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
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
