My first pump was a hand-me-down from my sister, and I remember sitting on the edge of my bed at 2 a.m. with the manual open on my phone, trying to figure out which flange size I even needed, while doing frantic math about how many ounces I’d need to leave for daycare in six
My son was seven weeks old the first time he looked at a bottle like it had personally wronged him. My mother-in-law was visiting, she’d offered to take a shift so I could shower for longer than ninety seconds, and I came downstairs to find her pacing the living room with a screaming baby and
Somewhere around 1 a.m., I texted my sister a single line: “he’s eaten seven times since 8pm and I don’t know what’s happening to my body.” She wrote back “cluster feeding, welcome to hell, it ends,” and honestly, that four-word diagnosis did more for me than anything I’d read online. That was with my first.
Three hours after my second was born, a nurse handed her back to me, tapped the side of my breast like she was ringing a doorbell, and said, “okay, let’s try.” My daughter turned her head the wrong way, latched onto my thumb instead, and then just… fell asleep. Mid-attempt. I remember laughing because I
My second kid, Theo, was born at 8 lbs 1 oz — a solid, chunky baby by every measure. Two weeks later, at his checkup, he was down to 7 lbs 6 oz, and the pediatrician’s face did that thing where she’s trying to look neutral but you can tell she’s not. I remember sitting
I remember standing in my kitchen at 2 a.m. with my second baby screaming in one arm and a tub of formula in the other hand, feeling like I was about to fail some test nobody had actually given me. My supply had tanked that week — stress, a bad cold, who knows — and
It’s 3 a.m., you’re propped up on hospital pillows that smell like bleach, and your baby has just come off the latch for the fourth time in a row, screaming like you personally wronged her. A nurse walks in, tilts the baby’s chin a half inch, murmurs “there you go,” and thirty seconds later she’s
Okay, real talk. Nobody warns you about the exact moment a nurse hands you your baby, smiles, and says “let’s try feeding” — while you’re still numb from the ribs down and terrified to laugh, cough, or sneeze because it feels like your stitches might pop. That was me, hour six after my second C-section,
I still remember buckling my daughter into her car seat for the ride home from the NICU and thinking, somewhat irrationally, “Wait, they’re just letting us leave?” She was five pounds, two ounces. I’d spent 26 days learning her feeding schedule from nurses who could read her cues better than I could read a stop
3:47 a.m. I know it was exactly that time because I remember glancing at the microwave clock in the kitchen, bottle warming, my son Eli screaming like the world was ending. Twelve minutes earlier he’d been dead asleep. Now I was standing there in a stained t-shirt, doing math in my head — wait, didn’t
