You’re a parent of a newborn and have breasts full of milk. For whatever reason, the child just cannot latch no matter what you try and ends up just biting you for hours out of desperation and you deal with it because it’s their only source of food. But all that milk is just in there and to get out you have to massage it all out in the shower so you’re not in constant physical pain.
Your baby is now losing weight instead of gaining, so all the lost sleep and nearly constant 24-7 feeding is still not enough. Your doctor will at this point finally stop pushing breastfeeding and insist on formula. They finally get you set up with the right formula through WIC so your baby’s gaining weight.
Except now you’ve gotta memorize this list of which baby foods will and won’t be covered and if you get it wrong or your particular cashier just interprets the rule differently then every single item they question is a reminder that, for whatever reason, you can’t breastfeed and almost starved your baby in the process of trying to. As if needing to line up brightly colored paper checks with WIC in giant letters that have to be punched in by hand instead of scanned wasn’t embarrassing enough as you hold up the entire line to be like 7 things.
Now you’ve got this extra thing in the back of your head nagging you as you have to put baby food back that you qualified for last month.
And complaining about any of this will get you flooded with suggestions for how to breastfeed better. As if you just weren’t trying hard enough. Or how to plan ahead which items are covered. As if you just weren’t reading them hard enough or shopping smartly enough. No one knows what you went through or how your tortured yourself over this when formula would have been fine from the get go.
Do you have any idea how maddening this is?
You’re a parent of a newborn and have breasts full of milk. For whatever reason, the child just cannot latch no matter what you try and ends up just biting you for hours out of desperation and you deal with it because it’s their only source of food. But all that milk is just in there and to get out you have to massage it all out in the shower so you’re not in constant physical pain.
Your baby is now losing weight instead of gaining, so all the lost sleep and nearly constant 24-7 feeding is still not enough. Your doctor will at this point finally stop pushing breastfeeding and insist on formula. They finally get you set up with the right formula through WIC so your baby’s gaining weight.
Except now you’ve gotta memorize this list of which baby foods will and won’t be covered and if you get it wrong or your particular cashier just interprets the rule differently then every single item they question is a reminder that, for whatever reason, you can’t breastfeed and almost starved your baby in the process of trying to. As if needing to line up brightly colored paper checks with WIC in giant letters that have to be punched in by hand instead of scanned wasn’t embarrassing enough as you hold up the entire line to be like 7 things. Now you’ve got this extra thing in the back of your head nagging you as you have to put baby food back that you qualified for last month.
And complaining about any of this will get you flooded with suggestions for how to breastfeed better. As if you just weren’t trying hard enough. Or how to plan ahead which items are covered. As if you just weren’t reading them hard enough or shopping smartly enough. No one knows what you went through or how your tortured yourself over this when formula would have been fine from the get go.