Despite my protests, I became outnumbered by J and my parents. According to J, he does not have the energy to take care of me, the baby, and a dog. According to my parents, a dog will only bring added stress to our new life as parents.

As a result, Comang has been staying at my parents’ since Claire’s birth and will stay there for at least another few weeks. My sister is back in NY for the year, so Comang has a friend — my sister’s dog Dante — to keep him company. I know that he is probably happier there than in our cramped apartment with a new baby and J’s parents visiting daily (they do not like dogs much). But the fact remains that he was our first baby, and I really really miss him.

Seeing this photo in my Google Reader just now set me off:

image source

I proceeded to go through pictures of Comang in my computer and had a good, long cry.

The other day I asked J if he missed Comang and he replied, “Eh…” I know that the indifferent response was more likely due to stress and fatigue than his actual affection for the dog, but I wanted to punch my husband all the same for seeming so heartless.

I really miss ya, buddy. Please don’t forget about me and I can’t wait to see you again.

Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 1)
Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 2)

Before I begin, I wanted to thank everyone for the supportive and helpful comments and advice. It really is encouraging to know that I’m not the only one who feels this way.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that not one person has stepped in to say, “It’s okay to formula-feed. Not breastfeeding your child does not make you a bad mother.”

Isn’t it funny the tremendous pressure and guilt-trips put on new mothers these days to breastfeed? There is a whole generation of people who were formula-fed, and they seem to be doing fine. I personally know many babies, children, and adults who were formula-fed and they are all perfectly healthy.

I know that breast is best. But at the same time, I don’t think mothers should be made to feel guilty if they choose to give their babies formula instead, nor do I believe a mother should feel forced to breastfeed if it is making her completely miserable.

</rant>

Everyone, including myself, expected Claire to be a large baby. But even at 39 weeks and 4 days, she was a scrawny little thing with wrinkly skin that had not yet developed enough fat underneath.

She also tested on the borderline for jaundice. A common ailment, for sure, but one that made this new mother ultra-paranoid about providing enough nutrition for her baby.

Coming home from the hospital. Notice how huge the pacifier looks
in relation to her head. She was too small even for the carseat!

My milk did not come in until the fifth day of Claire’s life (for most women, it comes in on the third or fourth day). Until then, my body continued to produce colostrum, but it was not enough to satisfy my hungry baby. She continued to cry and wail at my breast. We really believed that we were doing the right thing by supplementing with formula, and our pediatrician agreed, considering her dropping weight and worsening jaundice.

We ended up supplementing with formula for the first ten days of Claire’s life. In the meantime, I pumped like a maniac, drank about a gallon of water a day, had J run out to buy Mother’s Milk Tea, and ate tons of foods that — according to Eastern medicine — are believed to help a new mother recover and increase her milk supply.

I continued to try to breastfeed, but Claire would have none of it. She was a lazy, inefficient suckler. And by this point I was too tired to keep trying. We decided to focus on bringing up my milk supply first, and feed her pumped milk from a bottle in the meantime.

Because I was pumping every 2-3 hours for at least 30 minutes each session, I was exhausted whenever I was not pumping. My nipples began to protest at their new roles by cracking, bleeding, and developing painful blisters that reappeared with each pumping session. I rubbed breastmilk on them (which is supposed to have healing properties), slathered on Lansinoh Lanolin, tried saline soaks and warm compresses without much relief. More than once I had to throw away pumped breastmilk from the blood that had seeped into them…and all mothers should know how difficult it is to throw away pumped milk, especially during these early stages, as it seems as precious as liquid gold.

I cried after each pumping session because my breasts and nipples hurt so much. I didn’t want anything touching them and remained topless when I was not pumping, which meant that I was confined to my bedroom as my in-laws came over every day to help with the new baby. I couldn’t even hold my own baby because my nipples hurt so much.

I felt like a milking machine. The fact that I hardly saw my baby during the day did not help matters much. I was glad that my in-laws came over to help every day, but I also resented them for taking away my baby and my chance to bond with her.

During the nights, I would try my best to take care of my baby, but still continued to feel disconnected to her. I have never been the type to coo over babies, but I figured that this would change when I have my own kids. I was wrong. I felt silly talking or singing to her. If she didn’t need to be changed, fed, or consoled, I left her in her bassinet. Instead I roamed the house like a topless zombie, stressing over the messy state of my home and even attempted to clean (but usually ended up getting caught and reprimanded by J for not resting).

It would be the tenth day of Claire’s life when my own mother dropped by for a visit that I saw the light…

To be continued…

Read the rest of the series:

Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 4)
Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 5)

I’ve found that most of my readers, or at least the ones who comment regularly, tend to be women. As such, I was THRILLED to receive an email from Nick who expressed interest in submitting a couple of guest posts. Even better, Nick is an extremely talented writer (just check out his bio — wow!) whose blog I find thoroughly entertaining and subscribed to almost immediately.

Here, Nick writes about his new role in life as a new dad and the ever-changing relationship he experiences with his 4-month-old daughter. (And I would be lying if I were to say that it didn’t bring a tear to my eyes.) Enjoy!

There is a fine line to walk with this little girl of mine.

Abby is now four months old, a little bundle of teething-induced spittle, squawking catcalls, and silly smiles. She has reached a degree of intellectual development that allows her to grab a hold of anything within her tiny reach, and she has just enough control to shove whatever it is she has straight into her mouth. It is a far cry from her early days of being limp as noodle and asleep half the day.

But as fun as she is now, I miss my newborn.

Yes she was helplessly tiny, swollen, bleary-eyed and none too willing to vocalize beyond a very shrill wail. She was also my baby. My baby. We went through a year-and-a-half of fertility treatment and buckets of tears to get her into the world, and I didn’t want to let a second of her life go by without me treasuring it (and documenting it in still photos and video). I wanted her to stay just the way she was.

Of course, at the time I was unaware of the joy of “milestones.” Abby’s first smile — gas-induced as it was —tore my heart to shreds and left me a shattered, joyous mess. Her first cooing was a symphony. The last night we swaddled her was the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Suddenly I was looking forward to every new thing; my wife and I pored through my old psychology textbooks to figure out what Erikson, Piaget, and Vygotsky predicted Abby would do next. We watched for her changing attention span, periods of disengagement, her first consonants, and signs that things were staying in her memory for longer than a nanosecond. My little girl became something of a science experiment to me; she was a beaker full of love dressed in a sleeper. (She even releases stinky gasses like the experiments I did in high school!)

But this excitement holds its own pitfalls. I now find myself longing after a toddler, a talking child, my girl playing guitar, her first doodles, first stories, first arm-wrenching figure-four lock, first loves. I am catapulted into the future where I am telling stories at her wedding, where I show her pictures of the early days where I slow-danced her to sleep because nothing else would work.

Then I remember a piece of advice that someone gave me before my own wedding:

“Be present. It’s going to go by so fast that if you don’t try hard to be right there in the moment, it will go right past you.”

And with that I am pulled back to the present, where a four-month-old little girl is sitting in her Bumbo, a goofy grin plastered across her face and a silvery trail of drool running down to her Winnie the Pooh jumper. I wipe her face, pick her up, hold her against me. I remind myself that I can’t keep her from growing up, and I can’t jump forward in time (not until I fix up my DeLorean, anyway), so I should learn to celebrate every day for what it is.

And it is this:

About the Author:

Nicholas Stirling is descended from alcoholic Finns and pig-rearing Scotsmen. He has tried his hand at more than a few things: custom woodworking, bookstore management, and teaching (his current occupation) to name a few of them. He is happily married to his high school sweetheart, and lives in Ontario (that’s a province in Canada). He is currently promoting his first real stab at a readable novel, entitled Emily Rose, and his short story “Pretty Flowers” will be published in an upcoming edition of Morpheus Tales. He has also been a featured contributor on Cracked.com, with his “Elves” topic page picking up over 210,000 reads. He blogs regularly on Exercising Monsters.

Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 1)

Breastfeeding.

I always knew I wanted to breastfeed. “Babies are born to be breastfed,” La Leche League tells us. Breastmilk is chock-full of nutrients and antibodies that can’t be replicated with formula. It is linked to less health problems for the baby later in life. It helps the mother bond with the baby, ward off post-partum depression, and even assists in post-partum weight loss. It is free. It is natural. Breast is best.

Breastfeeding came naturally and relatively easy to my mother, and since so many of my pregnancy symptoms had mimicked hers — in addition to the fact that I have her body type — I had figured that it would come easily to me too.

I was wrong.

The type of blissful breastfeeding experience I had hoped to achieve with my daughter (image source)

As soon as Claire returned from the nursery after receiving her first bath, the nurse who brought her in asked me if I wanted to try breastfeeding. “Of course,” I happily obliged.

There is no feeling quite like having your new baby suckle at your breast for the first time. I felt warmth and a flashing sense of euphoria for the first time since giving birth. I was doing it! I was breastfeeding!

The first “milk” that the baby receives from the breast is not actually milk. It is colostrum — a thick sticky substance that contains important antibodies and nutrients that will aid the baby to thrive in the fragile first days of life. I had read about colostrum prior to giving birth, but what I didn’t know was how little there would be of it.

Lesson #1: Colostrum is enough for the first few days.

We kept Claire in my room for the first night, and I took her to my breasts whenever she woke up and cried. Each time, she would find my nipple without a problem and latch on, sucking vigorously for a couple of minutes…then stop and turn away and cry.

I would try to guide her to my breast again, sometimes even forcing my nipple into her mouth. And the same thing would happen over and over again: she would suck for a minute or two, then stop and cry.

I tried massaging my breasts and squeezing my nipples to see if anything was actually coming out — and it was! Except…was that really colostrum? The liquid seemed thin and watery…a far cry from the thick, yellowish substance I had read about.

I reminded myself that every woman is different, and so every breastmilk/colostrum must be different too.

Later, I was to learn that colostrum, no matter how little you produce, is enough for most babies. Newborns’ stomachs are so tiny and the nutrients that colostrum provide so vast that even if your baby loses weight in the first few days after birth, he/she will not be in grave danger.

In other words, I should have trusted that my body will provide what the baby needs.

Lesson #2: Be weary of the “second day freak-out.”

I kept trying to breastfeed Claire for the remainder of that first restless night and through the next day.

But by the end of the second day, I became exhausted at my feeble attempts to provide nutrition for my newborn baby and it was clear that Claire was not happy. In-between each “feeding” (if you can even call it that), she would scream her lungs out while waving her head side to side, her mouth agape in search of satisfactory sustenance.

“She is hungry,” my mother observed.

DON’T YOU THINK I KNOW THAT?!! I wanted to shout at her.

It would be a full week later before I was to read on a parenting board of the “second day freak-out,” where a newborn suddenly realizes, “S#&T! I’m really stuck out here! I’m not going back to the warm and comfy womb!” and proceeds to cry, cry, and cry some more. Refusing to nurse properly and being especially restless and unhappy are all common symptoms of the second day freak-out.

As a mother, I needed to be patient (as hard as it may be) and just suck it up, continuing to offer my breast despite the baby’s refusal and/or protests. But I was not aware of the second day freak-out at the time, and I gave in…

Lesson #3: We should not have supplemented with formula.

After enduring what seemed like countless hours of crying (and having my heart broken over and over again…I was actually feeling physical pain over my heart), I buzzed for a nurse and asked what I should do. “Should I…give her some formula?” I asked.

“If she continues to look hungry and unsatisfied, you can go ahead,” the nurse replied.

We snapped open a single-use bottle of Similac Advance and offered it to Claire. She looked bewildered at first, but began sucking away happily. She finished more than an ounce in that one sitting! And after she was done, she burped and looked happy for the first time in over a day.

She fell asleep soon after, and stayed asleep for almost three hours — the longest stretch that she had slept since being born.

When Claire woke up from her nap, I tried breastfeeding her again. I was dismayed to find the same results: sucking for a minute or two, then stop and cry. Her latch was fine and I could not find any other source of a problem aside from the fact that I seemed to have an overly hungry baby who seemed to be a lazy and impatient suckler.

On that second night, both J and I were so tired and exhausted that we decided to keep the baby in the nursery overnight. We knew that she would be fed formula but we didn’t care. I was still gushing blood, my nipples were starting to become sore and painful, I was overly swollen from 12 hours of IV and 5 hours of pitocin, and I could barely stand up by myself, let alone take care of a newborn through another full sleepless night.

The damage had been done.

To be continued…

Read the rest of the series:

Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 3)
Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 4)
Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 5)

I pondered whether I should write this series of posts, and I hesitate still as I type these words. But I figure that I can not be the only mother who has these tumultuous feelings (right?) and that if anything, writing this will be therapeutic and beneficial to this new, confused mother.

As soon as Claire was born and placed on my chest, I wanted to cry. Not because I was so happy to finally meet my daughter. Nor because I was overwhelmed with new mommy feelings of love and attachment. But because I felt like she wasn’t mine.

I had lost a baby prior to having Claire. I had wished and prayed so hard to get pregnant again, and was overjoyed beyond words to see the two lines on the pregnancy test. I had marked each passing day of my pregnancy with anticipation and excitement.

I am so ready to become a mother, I told myself repeatedly. Heck, I already am a mother.

But as I looked down on the little creature that had just made her entrance to this world, I couldn’t help but wonder why I didn’t — why I couldn’t — feel the irrepressible and immediate love described by other mothers. “I loved my baby as soon as I saw him/her,” they had all told me. Why didn’t I feel this way? WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME???

Later on, I would look on as J held his daughter for the first time, wiping tears from his eyes. “I can’t believe we made her,” he repeated over and over again. “She’s absolutely perfect.”

I wanted to cry once more. I was so touched at my husband’s reaction to Claire’s birth. (Who wouldn’t?) But at the same time, there was no denying that once again, I was asking myself, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? because I felt so disconnected from my own daughter.

Claire with her daddy moments after birth

To be continued…

Read the rest of the series:

Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 2)
Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 3)
Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 4)
Motherhood: The Most Difficult Journey Yet (Part 5)