I don’t have time to form like a full, coherent diatribe on breastfeeding, and also is there even enough time in the world? No. Time is even more precious now, my son just grew a millimeter or laughed at his first joke and I missed it. So instead of a carefully woven paragraph with a beginning, middle or end: a list of my feelings on breastfeeding, thus far:
- There is this image in my head of the baby coming out of its mother and crawling up to its mother’s breast and starting to feed, and flowers burst from the mother’s hair and the baby’s lips. Where did I get this image? Paintings? The bible? Pictures like the picture above?
- Wherever it came from, IT IS A LIE. Breastfeeding, or at least, for me, and it turns out, for many first time mothers (especially those who didn’t get to immediately start feeding their kids because of C-sections, NICU stays, etc.) is awkward, miserable and hard.
- It puts you instantly IN CONFLICT with the baby you’ve longed to meet for so long, which feels just wrong.
- Pumping (when a woman hooks herself up to a machine to harvest / stimulate her milk) makes me feel like a Robot Whore. The pump groans and shakes and feels like it’s sucking from me and laying bare every negative emotion and every moment of supreme vulnerability I’ve ever felt. It’s like trying on bras in middle school times a million, for forever, with everyone I’ve ever met just watching through a clear door.
- Trying to breastfeed weirdly reminds me of quitting smoking. Making promises of progress to myself every day, then giving up.
- Morrison says that technically, I fed our son for NINE MONTHS already, so it would be fine to throw in the towel.
- I love Morrison.
- Morrison loves Robot Whores.
- I AM NOT GOING TO THROW IN THE TOWEL, JUST YET.
- The woman in the picture above can go jump off a bridge with her beautiful children dangling from her breasts like ticks.
- If she doesn’t prefer to jump, I could push her off the bridge.
- I casually talk about murdering this woman easily because clearly SHE IS NOT A REAL WOMAN.