What We Didn't Expect by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

What We Made

BY SARAH DIGREGORIO

On the third day after my daughter was born—what they called “day three of life” in that strange and particular neonatal intensive care unit jargon—a nurse showed me the breast-milk pumping room. I shuffled after her with difficulty, wearing a cotton hospital gown and wheeling a butter-yellow industrial-grade pump behind me. Next to the closet, where everyone kept their coats, there was a door with a keypad. The password was, I believe, 1234. Inside the small, windowless room were two chairs facing each other, and a sink with a soap dispenser and paper towels in one corner. On the wall, a bulletin board explained preemie care basics, like how to use cupped hands to cradle your baby’s body, firm and still like the muscular walls of a uterus. The pumping room was the size of a very large walk-in closet or a very small kitchen. If you sat in one chair, you could lean forward and touch the other.

Parents needed a designated place to pump milk because our NICU was an open ward: several rooms lined with incubators, each just a few feet away from the next, and there was no other private space—not that this space could exactly be called private. I hated it the minute I saw it.

The nurse made sure I understood what to do and then said she’d give me some time. It was obvious that all of the doctors and nurses really wanted me to pump, though they pushed it gently and kindly. They said it was better, much better, for premature babies to get breast milk than formula, that my milk was the most important thing I could give her. I gathered that my daughter, Mira, would be less likely to die if I could manage to use this machine to wring some milk out of myself. (In the years since, donor breast milk has become more available for the most vulnerable premature babies, if their parents can’t or don’t want to pump.) I felt I had failed at every other bodily task, having produced a baby smaller than a rotisserie chicken, whose future was unknowable. So I was an easy sell, desperate to give Mira something of myself.

I felt utterly alone in this, but in fact, my feelings were not at all unique. One study*1 on what pumping breast milk means to mothers in a NICU found that most women had close-to-the-bone, strongly conflicting emotions about pumping: that it held both power and powerlessness, the feeling of being a mother and the feeling of not being a mother. When you have a baby who cannot eat by mouth, of course, pumping is a choice you can make, but it is also not really a choice. Feeding by tube, whether with milk or formula, is not how anyone envisions nourishing their baby. In that study, Linda Sweet, an Australian professor of midwifery, wrote of mothers’ feelings on the matter: “The breast milk offered a means of connection to the baby, but only after disconnection of the mother and baby and the mother and her milk.

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