Have you made your breastfeeding plan? You might want to scrap it.

Part 1: Pumping

Note: This is a multipart series on my experiences exclusively pumping vs nursing. In this post there are brief mentions of traumatic birth, NICU time, painful latching, mastitis, and undersupply.

Last May, while on a much needed girls trip to the Arizona desert, the question came up in a dimly lit Italian restaurant, “What was the hardest thing you went through in the last year?” Without flinching, and despite a very challenging year otherwise, I knew my answer would be exclusively pumping for 6 months with my first baby. It was both the hardest thing I’d ever done and my proudest accomplishment.

Now, almost a year later and with a new baby girl whom I successfully nurse, I can still confidently say that I’m prouder of myself for the pumping. That shit was hard. I’m going to tell you about it in the paragraphs that follow, but just know my why for writing this:

I aim to help any new or prospective parents that are making their feeding arrangements and likely struggling with some aspect of the physical or mental toll it takes to feed a baby, no matter which method you choose. I hope to illuminate the pain, the struggle, and perseverance that went into pumping breast milk for my son, share some of what I’d do differently, and also just give a deeper view into what it took. I certainly wish I’d had a fuller picture when I started my own breastfeeding journey.

Like any ripely pregnant new mom, I visualized my son’s birth on repeat in the months and weeks leading up to the event. The vision was equal parts exciting, beautiful, and scary. I’d read plenty of books in preparation for labor and birth, hired a pair of doulas to come support my husband and I during the event, built a visually compelling birth plan on Canva, and even packed some color changing lights and a Bluetooth speaker to really set the mood. I was going for primordial cave birth mixed with a little modern medicine and some John Mayor.

My dreamy birth setup generated by AI

While my brain hyper-focused on a safe and healthy birth, I spent barely a few mental pennies on breastfeeding, which felt far away. My mom had told me she loved breastfeeding me and did so for 15 months. “Great,” I thought, “that probably runs in the family.”

I felt decently prepared, too. I’d ordered my insurance approved breast pump ahead of time and purchased a sample set of bottles for “down the line.” I’d taken a few virtual lactation courses via Zoom and even diligently written notes. But, the well-meaning lactation consultants teaching with their crocheted demo breasts, pumping parts and illustrative videos on screen could never truly convey the process and challenge of latching a wriggly, hungry, human baby.

At prenatal appointments, I remember doctors and nurses asking me “What’s your breastfeeding goal? 12 months? Ok.” They’d type my answers into their system with approving nods. This line of questioning continued into months of well-child visits post-birth.

It felt like I was being tracked as a statistic and that statistic was going to show just how many women quit breastfeeding before X amount of time. Another tiny failure in a broadly failing American parenting system, the headline would read.

My inner obedient, validation-seeking self felt strongly accountable to the idea of a 12-month goal.

No amount of plucky guitar music or dim lighting could prepare me for the reality of having a baby come out of me in major distress and be quickly whisked off to the NICU. Thankfully, baby boy just needed a few days of extra help and some tests to be sure he was ready to rock n’ roll out of that hospital and into a normal and blissful newborn stage at home.

But for 5 days, his dad and I slept shallowly an hour here and there, making up techno sleep soundtracks in our heads, set to the irregular beeping of a pulse-ox monitor and occasional distant cries.

The doctors and lactation consultants had failed to mention what would happen to feeding if your baby went to the NICU. First, the nurses gave our son a feeding tube, and then bottles of my pumped milk, and some with donor milk. Bless the donors, always.

A cat nap during our NICU stay

The hospital lactation consultants were amongst a blurry and unending parade of nurses, social workers, and administrators visiting my postpartum room and our son’s NICU room at all hours, each with a lengthy agenda. The first few lactation visits, I was alone - no baby to work with. A kind faced nurse wheeled in an industrial grade pump and told me to use it for 15-minutes every 2-3 hours and be consistent. I looked at the pile of seemingly random plastic bits, bleary-eyed and clueless. Rifling through my mental archives, back to the pumping 101 session I’d attended on Zoom, I somehow managed to physically assemble and arrange the puzzle pieces onto my chest. Fumbling for buttons, my fingers forced the pump on and I eventually heard some mechanical whooshing. 15 minutes til I could press that button again and make it stop. I bottled up my output, pulled my hospital gown back together and waddled down the hall in a literal diaper to see my baby.

I did not wash my pump parts after using them for maybe 24 hours? It didn’t occur to me and no one mentioned it. There was certainly no way to sanitize the parts in my postpartum room. There were also only two very large flange sizes in stock at the hospital - this is standard practice in the US and meant my pump did not fit me correctly.

On approximately day 3 of my son’s stay in the NICU, a NICU specializing lactation consultant came to visit and told me approximately 75% of NICU babies never latch on the breast successfully, due to being bottle fed in the hospital. The odds were stacked against us. At first, this statistic motivated me. I was *sort of* getting my son to latch in the hospital for 2 minutes here and there and I figured we would get the hang of it. I smiled at the consultant and said “we’re gonna try for the 25%!”

The truth is, by the time we came home, latching was harder and more painful than ever and my son’s hunger was incredibly intense. As an aside, I should have expected a baby boy of mine to grow an insatiable appetite and urgency around mealtimes. His dad regularly eats double what I do in a day and doesn’t gain a pound. He also shovels food down so quickly our dinner table feels like Coney Island on the Fourth of July.

Baby boy was hungry, but the feeding was PAINFUL. Searingly so. I remember squealing in pain and running out of the room crying after my son had chomped down on my nipple using tiny shark gums, confused and screaming himself. I would cry and cry to my husband, “I can’t do this, it hurts too badly.” He would patiently help me find calm as I fumbled for my pump parts with my head hung low, resigned to get the milk out the only way I felt I could. I felt shame for crying in front of my baby, shame for how hard it was to latch, and complete astonishment when the lactation consultants would tell me pain with breastfeeding isn’t normal.

In part 2 of this series I’ll talk about my successful nursing journey with our daughter, but I need to interject this detail here now, too. Breastfeeding hurt me the second time just as much as it did the first. This time around, I was told by a lactation consultant with her gloved finger stuck in my preemie daughter’s mouth, “Oh wow, that’s maybe the hardest I’ve ever felt a baby bite,” which did feel validating. But also, I think I just have sensitive nipples. Either that or everyone around me is lying and this shit always hurts.

The closer we’d get to my son’s next feed time, the greater panic I’d feel, to the point where my heart would race and my hands would shake.

Not only was latching painful, attempting it was a contact sport requiring more than two hands, a pillow, and some small plastic nipple shields I was told would help transition our son to latch less painfully and from the bottle to breast. I know there are many nipple shield lovers out there, but I hated them. They were slippery, then sticky as they fill with milk, and in my case, using the shields inevitably ended with milk soaking baby and me (and that freaking pillow), with an actual latch no closer at hand.

For my son, this process of latching onto a breast was incredibly frustrating and all together too slow. I mentioned he was a hungry boy. He was (is) also impatient when it comes to his hunger. It’s a *right now* kind of thing. Messing around with my confusing fleshy knobs in his face was just not on the agenda.

A bottle on the other hand? A bottle he understood. And he could suck that thing down quick. I remember my mom visiting during his early babyhood and commenting that “her show was on” when our son drank his bottles. It really happened entertainingly fast. She compared him to a frat boy chugging a lite beer. Nothing was going to get in between that boy and his milk.

So, I exclusively pumped every 2-3 hours around the clock for 6 months with our son. Somewhere in that period he started sleeping through the night, but I kept my alarm set for every 3 hours. I had to keep emptying on that schedule because I was an under supplier with recurrent mastitis. Cue dramatic music. If you know mastitis, you know.

The first bout hit me when our son was about two weeks old, over a holiday weekend. Pain, fever, chills, and a sudden major drop in my milk supply. All I can attribute it to was my not-so-smart approach of cleaning pump parts irregularly in the hospital; I hadn’t been thinking. Or it could have been a crack in my nipples or my ill-fitting flanges, my unlucky anatomy or some combination therein. If you look up mastitis risk factors, I pretty much had them all. Regardless, mastitis is a dangerous infection paired with inflammation (hence the “itis”) that can make breastfeeders really sick and can, in some cases, tank supply. This happened for me.

To my misfortune, I was also prescribed a short dose of antibiotics and the infection seemed to simmer along at low levels (I never felt great) for many weeks until it flared back up again and we knocked those big bad germs out for good. Throughout the duration, I adhered religiously to the mastitis protocol to continue removing milk at a regular pace. This is important so you don’t contribute more to the inflammation or clogged ducts.

If I already disliked breastfeeding via pump, ongoing mastitis made it feel like a prison. While I was sick, I had to remove the milk, despite the pain from the infection making me want to quit entirely and the exhaustion from the illness making me want to curl into a tiny ball and just sleep it off.

Eventually, we made a well coordinated plan for me to slowly drop pumps and wean from breastfeeding. I was barely getting 6-8 Oz of output a day and putting in about 4 hours of work at the pump in the same period. My husband and I half-heartedly chuckled at the idea that my pumping endeavors were financially saving us about $3 in formula each week. Meanwhile, I googled and asked around in hopes that the small amount of breastmilk I was actually supplying our son each day was enough to provide some benefit. I was reassured it probably was.

If reading about this experience has elicited any sort of emotional reaction or rational frustration in you, I’m both sorry and glad. My aim is not to scare and certainly not to misinform. Rather, I hope that me sharing this experience can help prepare and inform other parents about the risks and challenges that can come with breastfeeding on an emotional and physical level. In reality, there’s not much I could have done differently in the situation with my son, apart from better cleaning those pump parts upfront and maybe asking about a sanitization option.

I do want to highlight this, now that I have a second baby, who (despite her little piranha mouth) is a great feeder:

So much of your success in latching and nursing a baby is up to the baby. Their temperament, their circumstances, their instincts, their anatomies, and more.

If you experience a challenge comfortably latching a baby now or in the future, I want you to know it’s an incredibly strong and brave choice to pump. It also may not be the right choice for you and baby. Ultimately for me, quitting pumping was physically beneficial and mentally freeing. I got my sleep and sanity back. We loved our experience giving our son mostly formula and we’ve had friends rely significantly on donor milk for their baby’s calories.

I’ll end on an emphatic note, that all lactating and non-lactating parents are heroes and we should normalize the struggle to get a baby fed and full.

I’d love to invite those with their own stories and experiences in this space to comment and share those here. And oh - you are cordially not invited to tell anyone else that their choice or experience is a wrong one.