Lactation Cessation

Anyone who has spent even a modest amount of time with me since Julian and Eloise were born knows that producing milk for them utterly consumed my thoughts and actions for the first couple months of their lives, and it largely consumed them for several subsequent months. I agonized over the contents of every bottle, over the maintenance of my supply, over whether the whole thing was worth it, given the sudden surge of “press” suggesting that maybe breast milk and breastfeeding aren’t really all they’re cracked up to be.

And now it’s over. I pumped for the last time on Saturday night, before we left for our vacation in New Hampshire. The babies got their last bottles of breast milk the following day. I imagined that feeding them those bottles would be emotional, and I hoped somewhat sweet. Unfortunately, they only drank half the bottles in their car seats before we hit the road, and they finished them at a pathetic little gas station just north of Concord where we’d pulled over to deal with a truly putrid diaper and inconsolable screaming. Not exactly the most meaningful end to one of the most difficult and amazing things I’ve ever done in my life, but I think that distraction and humor served me better at that point than reverent reflection, which almost certainly would have ended in tears.

A snapshot of the last 10 months:

• 60.23 total gallons pumped (this does not, of course, include whatever milk Eloise drank while nursing)

• 1,384 pumping sessions, totaling an estimated 346 hours (14.5 days) spent pumping

• Just 7 ounces lost in two spills (not counting regular quarter-ounce drips here and there)

• More Than You Wanted to Know Alert: 32 percent more produced by the right than the left side

• Roughly 2,500 fenugreek tablets swallowed

• Approximately 450 cups of Mother’s Milk tea drunk

• Nearly $1,000 spent on the above plus pump rental, lactation consultant, etc. (not including supplemental formula)

And the result of all that? Well, Eloise nursed nearly exclusively from birth to 5.5 months, when I returned to work. Julian, who couldn’t nurse because of his poor squished jaw, received bottles exclusively, and it was for him that I hooked myself up to the hated pump 5, 6, 7, even 8 times per day, waking up in the middle of the night to pump even long after both babies were sleeping through the night. For the first two months, both babies essentially got nothing but milk. From 2 to 8 months, they got between 2/3 and 3/4 milk (and the rest formula). Once Eloise self-weaned (a very difficult and sad turn of events for me) and there was no longer a live nursing baby to persuade my body to keep up milk production, my supply dwindled, but I was able to give them about 50 percent milk until 9 months, and then I ramped down completely over the three weeks after that.

I know that’s a lot of milk, and I know that, given the circumstances (two babies to feed, only one who could nurse), I did the very best that I could. I can’t help dwell a little on how much I would have liked the whole thing to go very differently, though. I liked nursing. I would have liked to do it for several months longer. I would have liked to have spent far less of early motherhood pumping. And while I’m making a wish list, of course I would have liked to have been able to nurse both babies. But of course all that wishing accomplishes nothing. So now I turn complete responsibility for nourishing my babies over to Whole Foods and PBM Products, makers of Target-brand formula, and I try to readjust to a life in which my body isn’t providing sustenance to any other humans. How mundane.

Circa one month old. Amazingly, given its omnipresence, I couldn’t find any pictures with the pump in the background.

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