What’s the most natural thing in the world? Breastfeeding? The naked human body? Worms and cockroaches and creepy crawlies? A little flatulence after a satisfying dinner of rice and beans?
Any one of them. Except for breastfeeding.
This declaration, I know, sounds a bit aggressive, wounded perhaps, certainly not in keeping with the spirit of someone who believes that everything can be cured by yoga. Everything, it turns out in my own personal experience, except breastfeeding.
Because no matter how many people might tell you otherwise, it is not the most natural thing in the world. At least for those of us whose children would end up wolf food were it not for utterly unnatural things like the medication I take to induce lactation. A medication whose dosage I am slowly reducing, slowly reducing my milk supply along with it.
I am also, not incidentally, watching my sanity level slowly reduce as well as I fruitlessly wish I just knew for sure when I should stop.
Our Bodies Do Not Betray Us
I should be clear here: Feeding Lily has not been the nightmare that feeding Jake was. Not since 2006 has there has been a tube taped to my nipple with stinging surgical tape that must be ripped off, tearfully, in a steamy shower. My living room is not adorned with an industrial-looking pump, lording over its surroundings as a testament to my body’s faulty machinery. Formula passed Lily’s lips a few times when she was just over a week old, but she rather quickly deemed it an inferior vintage and consented to work a bit harder for a diet consisting solely of breast milk. The only thing she has required in return is that I take medication.
Had I not been through all of this and more already with Jake, I might not have begun popping domperidone the second I suspected that Lily wasn’t getting enough to eat. I am, after all, hardly a cheerleader for the miracles of western medicine. Sure, it has its uses for truly life-threatening conditions like cancer. (Except it’s not so great at that according to a recent article in the New York Times.) I haven’t even considered getting a waiver for the overabundance of inoculations my children must receive in order to attend school. And I had no qualms about embracing antibiotics when they ended Jake’s string of ear infections.
But I’m just not the person who runs to the doctor for, well, anything if I can help it.
And breastfeeding? If you had asked me two and a half years ago, before Jake was born, I would have pointed out the fate of the free formula I received in the mail and immediately dumped in the trash. No need for formula or the advice of doctors or other specialists when you’re a work-at-home, yoga-centric, healthy living, all natural (if you don’t count my hair color) gal like me.
Except that it didn’t come naturally. And it’s not — I have learned through long, hard months of punishing myself — my fault. It’s just the way it is. Once upon a time, babies like Jake and Lily were simply wolf food.
Having accepted this particular limitation of my body, you’d think I’d be okay with the prescribed regimen for the domperidone. Start at the highest recommended dose, I was advised, and then slowly, a week at a time, reduce by 10 milligrams until you determine the lowest dose that works for you.
So far, so good. Except I have become addicted to the reductions.
The first few drops made not a bit of difference in my abundant-for-me ability to feed my daughter. “Hmm,” I thought. “Maybe, just maybe, all I needed was a kick start.”
I dropped the dosage again and, okay, I wasn’t making as much milk. But that only meant fewer nights waking up soaking in a puddle of something that felt like sugar water and smelled like sour milk. “Hey,” I thought cockily, “maybe I don’t need the medication at all. Maybe I need nothing more than a few capsules of fenugreek and to be okay with the fact that it makes me smell like a pancake slathered in maple syrup.”
I started almost looking forward to the day I would test the waters of a lower dose, sweating a bit at the possibilities, but waiting to be surprised. Because somewhere inside I believed I would beat the meds.
And in that belief lurked a whole lot of judgment. How natural I’d be without them! What a great mother! Obviously a better one than I am now because I’d no longer worry about whether Lily was getting enough to eat! I’d be free to figure out her every other little cry and whine, to gauge perfectly her needs, to create a child who NEVER EVER COMPLAINS because I’d see to it that she had nothing to complain about!
Did I mention that I’m down to just half my original dose and suddenly I’m pretty sure Lily’s not getting enough to eat? Best case, I hang in there, feed her 20 times a day, and hope my acupuncturist comes up with something more potent than fenugreek. Worst case? I bump the domperidone back up a mere 10 milligrams.
It’s not a big deal. I know that. But somehow getting to the place where I know what Lily needs — that’s a big deal. It’s the figuring out whether I’ve dropped too much, whether I need to take more, how long I’m willing to continue taking the drugs at all. The not having things settled — that’s what’s making me crazy. As if my job is to get everything about her right the first time, before she tells me I got it wrong.
Anyone who believes that has never cared for a baby.
Letting My Baby Lead Me
I fed Lily about six times before leaving for Baby and Me yoga class at 10:30 this morning. Just, you know, to be sure she wasn’t cranky and hungry when we got there.
Happily, neither of us was. I got to vent my troubles to the first mom to arrive after me, giving her the opportunity to point out the woes of producing too much milk. It’s always something with this new motherhood stuff.
And Lily? She grinned and cooed and eventually did a decent enough job of eating to convince me that maybe, just maybe, I’m worrying for nothing. Then she cried a little and went to sleep, as she does.
The best part, though — and the reason I’m racing to write this while she continues the nap she began there that I have successfully and with breath held tranfered from yoga studio to car seat, car seat to porch swing, and porch swing to bouncy seat on the dining room table in front of me — was a sentence the teacher spoke to all of us:
“Let your child lead you.”
Now, of course I know how wise this is. If I’m not mistaken, it’s what I’ve written about a hundred and forty odd times on this website.
But I needed to hear it. We all need to hear it. Whether it’s our child or our career paths or our love lives. We need to be led.
It’s easy for me to concede that I’m not in control. After a lot of practice it’s even easy for me to allow myself to be carried by forces bigger than myself, to make choices aware that they will set me on a path but not guarantee where it will end, to, in short, enjoy the ride.
Except.
My dirty little secret is that I can survive this level of freefall only if I have a few safety nets in place. Some structure on which I can count, a kind of system of bumpers to cushion me as I ricochet about a carefully Melissa-proofed space.
My issue right now is that I don’t know which net awaits me — the higher dose one or the drug-free breastfeeding one. I honestly don’t care that much which one it is. Obviously, I’d prefer the latter, but, hey, I haven’t minded the ride on meds so far. It’s just that I’d like to know.
Not because of the knowing part. Because of the getting to the place where I know part.
How to explain this? I am okay with Lily crying sometimes, even if it means she’s a little hungry. If she gets really hungry, I can always heat up some of the precious frozen breast milk I’ve been storing up against the day she starts daycare. I am okay with taking 50 milligrams of domperidone for the next four-and-a-half months and then deciding whether to continue doing so. I’m okay with Lily shifting to formula if I decide six months of meds — however invisible the side effects — is enough. There is, in short, nothing terrible about the figuring-it-out phase.
Except the very specter of figuring it out.
It is in this unsettled place that my personal understanding of surrender is tested. How much, I ask myself, can I let go when I don’t know for how long I am letting go or how far I am flying before the safety net of the known reaches up to catch me?
The answer, of course, is up to my practice. Because no matter how far I might be able to go, there is always someplace further. My practice lies in learning to get there. Just as every single yoga pose offers endless places for us to go. No one ever “masters” an asana. She just keeps practicing.
And here is where the wisdom of the yoga teacher’s words hit me. “Let your child lead you.” Parenthood is one long, intense experience of practice. You are never, ever in control of a child. You never know where you’re going, even when you think you do. You always have to be ready to recognize that the bumper you thought was up ahead has just opened up and you are about to hurtle into a great abyss. You can do it alone or you can look up, let go, and follow your baby. Or whatever it is that’s messing with your plan.
Without a doubt, she will lead you to the place you were meant to be. And the not knowing — the fear of and need to trust — that, I believe, is the most natural thing in the world.
Uttita Hasta Padangustasana — Reaching with Respect for the Destination
Uttita Hasta Padangustasana — standing head-to-knee — is a pretty intense pose. So respect that and practice the same principles with a simple pascimottanasana (seated forward fold) if you choose.
I offer uttita hasta padangustasana because I don’t know a person who always knows where this pose will go for her on a given day. (Well, okay, one or two I used to practice with who have graced the cover of Yoga Journal, but they don’t count.) It’s hard, and there a several things working at once — the hamstring stretch, the balance, your core muscles, quieting your mind. Safety nets, in other words, are hard to come by here. And that’s just what I’m going for — take a leap in the safety of your practice and see if you can go where it leads instead of the other way around.
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