Two in the morning, baby on my hip, and I was crying almost as hard as she was — because I could not, for the life of me, understand how something everyone kept calling “natural” was making me bleed. Nobody warns you about this part. Not the nurse who hands you home from the hospital
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.
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,
