Hazel was born at 2:14 on a Saturday and by 2:14 on Sunday, Steven and I weren’t feeling any more like parents than we had the day before. Since they had whisked Hazel away to NICU, Steven and I had been down to see her five times and each time we took her out of her little plastic bassinette and held her, but the nurses were providing all of her care, so we didn’t feel any sense of real responsibility to this little person. We were ready to have her up in our room with us, so we could start feeling like a family.
We had met with the pediatrician that morning, who had said that Hazel’s lungs were fine and that she should be ready to be discharged from the NICU around 6:00 that evening. Steven had a basketball game at 5:00, so we thought we’d head down around 3:30 to see if we could get her out any earlier, but when we met the doctor again, she said that she had reconsidered and wanted to keep Hazel another night. When I asked why, she said that Hazel had been throwing up and they wanted to continue to observe her to be sure that she could keep her food down.
When I heard her reasoning, my immediate thought was of the marble that the midwife in our prenatal classes held up to show us the size of a newborn’s stomach, a thought which immediately led to another of all of the mothers I had talked to who had had children at FV and their stories of babies being force fed formula even when the parents had specifically stated that their child be exclusively breastfed. In my first act of defiant independent mothering, I explained to the doctor that we wanted our baby to be exclusively breast fed and that we did not want her to remain in NICU, but wanted her in our room that afternoon. After a bit of back-and-forth the doctor finally backed down and agreed to let us have her, saying that we should go back to our room and the midwives would bring her up in an hour. At this point it was 4:30.
Steven and I parted ways at the elevator, him to his basketball game, and me back to our room to wait for our baby. At 5:30, I walked down to the nurses’ station and politely reminded them that a midwife was supposed to be bringing me my baby from NICU. At 5:45, I was heading out the door back to the nurses’ station, when a midwife wheeling Hazel in her bassinette stopped me mid-way, saying, “Your baby.” Before she left, she handed me a bottle of medicine and explained that it was to prevent Hazel from throwing up and that she should be given three drops every six hours. I decided immediately that, as long as Steven agreed, not another drop of this medicine was going anywhere near our child. After keeping her medicine-free throughout nine months of pregnancy and the whole labor process, we weren’t about to pump our newborn baby full of medicine. Steven heartily agreed.
Steven returned after his game, fresh from our apartment with snacks and fresh clothes and we enjoyed our first evening together as a family. Because overnight guests were not included in the package, Steven had to pay $12 each night for the use of a hospital cot, pillow, blanket, towel and complimentary breakfast in the cafeteria in the morning. His cot was brought up around 8 and around 10 o’clock, Hazel in her bassinette, Steven and I in my bed, the cot against the wall, Hazel began to cry. I got up and fed her, danced around the room a bit and put her back in her bassinette. And she began to cry again. I changed her diaper, danced around the room a bit and put her back in her bassinette. And she began to cry again. Not wanting to keep Steven up all night because he was going into work the next day, I wandered out into the hall, where miraculously she stopped crying. We walked around and around until her little eyes seemed sufficiently shut and then went back into our room. And she began to cry again. Back out into the hall. Around and around; back into the room; down in the bassinette; feed; diaper change; crying again. At about 2:30, I was practically walking into walls, yet having fended off two nurses telling me to “give me the baby” and “get some rest,” I was determined to make this work. The third nurse broke me. “Baby is hungry, you need rest, give her to me.” I caved and handed over my child, but not before bluffing to the midwife that Hazel had already had her last dose of medicine and that she didn’t need any more until the morning. Feeling like a complete failure, I crawled back into bed to get some rest.
The following day was much better. We still didn’t have the breastfeeding thing down, but I had managed to keep her happy all day, feeding, changing and sleeping. I spent my down time napping and answering emails. But that evening, Hazel was restless and the nurses were back.
Having read everything I could about breastfeeding, I knew that one of the common ways to derail your own efforts was to offer the baby a bottle of formula. Not only is formula sweeter than breast milk and therefore more appealing to babies who are partial to sweet flavors, but it is much easier for them to suck formula out of a plastic nipple which is designed for faster flow, than to get milk from a breast. These two factors combined can cause a baby to refuse to be breastfed after too many bottles and one too many refusals a mother’s milk can dry up and dreams of a yearlong diet of nutrient and antibody rich breast milk are shot to hell. This was my greatest fear. So every time the nurses said, “Give me your baby,” I felt I was one bottle closer to having a formula fed baby – while granted, not the worst thing in the world, also a big deviation from the healthy start Steven and I wanted to give our child.
The second night was no different than the first, although she did sleep from 8:30 to 10:40 a feet of which I was immeasurably proud, given that she did it under our supervision. But after 11:00 it was a repeat performance of the night before: cry, breast, diaper change, hall, walk, room, cry, breast, diaper change, hall, walk, room. At midnight, I was determined to calm her down and get her to bed. At 1:00, I was determined to get her to calm down long enough to get at least an hour’s rest. By 2:00 I was determined to keep her calm at least until I was supposed to give her another dose of medicine to assure that the nurses didn’t give her any. By 3:00 a.m., I was wheeling her down the hall, dejectedly passing her off to the nurses
The following morning, as the morning before, the nurses wheeled Hazel back into our room around 6:00, bundled up like a little worm, snug in her bed and sound asleep. Their secret – a bottle of formula. I felt awful. Here I was, a mother for only three days and already failing my child. I had tried to breastfeed her and had managed to get through each day to early evening, a painful process that left me in quite a ragged state. I was obviously doing something wrong because 1) it wasn’t supposed to hurt and 2) she wasn’t getting enough to eat. I wrote desperate emails to my mom and close friends with kids, scoured the internet, sought advice from the midwife who had led our prenatal classes, but nothing seemed to help. Everything I read said to consult the hospital lactation consultant, but my doctor, who had proven less than helpful on other matters in the past, simply replied, “Your nipples are too short.” I tried to get help from the nurses, but they just repeated what they had heard the doctor say and suggested that I continue to try and if it didn’t work, “give her a bottle.” By the fourth day, I was in tears and ready to go home, where I could figure out how to care for my child without a nurse rushing in to whisk her off for a bottle.
That last day, I was dreading another evening in the hospital. More than once I had told Hazel, “If you cry, they are going to come and take you from me,” and that is how I felt. Rather than try again and again to get her to latch properly, when she cried, I would just latch her on, painful or not and let her feed, just to keep the nurses out. Both my mother and many friends had assured me that supplementary feeding in the initial days wasn’t going to completely ruin my efforts at breastfeeding, but I was still feeling quite dejected. I knew what was in store for me that evening and had decided early on that I would just give her up early, too tired to fight. But that night around 1:00 a.m. when I gave in and was wheeling her down the hall, she looked up at me with the saddest little face, milk drooling out of the side of her mouth and I thought, “I can’t give up this baby. She doesn’t need to be pumped full of formula. She just needs some TLC from her mother.” So I wheeled her back in and danced up and down the hall for another hour before finally giving in to exhaustion and frustration.
The next morning, we were visited by my doctor and the pediatrician who gave us both a clean bill of health and we checked out and headed home for the next phase of our adventure in new parenthood.
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