You Are a F*cking Awesome Mom by Leslie Anne Bruce

Author:Leslie Anne Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

It took some time getting used to, and it’s not all sunny days, but life with my children is better than anything I had before. You might not feel the same right now, but you will. I promise. And it’s going to be fucking awesome.

9

HOW YOU FEED YOUR BABY IS NOT UP FOR PUBLIC DEBATE. PERIOD.

My husband handed me the orange prescription pill bottle of antibiotics that had already halved my milk supply once before. It turns out that mastitis—a common breastfeeding complication that I had never heard of before having my daughter—is no fucking joke, and I was well into my second battle with it.

I knew I needed to take the medication, but I also knew that taking it could further reduce my already crippled milk supply. The infection developed rapidly. It was two weeks before Christmas, and I snuck out to the mall to do a bit of shopping. About twenty minutes into the errand, I could sense something was wrong. By the time I got home, I was already sporting a pretty impressive temperature. My husband immediately called my OB, who had a prescription sent to the pharmacy and directed him to get it as soon as possible.

“Have some water,” he said, handing me a glass and encouraging me to take the pills.

As I lay in bed shivering and convulsing from the now 103-degree fever, It’s a Wonderful Life taunted me from the television like an incredibly unfunny punch line. I briefly considered risking my own health and not taking the pills. I sobbed each time I tried, in vain, to feed my hungry, tiny baby. She was so pure and so small, how could I possibly fill her body with formula? How could I let her ingest something manufactured in some factory instead of from my own body?

I wasn’t ready to stop breastfeeding. I kept hearing the vicious echoes of other women, and all the horrible things that could potentially happen to my daughter as a result of what I considered my maternal incompetence. If some horrible illness were to befall her at the age of ninety, it would undoubtedly be because of my inability to breastfeed her for longer now. What if she develops allergies? What if her immunity suffered?

(I want pause for a second to say that formula is not toxic, and I’m a logical woman who should have recognized this at the time. I’ll talk much more about this shortly, but I was allowing myself to fall down an unnecessary rabbit hole that only made things worse.)

Breastfeeding had by no means come easy to me. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to breastfeed Tallulah. And saying that openly isn’t an easy thing to do, especially in a culture that makes it acceptable for friends, family, and even strangers to shame women who aren’t breastfeeding:

“Ooh, I hope that’s breast milk in that bottle…”

“I’d never formula feed my baby.”

“Why didn’t you keep trying?”

“It’s our job as women and mothers to breastfeed.

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