Learning to Love

written by Pamela Brown

I love nursing my daughter, Noa, but each time we nurse is bitter sweet, because I’m always aware that the next child I raise I may not be able to nurse.  Fourteen hours after my daughter was born I had a hysterectomy.  I had a rare condition-- placenta accreta.  Our placenta grew into my uterine wall and after many blood transfusions my doctors removed my uterus to save my life.  Nobody was at fault.  My doctors saved my life and I’ll always hold them close to me.  My daughter is the most amazing person I’ve ever encountered and I would give my limbs for her, let alone my uterus.  I’m able to find the blessings in this medical drama, but it still effects me everyday.

Because I was so sick after delivering my daughter, she was fed formula in the hospital.  I remember giving consent to my husband to allow the nurses to feed her.  It was maybe two hours after she was born, perhaps less, that he came to me.  I was still on the table where I had held my slippery, new baby just hours before.  He told me the nurses asked to feed her because she was hungry.  Looking back I know she wasn’t hungry, she wanted me.   But I was helpless and I felt guilty for having failed.  So they fed her.

And she loved it.

I tried nursing in the hospital and had a bit of success, but Noa was used to drinking a lot of formula, so I never felt confident in my own ability to feed her.  She also screamed when I brought her to my breast.  My pain from surgery and the extra nurses were a reminder of my new infertility and even though I was a new member in the tribe of mommies, I already felt like an outsider, as if I were less than a woman.  After all, what newsletter or magazine would ever be interested in this birth story?  My mother’s friends have asked me not to share the details of my story with their daughters.  It destroyed me to think I couldn’t nurse my daughter. 

The next chapter of my nursing story is less dramatic and the most significant. 

After a few frustrating days and a tearful call to the Pump Station, a woman with tremendous patience and warmth came to my home.  She listened to me, she listened to my baby, and within two hours my daughter was nursing.  Finally I felt that someone was taking care of me.  My husband, sitting on the couch across from me, wept as I fed my daughter.  Although my wounds will never heal completely, at that moment, the process began. 

But now I’m conflicted.  My daughter and I have a beautiful relationship and nursing is an integral part of it.  Although she’s jut shy of 7 months, I dread the day she’s done with nursing.  I would nurse for as long as she wants, if not for the fact that I want to give her a sibling.  Having chosen surrogacy, I’ll need to harvest my eggs, and I assume that this will be the end of nursing.  I say assume because it’s too soon to find out for sure now.  Serious research would betray our daughter; we’re waiting until she’s a year.

There are days that I look at her and decide that she’s enough.  But I know she won’t be enough, and the beginning of the journey to our new baby will likely be the end of nursing her. I see how my sweet Noa will lose me to a new sibling.  I’m sorry already.

I nurse her and think of our next baby, and wonder how I will relate to that child if I can’t feed her, if we don’t lay lazily in bed with me in her mouth.  I think of Noa, who tries to crawl, and at times of apprehension she comes over to me, and I lift my shirt, and she suckles for less than a minute.  You can’t do that with a bottle.  Hours we spend at night, connected.  When we separate her little mouth searches—for me—and when I lift my breast to her mouth she calms.   I’m sorry already.  I may fail my next child, because I can’t imagine our relationship without nursing.  I may fail my daughter in search of another baby.

As I write this and relive all these extraordinary circumstances, I realize that I’m not alone.  Whether our babies were born at home or in the hospital, from our wombs or those of another mother, and whether we nurse our children for months, years or never, we all strive to give our babies our best.  We all struggle and second-guess because this love that’s found us consumes us.  It’s so easy to love our babies, the real challenge is loving ourselves as mothers.  As Noa sleeps, without me, I struggle to accept our future and the independence she’s slowly exerting.  I hope to enjoy every moment we have together and leave myself open to the love that awaits me.  I don’t think that wish is unique to me.  I wish the same for all of my sisters who read this.  Wherever you are.  Whether your children are nursing in your laps, or if they’re in their own beds, or at college, away for the first time, or even nursing babies their own.  We’ve done our best.  This love we’ve given them will never be matched.