Pumping Is A Mindfuck

And how the desert carries it all

Jonathan and I spent this weekend in Joshua Tree, our first time away from C. Each of us has left her with the other for a couple of nights, but we’ve never gone away together, leaving her in the care of someone else (this time, Jonathan’s parents). We both fully trusted things would go ok despite my semi-irrational thought spirals that she would (a) think we abandoned her; (b) forget who we are; (c) regress in sleep because her routine is broken; (d) be so sad/upset/overtired/[insert another adjective here] that she’d refuse milk and starve; (e) not nap and wouldn’t sleep the night we got home; or (d) I could keep going, but I’ll stop here…

Turns out, she was fine. Happy the entire weekend without us. Certainly, this was tougher for me.

This trip coincided with the week I decided to stop pumping during the day. I had been pumping only twice during the workday for the past several weeks, and still pump or nurse in the morning depending on my work schedule, and before C goes down for the night, sometimes needing to supplement with a bottle of formula to ensure her belly is full for the night. My milk supply went down after my period returned a couple of months ago, and I don’t have the energy to increase my supply with additional pump sessions, which would likely require waking up in the middle of the night. I feel incredibly grateful I am able to breastfeed, let alone exclusively provided C breastmilk up until she was about six months. When we first started supplementing with formula, she hated it, making me think she’d be attached to my boob forever. We tried a different brand, which she loves. And it forced Jonathan and I to get over our slightly disordered relationship with seed oils because there is literally not one formula on the market that does not contain seed oil. We reminded ourselves that millions of babies — including Jonathan himself — were formula-fed and are perfectly healthy humans. A healthy human and my own mental health were top priorities.

Now, in Joshua Tree, I sat on the couch in our perfectly desert aesthetic decorated Airbnb. Looking down at my breasts, my nipples stretched into the cylinder funnels attached to the oblong plastic-encased motor by yet more plastic tubes. Stretching back and forth, in and out. My nipples still pink at the ends, but became paler in the middle as they pressed against the flanges. The timer on the little motor screen read 9 minutes 35 seconds. Almost 10 minutes and no let-down. The pins and needles feeling I had grown so accustomed to was absent. The feeling that, when occurring spontaneously in public when I realize I forgot nipple pads, causes panic. But causes soothing relief when C latches after hungrily searching for me, or when it comes within 30 seconds of starting a pump session, having only 8 minutes before I’d be late to an appointment. Sitting on the couch with my trusted frenemy, I craved that feeling. Turning to my mind to create it for myself, I began to visualize the milk flow through my ducts, imagining the slightly painful feeling starting high in my chest and creeping its way down like the tendrils of a pea plant.

Nothing. Even as I switched the mode from stimulation to expression, wondering whether the modes mirrored those on industrial dairy pumps. And wondering whether the let-down felt the same for my fellow female mammals. I heard no dripping. It had been nearly 20 minutes. I cut myself off at 22 for the health of my nipples. Defeated.

Jonathan sat next to me and I looked at him with tears in my pleading eyes, and pointed at the empty bottles attached to my breasts. Nothing.

“Where is the milk?” I cried. “I haven’t pumped all day, since 7:30 am, there should be more. Am I done?”

I wasn’t ready.

“I’m just really sad,” I said, inching closer to him as he wrapped me in his arms and let me curl up against him to cry.

“I know. I’m so sorry, babe,” he said, reading my cues that I needed his empathy rather than problem-solving. “It is sad,” he affirmed.

I allowed myself to cry but did not yet accept that the road might be at its end. Was there still hope? I texted my friend even though I knew she’d be asleep in the Eastern time zone:

Ugh, I tried no pumping during the day after the morning nurse/pump, and I’m hardly getting any yield. Maybe I’m just done.

The next morning, she asked: What do you think you would want to happen ideally?

Ideally, I would be able to not pump during the day and either nurse or pump in the morning and night. I wanted the independence of not planning my day around my pumps, to forgo thinking about whether I would have access to a private space, whether I’d be able to step away at the time my pump was due, whether I’d have a fridge nearby or would need to carry a cooler, whether I needed to bring my pump and all of its many parts because if I forgot just one piece—even the piece the size of my thumbnail—the entire contraption would not function and I’d be left either milking myself over the sink in a public bathroom, risk leaking through my shirt, and wake up the next morning with painful clogs or feverish mastitis. I wanted to free my mind during the day. Just last week I removed my pumps in the bathroom of Los Angeles’s Union Station and dumped the milk in the sink for sanitary reasons. Especially this weekend in Joshua Tree, I wanted freedom. I wanted to hike without worrying about how long we’d be out. I wanted to leave my pump at home when we went to dinner, the one night we decided to go out.

As I sat on the couch, disassembling myself from my pump, I resolved to try again in the morning, hoping I hadn’t quite hit the end of my road.

Sure enough, the next morning, I pumped close to six ounces. Enough for a whole bottle plus an ounce or two more. I felt relieved. And weirdly proud of myself, as if I had control over my yield. My sense of pride and relief reminded me of the sick connection between breastfeeding and our self-worth as women and as mothers. This is conditioned, and takes major work to unwind. I’ve been stopped on the street while wearing C — these passersby ask how old she is, whether she’s a boy or a girl, and whether I am breastfeeding. What would they think if I said no? There is a disclaimer on the first brand of formula I tried stating, “breastmilk is best for babies” in capital letters. What is this disclaimer trying to tell me? That I am doing my baby a disservice by supplementing with formula?

Noticing my six ounces, I felt capable, like a “good mother,” even though rationally I knew that I was a good mother regardless of my ability to produce breastmilk. Yet just the night before, I cried to Jonathan, while thanking God for formula, “but if formula didn’t exist, she’d starve to death because of me.” Because. Of. Me.

How could I think this way? Anger boiled inside me. We don’t live in a world where I can exclusively nurse, as would be the case in the pre-formula age when a new mother would have to stop working (if she did work outside the home) to nourish her baby. And I am grateful for that because I get to have a career that, on the outside, seems uninterrupted by motherhood. And during the time I wasn’t working, during my maternity leave, my sole focus was to nourish C. But, I couldn’t help but crave independence from her, all while knowing a day would come, like this weekend, when I would feel nostalgic for the singular focus and what felt like constant attachment to my breast. Such conflicting emotions.

As I sat writing this essay in Joshua Tree, I stared at the desert landscape covered with the trees of its namesake, found only here on the entire planet. No tree is the same. I notice their hairy trunks and spiky tops, the tallest of them hundreds of years old. The competing feelings seem to flow through me more easily in the desert. Through the open spaces, between the Joshua Trees, hopping over the Cholla cactus plants that look gentle and cuddly, but require a special needle removal tool if touched. Though these feelings occasionally get stuck, or pricked, or sliced, or blocked. But here in the desert, I saw them more clearly.

I saw how this period marks a transition in my motherhood journey. The transition to become a mother independent of my daughter, who is becoming more and more independent by the day. Created out of my own matter, birthed from my own body, she depended on me completely during pregnancy and after birth. Now, she depends on me less. And the goal is for her not to depend on me at all. It is this that both devastates me and excites me and scares me and brings me an overwhelming amount of joy and awe.

I crave the independence, crave having my body back, crave being able to travel without my pump. But I also don’t want to stop. I crave the connection, the lack of independence my body has from C’s. And right in line with the pressure I feel to “bounce back,” I don’t want to give up how easy it is to justify abnormal hunger, or to justify my body retaining weight. Right now, I feel like I can’t live without the satisfaction of a high yield, but at the same time, I can’t live with the dissatisfaction of no yield. I both want to rid myself of the frustration that I feel with every period-induced supply dip, and also hold onto it because I know it is all fleeting. The sadness reverberates in my bones when I stare down at the bottles, listening to the drip drop as milk hardly reaches an ounce. It is these empty bottles that remind me that I am losing the last remaining physical connection to my daughter, no matter how many times I whisper in her ear that my heart is always connected to her heart. The annoyance that causes me to shove my flanges into a Ziploc after spending 20 minutes of my life attached to plastic tubes like a dairy cow, yet yielding nothing. The wave of worry that I’m not doing the best I can to nourish my daughter. Quickly replaced with shame and frustration for feeling anything but gratitude. Can’t I just let it go?

When the frustration and anxiety are replaced by the relief for the morning’s yield, the pride of doing things “right,” and the gratitude for being able to do this at all, it changes all over again a day later as I suffer from yet another dip. Let the mindfuck ensue. Let the competing emotions stay present all at once. The nostalgia for the earliest days and the reminders of how trapped I felt. I’m not quite ready to let it go and I’m also not willing to do what I’d need to do to keep it up. I both enjoy my pump-free workday and tap on my breasts multiple times throughout the day to feel if I’m filling, because knowing that makes me either confident and motivated to keep going or depressed and full of despair. I feel both annoyed at my yieldless bedtime pumps and anxious about giving them up entirely. I know these feelings are my first true manifestation of the competing feelings motherhood evokes throughout a lifetime. The ability to hold both love and fear at the same time.

This weekend, in Joshua Tree, I felt more myself than I have in a long time. I was not tied to my pump during the day, and J and I were able to connect with each other for an extended period of time without the interruption of logistics and baby care. I sat writing in an Adirondack chair with my pen in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee in the other, in front of an expansive landscape, allowing myself to feel whatever appeared. I allowed the desert to carry my competing emotions through it, and allowed them to exist rather than make rational sense of them appearing simultaneously. Through this all, I felt more myself, but the version transformed forever by motherhood, the tendrils like those in my breasts light up, with a constant stream of worried thoughts, and with thoughts of love and fear like I have never experienced before.

All at the same time. All a mindfuck.

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