Breastfeeding and the Feminine Mystique

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Content warning: birth story

My baby Grant had a quick and joyful entrance into the world. It was right after I got to look at his weird little alien face that the trouble started.

I popped him out just four hours after receiving some drugs to help along my contractions, and I was feeling very proud of myself that I only needed one stitch (thank you, prenatal yoga and pelvic floor physiotherapy!). But about half an hour later my placenta was still refusing to come out. This is relatively rare but can be life-threatening, so suddenly there was an OB-GYN in the room, and then her hand was all the way up inside me, manually scooping the damn thing out. This is called a manual placenta removal. I do not recommend it (well I recommend it over dying of hemorrhage, but if you find delivering yours is uncomfortable, think of me with a stranger’s hand inside my ribcage). 

“I’m just going to give you a quick rectal exam,” she said when she finally took her hand out, and poked a finger into my butt. 

“One final indignity,” I joked, high on laughing gas and fentanyl. It was far from the final indignity. A catheter, a surgery, two more hospital visits and countless blood draws and IVs later, I complained to my mom that I just wanted people to stop sticking things into my body. 

“That’s just being a woman, Julie!” she said simply. 

And apparently, it was. Despite the vigorous scooping, there was still some placenta left in my body a couple of weeks later, and this was impeding my milk supply. The surgery I needed to remove it also led to a massive amount of blood loss, so my poor body was tasked with making milk and blood at the same time. My nipples were blistered and raw, and I couldn’t seem to get enough food into my tiny adorable alien. I was anxiously feeding him drops of formula off my pinky finger, having gotten the impression that allowing him to even LOOK at a bottle would ruin my chances of breastfeeding forever. 

As I struggled with my supply, his latch, pumping, and whether and how much formula to give him, we were faced with impossible infant math: feed him every 3 hours, pump every 2 hours, sleep when the baby sleeps, and somehow also feed ourselves and shower, all while trying to recover from a cascade of traumatic hospital experiences. 

Feed on demand, the internet said, but don’t go longer than three hours. Feed the moment he seems hungry. Don’t miss a feed or your supply will never go up. Breast is best. Don’t give him formula. Don’t give him a pacifier. If you can’t feed him exclusively, you are a failure as a mother and as a human being. Oh—and relax. If you don’t relax your milk won’t come in at all. 

Finally, I had a chat with Dr. Lin at the Vancouver Breastfeeding Clinic. She set me up with a plan that was intended to help teach Grant to feed more efficiently (he liked to fall asleep on my breast a lot, so he’d be sucking one small drop at a time), topping him up with formula to make sure he got enough and getting me to pump to keep up my supply. The key takeaway was that in between these feeds, we’d wait for a blissful two and a half hours. This time was for me—to eat, drink, shower, write, and generally be a person and not a milk machine. This plan required my husband to hold and soothe him in between feeds. This plan involved some boundaries. 

A lot of the advice I had gotten up to that point was completely devoid of boundaries between me and my baby. I was meant to be essentially chained to the bed, feeding him whenever he wanted, barely able to have enough time to go to the bathroom. Not only was I supposed to ascribe to this punishing schedule for as long as my baby wanted and long past the point of bleeding for it, I was supposed to like it. 

In her classic 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan pointed out that, despite the social pressure to do so, “No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.” The root of what she called “the woman problem” was that the culture at the time insisted that women could only ever desire to be homemakers, and if she wanted something else, there was something wrong with her. A lot has changed since 1963, but something about the intense pressure around breastfeeding rang a little Friedan bell for me.

Let’s be clear: Betty Friedan is dated. There have been several new waves of feminism to come through since her book was published, and she has been rightly criticized for focusing her attention on rich white women at the expense of other groups. And yet, here it is: the immense pressure to do a boring and even sometimes painful thing with the orgasmic glow of deep fulfillment. I mean, we should have moved on from this by now. But we haven’t. It’s just more patriarchy in the disguise of holistic parenting.

Women get the message early on that we are supposed to take care of everyone else at great cost to ourselves. That sacrifice in and of itself is supposed to feel good. If breastfeeding sucks (pun intended) and we’re struggling to get enough food into our babies and need a little formula, we are completely failing at the one thing we are supposed to be able to do “naturally." This is the same message we’ve been getting since Friedan named it back in 1963. This is the “woman problem”: that general malaise that comes with being told you are a failure if you dare to want more from your life than caring for everyone else.

Breastfeeding did get a lot easier for me after a few months of very hard work. Nine months in, it is sometimes a pleasure, but it is also still sometimes a pain in the boob (especially now that baby has a few sharp teeth!). There are a lot of things I love about being a mom, and making my kid smile is about the best thing in the world. I also need breaks from him, however. I need someone to take him for a couple of hours so that I can write or have a shower or cry. I’m allowed to feel that new motherhood is hard while at the same time deeply loving my baby. I’m still a person, and pain still hurts. When it does, I’m not going to smile about it, and I’m certainly not going to have an orgasm about it, either. 

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