So there is no part of me that intends to be crude or unpleasant during this blog, but there are some things a bit outside the normal bounds of polite society that simply must be discussed. Since becoming pregnant, I’ve had all the normal mom-to-be fears. I mean, seriously. I’m fumbling my way along with an eight year old that is suddenly calling me his mom, totally unprepared for how much I love the little stinker, trying to shift gears from single life to married-with-children in a few months. It’s weird. I’m handling it, I’m loving it, but it’s definitely weird. Now there’s a baby in the mix, even if it’s still confined to my uterus, and it’s already causing all kinds of havoc from the comfort of its little office space.
First there was the morning sickness. When you can’t even keep saltine crackers and Gatorade down, there’s a problem. My ordinarily hypersensitive nose became its own superhero as I was able to pick up cigarette smoke from a block away, smell slightly dirty dishwater from across the house, and God help me if I went more than 24 hours without washing my hair. The Bionic woman never had it so bad good. The toilet bowl became more familiar to me than I ever wanted, and due to a spectacular plumbing debacle and the laziness of our pot-smoking apartment manager, our sewer overflowed for four days—that’s right, boys and girls, four days—right into our bathroom. That’s a whole other issue that I would rather not think about any more. When Cheech and Chong finally came to fix everything (reeking of weed and apathy), my carefully planned sermon about their neglect dissolved into a groan and a, “You know, it’s really tough being pregnant, smelling sewage all day, and not having a toilet to throw up in.” I think I reached them. Either that or it was the high wearing off.
Total, I lost about 36 pounds from conception to the second trimester. My second OB visit was yesterday, and I had lost another 11 lbs despite eating like a horse on my honeymoon (pants still don’t fit, by the way. Yaaaay). But Robert was really good about trying to get nutrition supplements down my throat, and my mom had possibly the worst nausea in history with my brother and I (misdiagnosed as anorexia before they knew about hyperemesis), lost weight from her already-skinny frame through the whole pregnancy, and still managed to pop out two healthy, if a little small, babies. So I’m not that worried about it.
This brings me to what I AM worried about.
Here goes.
Don’t judge me.
I can’t stand to watch people breastfeed.
Now, before I get clouds of militant anti-formula Nazis yelling at me about how I’m going to be responsible for my child’s crippling and death if I give it Similac, let me say this: I am going to breastfeed. I know how good it is for the kid. The health benefits are too good for me NOT to breastfeed. It’s my choice, and it’s not changing…
But Lord. Have. Mercy.
It all started when my friend Caitlin had her first child. I’m a nurse. I’ve seen blood, guts, and gore. I’ve seen things that would make brave men weep and vomit, and I didn’t flinch. I thought nothing of walking in this soothing, calm post-partum room to see my friend after a perfectly natural, normal child birth.
Then I saw her using the electric breast pump.
And I got so dizzy I had to sit down.
It looked like the machine was about to suck her nipples off…no lie. All my life I’ve looked at the female anatomy and thought “How in the name of Elsie the Cow do we produce milk??” I still don’t know! So much of the human body is common sense to me and easily explained, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how this is supposed to work.
THERE’S NOT EVEN A VISIBLE HOLE THERE! There is some part of me that thinks I’m going to be the only woman alive who’s ever gotten her baby home, been full of milk, and found that her nipples had no exit for it all. Forgive me, any men reading this, if I am being too explicit, but if you can’t handle the milk, get out of the nursing bra.
So I went to see a WIC lactation consultant. She was a round, hippie earth mother type who spoke sweetly and calmly, as if everything that had ever happened, from Hiroshima down to the birth of Brittany Spears, were perfectly wonderful and ideal. Then I dropped the bomb on her.
“Listen, I’m going to breast feed, but I’ve gotta tell you…I have a phobia. It makes me dizzy to watch, and I have to sit down or pass out.”
There was, then, a long moment of silence.
The silence was eventually broken by the lactation consultant, who had dropped her “isn’t it wonderful?” tone and used a real woman’s confused voice to ask me, “….What?”
Apparently she had never run across this phobia in all the many millennia she had been leading women down Gaia’s Path of Breastfeeding Enlightenment. Huh. Well, isn’t that special for me? Leave it up to me to develop a new, freaky-ass phobia.
The more she explained the process, demonstrated on a rubber boob, and told me how natural it was, the more intense the willies got, until she finally gave me a DVD and told me that watching it regularly may help.
I just watched it. Then I texted my mom in tears and panic. “MOM! I just watched a breastfeeding DVD and it was WEIRD and unnatural and I’m sure my nipples have no holes and there’s no way I’ll EVER be able to do this and AAAAGH!”
She has yet to respond. Knowing my mom, she’s probably waiting for me to get a grip on myself and stop being a drama queen, but GAAAAW-LEE, miss, I can’t!
I can’t explain why this is so weird to me. Part of me knows that besides pooping and childbirth, it’s the most natural, positive, and therapeutic thing in the world for mom and baby. BUT IT’S WEIRD! What cruel joke were the angels playing on God when they broke in the Human Shop after hours and switched the woman’s breast out with this FREAKISH MONSTROSITY??
I suppose it could be worse. We could have to regurgitate our baby’s food like birds. I think that would be nastier.
But it’s still weird.
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