On the day my baby left the NICU, an occupational therapist came to visit us. “You’re leaving today! Yay! How’s the nursing going?”

“We’re doing the SNS,” I said. SNS meant Supplemental Nursing System, a bottle of breast milk around my neck, dripping down a tube taped to my chest, beneath a silicon nipple shield. The first time the lactation specialist showed it to me, untangling all the tiny tubes, demonstrating how it was supposed to work, I cried and cried. “Everyone cries when they see this,” she told me.

“You’ve got the SNS working well enough to go home? Really?” the therapist said. “Wow!”

“Why does everyone sound so surprised when I tell them that?”

“Because the SNS is a pain in the neck, and most people give up before now.”

“I’m used to nursing problems,” I said, and then I told her the same history I told the other lactation specialists (they were fabulous) who helped me in the NICU: how I never figured out nursing with my oldest two, and pumped my milk for them. And it took my two and a half months of pumping and trying to nurse till my third child finally caught on. He was the only one I nursed normally. “I’ve been cursed by the nursing gods,” I said. “But in a way, that kind of prepared me for the NICU experience, since premies have such a hard time nursing, and I had to pump anyway. I’m used to it. It’s the only nursing reality I have ever known.”

“You could be a motivational speaker,” she said. “All that pumping to give milk to your babies. Plus the SNS now.”

“Not me,” I told her. “Because it was too hard for me to ever impose that decision on anyone else. I could never, ever stand up in front of someone and tell them that they ought to do what I did. I chose it, but I wouldn’t give anyone a guilt trip for not doing the same thing.”

I brought my baby home with the SNS and the nipple shield and spent the next several weeks holed up in my bedroom, trying to get him to eat enough from it so that he could grow. It’s impossible to nurse discreetly with the SNS, and I didn’t want my older kids to watch everything, so I hunkered in the back room, listening to the sounds of bickering with one ear and the ipad earbud in the other. It took about an hour to get him to eat enough to sleep for two hours, and after that I still had to pump. And maybe shower. And maybe acknowledge the existence of my other children, and my husband.

When he reached 40 weeks gestational age, I went to see a lactation specialist for SNS weaning advice. She was a sweet lady but not too helpful; everything she told me I had already tried. And it was just. so. time-consuming. I needed to get ready for school to start, I needed to attack my laundry mountain, I needed to care for my entire family better than the SNS’s time commitment allowed. So I broke out the bottles for daytime feeding so I could feed the baby in fifteen minutes instead of sixty, and I still did the SNS at night. And still pumped 5-6 times a day, but this system worked better for me.

Until one night when I was so dizzy with fatigue that I used a bottle instead of the SNS, and since then it’s been all pumped milk bottles. But eventually the milk supply will run low, and we’ll be doing formula. I know how it goes; I’ve been here before.

I’m not really at peace with giving up on real nursing. I wish I were. I wish I could just pat myself on the back for all past and future pumping. There’s something primal and core for me about nursing, and I have felt the loss of that relationship with my two oldest children. It was incredibly validating as a mother to finally, finally be able to nurse my third child, and I was hoping I could make it work with this baby.

And yet, I’m also not ready to go back to being holed up in my bedroom all day long as I try to get my baby to nurse the right way. I just can’t do that anymore. I feel stuck and frustrated by the whole thing.

So this post may be the essence of Too Much Information, more than you ever wanted to know about my nursing experience. But I’m curious about all of yours. You NICU moms, did you pump? For how long? Did nursing ever magically start working for you three or four months out? Has anyone else been cursed by the nursing gods?

I will state up front that I really want stories–what did you do, what worked for you personally–but I’d prefer that you avoid saying “you should do this” or “have you tried that.” Because I’m pretty fragile and defensive about the whole situation, and I just can’t handle advice very well right now, even when it’s well-meant. I have been to the websites, I have read the books, I have visited the lactation specialists. I’m going to muddle through somehow.

And I will also say that I respect the feeding choices of any mother who feeds her baby in any way, breastfed, formula fed, whatever works for you and your family, and I hope that all comments also reflect that respect for different feeding choices. A breastfeeding motivational speaker I am not. I’m just a mom trying to feed her baby.

Related posts:

  1. NICU Stories
  2. Held Close
  3. Nursing


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