down the drain. Like it’s nothing.” My voice raised hysterically at the end.

“I’m sure she didn’t know.”

Undoubtedly, he was right. But no one seemed to know. Somehow, no one understood what I was feeling. The isolation was every bit as painful and inarticulable as engorged breasts and raging hormones. Maybe more so.

“I’m so angry.” I kept saying it, as though the repetition made the word big enough to capture all that poured through me. My fury defied description, consuming me and scaring me, a wrath directed at our wonderful long-term nanny, whose wisdom and intuition I trusted and relied upon. “I can’t go down there. I can’t even look at her. You need to talk to her.”

Image credit: kevin laminto on Unsplash

He retreated, as directed, and I breathed to steady myself, searching for logic and rationality.  When he returned, I tried to explain, aware I sounded irrational. Emotional.  Unstable. “Every ounce she throws away is another day I will have to spend pumping. Another day I’ll have to breastfeed, and breastfeeding is making me crazy. It’s more than just the time, it’s the hormones and the lack of control, and I need to build up a stockpile so I can quit.”

He didn’t tell me to quit immediately, though I knew he wanted to. Any sane person would want me to quit; no one would want this for a person they loved.  But he knew from experience that such a suggestion would be futile, interpreted as a dismissal of my efforts and contributions. I was only open to gratitude and sympathy.

This was not my first time at the breastfeeding rodeo. My oldest was six. He read and wrote; he had opinions and insights. He told me about the kids in his class with surprising intuition. When I was pregnant with him, I eschewed caffeine and alcohol, sushi and retinol, ibuprofen and back sleeping. I breastfed him for a full year, and then I did the same for his sister, born two years later. I didn’t question my choice. My body produced milk easily, and I knew this was a blessing. I knew what I was supposed to do—the books, the doctors and even my peers were firm on this—and I did it reflexively, proud of myself. 

But this time around my body was less compliant. My supply never leveled out, causing painful engorgement and relentless leaks, disturbing rises and falls in my hormone levels, and a relentless need to plan for the next feeding, day in and day out, hour after endless hour. My milk supply consumed my thoughts, a dull obsession that bored even me. I calculated hours between feeds, measured ounces, and strapped myself, multiple times a day, to a medieval torture device in my office’s lactation room.  I was a woman possessed, my thoughts and personality controlled and transformed by the hum of obligation every hour of the day.  I washed and cleaned and stored and labeled bags of milk, organizing them and counting them like I was ticking off the days on a prison calendar.  It felt like drudgery and servitude in a way I didn’t remember with my older children. But I was older this time. I’d been through more; I had more to manage.

I recognized that breastfeeding was harming me, making me sad and angry and volatile, resentful of my baby and disappointed in myself. I knew the benefits of breastfeeding for babies dropped precipitously after the first few months and became nearly negligible after six months. I knew I was no longer doing this for my baby; he would be fine with formula. And yet, I couldn’t stop.

At the store, I averted my eyes from the formula, advertising its simplicity on the shelves across from the breast pump materials. But it was there, taunting me with its ease and accessibility. A perfectly good solution going to waste. 

I was a sane person and yet I could not make the sane choice.  Somehow, some part of me truly believed that a good mother was a martyr, strong enough to endure the sacrifice and physical labor that one to two years of breastfeeding requires.

And yet, in my moments of clarity, I knew this wasn’t true. I knew that the good mother equation was more complex than that.

As a first-time mother, breastfeeding seemed like proof of my value.  There were so few things to do for a baby—feed them, change them, bathe them, help them sleep.  Failure on any one of these components caused your grade to plummet. But I wasn’t a first-time mother; I no longer had such a limited view of motherhood. I knew from my older children that parenting involved a complex array of components, an expansive list of performance metrics.  As a mother to my older kids, I played and laughed, showed them joy and sorrow, explained boundaries and rules and relationships and resilience.  I talked to them, told them stories, taught them about the world. The question of whether I was a good mother to them was blessedly difficult to answer because the number of factors in the equation continued to multiply, year over year, allowing small failures and triumphs without dramatically skewing my overall grade.  What my older children ate was but one sliver of the gorgeous kaleidoscope of how I mothered, and, as such, I rarely lay awake at night dwelling on their diets. I certainly didn’t accept round-the-clock physical pain in the interest of their nutrition. And I felt like I was doing alright with them. 

Still, it was months before I convinced myself to stop breastfeeding Charlie. Night after night I sat in the gray glider in his bedroom, nursing him to sleep, listening to the laughter of my older children outside the door. I missed the pajama-clad joy in the other rooms of the house: books being read, stories told, snuggles demanded.  I wanted to be out there, and one night I realized it was within my power to get there: I needed to stop breastfeeding. 

If I couldn’t do this for myself now—when there was a completely perfect alternative—a magic potion—I would never be able to do the things that I needed to do that were actually hard.  I imagined myself years from now ignoring a painful diagnosis, eschewing inconvenient treatments, choosing the myth of good motherhood over the realities of my own body.  The voice in my head was suddenly so clear and so confident.  Where did that come from? I wondered. And yet, I felt in my bones that the words were right, that this was an intervention.

I bought formula in secret; I had it delivered rather than buy it at a store. I placed it in the back of a cabinet, hidden.  Mix with water and drink, it said. Could it be that easy? I waited a week before I slipped my son a bottle of formula, bracing for him to notice, to reject it, to have an allergic reaction.

Image credit: Wix

He didn’t flinch. He gulped it down. It was an absolute revelation.

I intended to keep feeding him at night, and simply stop pumping during the day. But the formula taunted me from the cabinet, tempting me. It dangled visions of freedom: my husband putting Charlie to bed instead of me, throwing away nursing bras and absorbent pads, sleeping on my stomach, regaining control over my mind. I relented.

On my last night of breastfeeding, I held my son’s small body, aware this was the last time I would ever breastfeed a child. When my friends finished breastfeeding they expressed wistfulness, the loss of some deep and precious closeness they had with their baby.  I felt none of those things. I felt relief; I felt guilt. I felt impatient for it to end.

It took a week or two for the veil to lift, but eventually, I returned to myself, as though I'd been released from a curse controlling me.  Suddenly I could see clearly. 

“Did you know how easy formula is?” I asked one mother, quietly, scandalously. I was shocked to hear the words leave my mouth, a confession of my failure.

“I do,” the mother said, amused, as if the joke was on me all along.

***

Laura Mullen

Laura Mullen is a lawyer and writer who has been published as a regular contributor to The New York Times and in various literary journals. She sits on the board of the literary arts organization, Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and three young children. She is currently seeking representation for her debut novel.