Sahara Tits

A long reflection on my least favourite topic, breastfeeding.

I think maybe my body thinks that my baby is dead.

I’ve always been a bit mealy mouthed about the kind of people who ascribe sentience to their bodies. Bodies don’t have brains, bodies don’t think things. But maybe I was wrong about that, because I am currently sad in a way that is unusual for me, and that sadness started when the breastfeeding stopped. I’ve come to the conclusion that on some deep, ancient, biological level there must be a feedback loop where your body stops making milk, six weeks after you gave birth, and concludes that the baby it was previously making milk for is dead.

My baby is, as far as I know, fine. But my subconscious doesn’t seem to know that. I feel like I’m watching someone thrashing and sweating through a nightmare and trying to wake them up but failing to do so, begging them to open their eyes and see that everything is actually absolutely fine.

I don’t remember feeling this way, last time. When I had Margot I tried desperately hard to breastfeed but was thwarted a) by a tongue tie and b) by a lactation consultant who refused to snip the tongue tie because ‘too many babies in Islington had had their tongue ties snipped’. I tried and tried for the first month of her life, falling into the loving arms of Aptamil after I ended up in hospital with pancreatitis.

At the end of the hospital stay in 2022 I felt relieved to have been handed a perfect excuse to stop trying, stop folding my left tit into an ‘envelope’ as the lactation consultant phrased it, and attempting to shove it into my daughter’s mouth. We were synthetic milk via plastic teat and while I didn’t feel good about it, I was absolved from most of my guilt around not breastfeeding by the fact that it wasn’t my fault.

This time around it was all so different. We did some formula from the outset because I assumed my supply would, once again, be pitiful. But it was better. Not brilliant, not enough to exclusively breastfeed, but enough that (combined with Eliza’s impressive latch) by the end of her first week of life, she was getting a significant portion of her nutrition from my body rather than a bottle. It was working! I was producing milk, she was drinking the milk, and it was all fairly amazing, until I was, once again, hospitalised.

My c-section stitches reopened and got infected, which is not an experience I would recommend. I was in and out of hospital, never admitted, while we shopped for the correct antibiotics and attempted to get the increasingly aggressive infection under control. Just as I thought we’d kicked it, I found myself shivering so hard it bordered on convulsing, while watching the new Knives Out at Baby Cinema (it’s a very good film, you should go and see it).

Back to hospital where everyone got very worried about sepsis. It took three different doctors to get a needle into my veins, which were apparently so shrivelled that when they did eventually get a needle in, no blood came out. I was admitted, pumped full of drugs and we all hoped for the best. That night I marvelled (or whatever the bad version of marvelled is) at how history was repeating itself and continually panicked that I’d lost my daughter (who was in fact at home with her father). My tits hurt, because I hadn’t fed my baby for hours. A very apologetic midwife told me that they only had two breast pumps on the ward, and assured me that the woman who had one of them was going to let me have it at midnight. I stayed up, watching the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and counting down the minutes until the breast pump would arrive. It didn’t arrive. The other woman had decided she wanted to keep it overnight and apparently the postnatal ward had a similar policy to Margot’s childminder: if you had it first you get to keep it.

I knew when I woke up the next morning what was going to happen, but I still hoped against hope. My husband arrived with the baby having done a heroic job, alone with both children that morning. I breastfed her. She wasn’t full. I gave her formula. And my milk supply just never recovered. I pumped, I fed, I tried, but nothing. And before long she stopped even letting me try, looking at me like I was an absolute pervert when I tried to put my nipple in her mouth. Breastfeeding, which has become so redemptive and healing, was over.

I am somewhat shocked by the impact that stopping has had on my previously robust mental health. I was upbeat about my c-section recovery, even if the stitches did reopen and get infected, resulting in four hospital visits in ten days. Until last week I was having a high old time, telling anyone who’d listen how two isn’t actually any harder than one, how I was finally getting the newborn experience I’d always dreamed of. This week, not so. That old, familiar feeling of claustrophobia and misery, of not caring what happens to me, of hating myself, of being so endlessly angry with everyone and everything, of drowning under the previously very tolerable weight of working and pulling my weight domestically.

It’s not even that I’m upset about it, academically. I know that I was never going to make it past a few months, that combi feeding is a tricky art. I’ve read Emily Oster and I know that the long term benefits of making it longer than six weeks would not have been that significant, especially when cross referenced with our other demographic factors. I know that my older daughter, who was barely breastfed, is happy and healthy and brilliant. Intellectually it’s all there. But emotionally, it’s not. Because I think my body thinks our baby is dead, and it’s very hard to give a shit about washing bottles or folding laundry or replying to emails or moisturising when you think that.

Things will, inevitably, be fine. The mushroom cloud of hormones will clear. I will be able to talk in full sentences and feel joy and not look at the pile of clothes on the stairs and want to pour lighter fluid over the whole thing before throwing a match at it. I’ve felt all of this before, if I had another baby I would feel it all again. My life is good. I will, before long, remember that it is good. And on the upside, I can now get Botox.

In other news:

• I’ve been listening to Lady Antonia Fraser’s memoir about her life with Pinter, mostly based on her diaries, and it’s really lovely. Strongly recommend.

• The new Knives Out film is really very good, even if Daniel Craig is barely in it.

• My Spotify wrapped was unutterably depressing - wall to wall Disney. Could the people at Spotify PLEASE make a setting where you can exempt all children’s music from your Wrapped? I did not listen to the Sophia The First intro 47 times this year by choice.

• I bought striped sheets for our bed, because it’s impossible to work out which sheet is a king and which is a double, which keeps resulting in one of us, or the cleaner, putting a double sheet on a king sized bed, which means it comes off both corners every night, likely to be my 13th reason at this point. Anyway I thought they would look shit but sort the size problem out, but actually they look quite lovely. Strong recommend.

I know that any suggestions about how to re-induce lactation, or general advice about breastfeeding would be well intentioned, but it’s not on the cards for me so please don’t suggest it.