The Pump

I believe the nurse tries to help me get the baby to latch, but maybe I am dreaming this, groggy and nauseous from the numbing needle, the dry heaving, the 27 hours of labor that came before the Cesarean.

In one or two second bursts, I feel the quick jolt of the baby’s mouth pulling on me, but nothing comes out. Not milk certainly, and also not colostrum, the thick, supposedly bursting-with-magical-nutrients substance that appears before the milk in those first days. Each time I try to feed her, the baby screams, a rhythmic shriek so painful and large from her small, red face that I begin immediately sobbing too. Her skinny arms and legs flail against my bare skin.

A lactation consultant examines my nipples with the touch of someone pinching an unwelcome bug from a sweater. “They’re short,” she says, “and your breasts are very large.” She looks meaningfully at me as she says the last part, as if this might be new information, rather than something I’ve wished away every day since I was twelve. She offers me a nipple shield made of flexible clear plastic, the size of a coaster. She sticks it to me, and together we move the baby toward it, try to maneuver her head against it at just the right angle. The shield slips and falls against the baby’s face, again and again while she cries. The woman tells me I have to hold the shield, and the baby’s head, and the baby’s body. When I ask how a person with only two hands might do this, she says, “You’ll get there.”

The shield slips and slips.

I am still crying — I am always crying — six or twelve or twenty-four hours later when the nurse says, “She’s hungry. Do you want me to get some formula?” She nods yes even as she asks the question. My husband and I stare at one another. I say, “I read that it will confuse her? That we shouldn’t?” and the nurse says, “That’s not true.” The baby screams and screams, so we look at each other and say, “I guess, then, yeah?” even though I don’t believe the nurse.

I am given an industrial strength pump, secure on a stand likely made for an oxygen tank, to help the milk to come in. With both hands I hold the plastic funnels to my breasts for 30 minutes at a time, willing myself to ignore itches and thirst and the desire to touch my baby’s black hair and oddly shaped left ear. My husband holds her on the bench seat next to my hospital bed. I have no pumping bra to told the funnels in place because I’m supposed to be breastfeeding. On a chart that sticks to the baby’s plastic sleeping bin, I mark my milk production in milliliters.

It’s day three, at least by the calendar. We sleep in 40-minute bursts that we can neither anticipate nor, afterwards, recall. When a different lactation consultant comes in, long red hair swinging, I am crying that I have perhaps ruined my chances at breastfeeding because the baby drank formula. She and my husband comfort me and I cry harder. My top comes off. I am aware of the tape and gauze ripping at the healing incision on my belly, drooping and dirty. I have not yet been allowed to take a shower. She leaves and returns with a syringe and the thinnest clear tube I’ve ever seen. My husband and I form a bumbling, amateur team as we learn this complex, intricate system for trying to get the baby to learn to breastfeed. My husband fills the syringe with formula and attaches the tube to the end of it. We lace it under the nipple shield and towards one of the four small holes meant to mimic milk duct orifices. The tube scratches at my nipple. We hold the baby’s mouth to the shield and sometimes, between screams, she drinks. Between preparation, the act itself, the struggle to get the baby to cooperate, and cleanup, each feeding leaves us with approximately 40 minutes between the time we end and the time we must begin again.

I pump. And pump.

Even as we live it, the first night at home is a blur. Sometime around 11 p.m., we eat mini muffins over the sink. Before and after, I sob in our bed for some reasons I can articulate and for others that I can’t. My C-section incision pulses with pain. When I reach for the syringe and the tube, my husband says this is ridiculous, that we should just feed her formula out of a bottle, and he lists off all of the utterly rational reasons why this is the case. The most resounding: Because she will be fine. But I have read too many websites to believe it.

I learn to use the pump my insurance sent me, still in the box because surely, I had thought, rubbing my plump pregnant belly, I wouldn’t need it until months later, when I returned to work. We continue to measure in millimeters and worry that the baby is not getting what she needs. I berate myself for not eating more salmon and greens, although I do eat oatmeal cookies—a lot of them—which someone has told me will help me produce more milk.

We abandon the tube and syringe and begin feeding her my milk in a bottle.

At the first pediatrician appointment, I begin weeping with joy when I discover I will also get to see another lactation consultant. Penny is no-nonsense. She is rough with the baby and with my breasts, but I think, Maybe this is what we need. She places the baby in only a diaper on top of a foam wedge with a ripped cover on my lap. I’m afraid the rough edges will scratch the baby’s brand-new skin, but I can tell from Penny’s pace — no time for hellos or for asking names; we are simply Mom and Baby Girl — that this will be considered a ridiculous concern. Baby Girl latches for a second here and there and screams for the other 44 minutes and 50 seconds. I cry too. I ask if this is normal, and Penny doesn’t look up from the screen when she says, “Of course.” Penny believes in progress, not perfection, and convinces me to not only leave with a positive attitude, but also to try a number of acrobatic positions at home for better pressure, better angles.

The baby screams as if she is in excruciating pain at night when she wakes, hungry, and it takes us three or four minutes to go heat up her bottle of refrigerated, pumped milk.

I attach myself to the pump every two hours, 24-hours a day for approximately a half hour at each session.

So many people come over in those first few weeks that I am constantly moving the pump and all its parts from living room to bedroom to nursery to, once, bathroom, depending on who is here and what I feel comfortable with and what I imagine they might be comfortable with. If I were breastfeeding, I’d be likelier to feed her in front of people, but a bare breast with a baby attached to it feels utterly different than a bare breast with a clear plastic funnel attached to it. Also, I don’t like the way my nipple expands to five times its, filling the thick tube of the funnel.

I sit alone in the middle of the night in the expensive glider my in-laws purchased us to rock the baby to sleep while my husband feeds her in our room down the hall. I scroll on my phone through thousands of posts from mothers who are also trying to breastfeed. They talk about the football hold and the cross-cradle hold. About inverted nipples. Birth weights and nipple moisturizer. About judgment from sisters and mothers-in-law and friends. I scroll and scroll, always to the whir, whir, whir of the pump pulling at me. Then, I shuffle downstairs to the dark kitchen to scrub the plastic shields and tiny valves with specially designed soap and scalding water.

Milliliters turn into ounces and I feel a certain pride. I also feel something like satisfaction as I watch five or six tiny but strong streams of milk shoot out of my nipple when I press it hard at a certain angle. Still, we try to get the baby to latch, and still she screams.

The baby must be held at all times. She will not sleep in a bassinet or even simply relax there, awake, which means that when I am home alone with her, she shrieks every second I am pumping because she is not in my arms. When my husband leaves for work in the morning, I cry anticipating the four or five times that day I will have to pump to the sound of my very sad baby. When people visit, even people I don’t know particularly well or people who have no idea what to do with a baby, I beg them to hold her while I leave them to go upstairs and pump. Alone in the nursery, I fumble with the funnels and tubes. Inevitably have to run back downstairs, often holding a towel over my breasts for time’s sake, for a tiny forgotten part resting by the sink. I yell, “I’ll be so quick — I’m so sorry!” to whoever is holding her because anything is better than listening to her cry next to me. My mother-in-law eventually purchases us an electric, rotating mobile featuring a fox, a bird, and a hedgehog. “It doesn’t fit the theme of the nursery,” I say to my husband as he attaches it to the crib. But the baby loves it, and from then on she is silent for thirty minutes at a time while I pump, her tiny dark eyes tracking the animals as they move in a jerky circle.

The third time I see Penny she says, “I’m not saying this is the most stubborn baby I’ve ever seen, but she’s close.”

I use a second pump — a hand me down from a friend — one night when we stay with my in-laws. I don’t want to wake the baby or my husband, and so I pump in the complete darkness there, next to them. It’s uncomfortable, painful even, but it is 3 a.m. and so what if this pump is a little more painful than the other one? I keep pumping, wincing. The next morning, I wake to blood blisters covering both nipples. In the days that follow, all my milk is tainted pink from the blood the pump draws out with the milk. I cry as I pour it down the sink.

My sister-in-law makes me an appointment with a lactation consultant who will come to our home, because, she says optimistically, the baby is healthy and it should work. It is with this woman in my home, in my bedroom, eventually, that I realize something about me has fundamentally changed. I am naked from the waist up, laying across my bed with the baby being turned and twisted for better access. There are used tissues by the lactation consultant’s feet from my crying the night before and I truly do not care. We chat about traffic. I am neither content nor devastated, and not exactly resigned.

Eventually, I begin making so much milk that it pours out of me when I am taking a shower or eating dinner or walking around the block. The websites call breastmilk liquid gold, and I think about all the other things I’ve heard described that way: Petroleum. A protein-based muscle-building powder. Tequila. A drug referred to also as poppers that apparently enhances the feeling of orgasm. Argon oil for your hair. Turmeric tea.

The baby is always turning her face towards my breast, but once she’s there, she gets angry. I fuss with the pumping bra — its holes, it’s slits — each time I pull it on or off, and I smell the dried milk that has seeped into it. I only have two because the good ones are $36 each, and I couldn’t bring myself to purchase more than that, so they always smell like this. The moment the baby is in my arms, my milk lets down, and each time we try, the milk drips all over her. It covers her chin and cheeks and sometimes drips right into her screaming baby bird mouth and I say to her, quietly usually but not always, “Can’t you taste that? Drink, drink, please. Please.”

Eventually, I say I’m done trying. I tell everyone I am embracing what the internet calls “exclusive pumping,” but it is something more like defeat, really. Occasionally, when the baby is awake but calm in my arms, I still slide off my shirt and try. Once or twice she pulls and I get excited, and then she stops, always. I shift from reading technical breastfeeding advice from mothers with screen names like MomofBergan222 about the angle of the baby’s head and the placement of my thumb to reading forums about exclusive pumping. Every mother feels she has to justify her decision. I read about clogged ducts and mastitis and premature babies and a lack of sleep and nipple blisters and how very, very, very hard she tried, she swears, she wanted to breastfeed more than anything.

I learn that the baby’s eyesight has developed so that she can see best at 12 inches from an object — not coincidentally, the internet tells me, about the distance from her little face while she breastfeeds to yours. I hold the bottle right next to my nipple.

Every outing is planned around pumping, and when one can’t be, like a long-distance wedding, I purchase a car converter from the internet. We load up the pump, all of its parts, empty storage bottles, and a cooler filled with ice. My husband swerves, slows, so that I can take my top off, attach the funnels, and cover up before we are beside the next 18-wheeler.

I make a plan to stop at six months. When I ask my husband, he says, for the thousandth time, “Of course it’s fine.” But I ask again and again, “Do you think this is okay? Really?” I drop down to ten sessions a day. Then eight.

Despite the pricey breast pads I keep tucked in my bra, most nights I wake to a soaked tank top, dark wet circles on the sheets.

Over 24 hours the milk separates in the refrigerator into something more like cloudy water with a thick rim of white-yellow cream. Each time I pour it into a clean glass bottle to heat, I scoop the fat with my finger like I would cake batter, making sure every last bit makes it in. When my refrigerator is full, I begin stacking bags of milk in shoeboxes in the freezer. The baby begins to grow fat. I point out her rolls to everybody who comes over.

I begin to wonder if this — all of this — feels so hard because of the pumping. I drop down to six and then five pumping sessions each day.

People ask if I am breastfeeding. Friends. Neighbors. Acquaintances that I never imagined discussing my breasts with. When I explain that it didn’t work, that I am pumping, they make faces and say, “But it should work?”

A friend and her husband come over, and she breastfeeds her older baby just out of our sight line, perched halfway up the stairs, the long baby boy stretched out across her. I am so envious. I imagine that her bond is stronger and her baby. That he loves her more than mine loves me.

I cut out another session and then another, so that I’m pumping only during the hours that the sun is up. A few weeks later, I cut another, then another. Eventually, I’m pumping twice a day — morning and night only. Then only once.

Finally, I unplug the pump, wrap the cords and tubes around it like a ribbon, and put it in a tote bag, along with all of the plastic funnels and bottles and tiny plastic valves. I count the frozen bags of milk: 45. A month and a half’s worth, if she has one bottle of it a day, and the rest formula. No one calls formula liquid gold, but they should.

Eventually, the baby stops screaming in the middle of the night. She still wakes us with something that sounds like a dinosaur screech, but when we lean over to pick her up, she grins, pleased to have gotten our attention, letting us know it’s time to fill her tiny protruding belly again. I rock her by a dim nightlight that shoots beams in the shape of stars against her walls. She sucks hard on the bottle and stares into my eyes. She runs her tiny hands along my wrist and forearm softly, rhythmically.

Months later, I visit the friend of a friend, who I don’t know well, but who, I learn through a mutual polite-turned-confessional-turned-frantic series of late-night texts, also exclusively pumps. We talk about our hatred of the pump, how it takes time — hours and hours each day — away from the babies, even though we are, of course, doing it for them. We rehash their little red faces and our weeping and the soreness we feel from the constant mechanical pull of the pump. How we hear its angry chant even after we turn it off. She’s leaning over his changing table when she says, “I know this is crazy, but deep down, I’m afraid maybe I still didn’t try hard enough, and maybe it will matter,” and on the way home I cry because, despite all evidence and reason, I feel it too.

ξ

Jessica McCaughey’s work has appeared in Gulf Coast, The Colorado Review, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Best American Travel Essays, and The Rumpus, among other publications. She teaches academic and professional writing at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and earned her MA in English, MFA in Creative Writing, and PhD in Writing and Rhetoric from George Mason University in Virginia.