Maybe I couldn’t conceive on my own and maybe I couldn’t get to term, but by fuck, I was going to breastfeed. When the babies were born, I wanted to get to the NICU immediately, not just to check out their adorable punim, but because I needed to get them on my breasts. Everyone knows that early breast milk is crucial for a full-term baby so imagine what I had convinced myself in my anxious little head in regards to my premature, underweight, IUGR babies. It was like my breasts were literally leaking the medication that would get them home and I wanted to shove my boob straight into their mouth AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

Except that my breasts weren’t really leaking anything. Strangely, I hadn’t had any breast changes during the pregnancy. No sensitivity, no big boobage. My size C’s stayed firmly size C’s. I commented to my OB about this and he brushed it aside saying that many women experienced no breast changes. Which is probably true.

But then my milk didn’t come in. My boobs never became “engorged.” In fact, it was sort of like my boobs hadn’t gotten the message at all that I was pregnant nor had given birth. I thought of my boobs like teenagers glued to a Sony Playstation who have blankly turned towards my voice with a glazed over expression. “What? You were pregnant? Dude…that is nasty.”

But the breastfeeding consultants and books didn’t find this a problem. Rest more! Pump more! Eat more! Drink more! This was the advice that kept coming around every time I set up a session with a consultant and mentioned that eight full pumpings as well as several sessions directly on the breast every day yielded at most one ounce–altogether. In other words, I could squeeze out a few cc’s each session and if you poured all of them together into a vial, you could sometimes eek out an ounce that would go to one baby for one feed.

Books promised me that if I followed their instructions, I would easily be producing four ounces or more per feed. And I believed it because I wanted to believe it. Even though everything felt wrong just as it had with conception. I knew long before that first year was up that something felt “off” and I knew long before the blood work yielded no prolactin in my body that something just didn’t feel right with breastfeeding. But I really wanted to breastfeed, so I kept with it for weeks, drinking the water, popping the Reglan, pumping with one of their dirty spit cloths under my nose. I was literally willing to try anything.

Breastfeeding for me was very similar to trying to conceive. The initial message when I expressed my fear that something was wrong was that I needed to give it time. I was told I need to relax. I was told I needed to focus on timing and drink more robitussin or green tea. I was told that a good vacation would bring me a baby. Then the blood work was taken and diagnoses were doled out: POF, LPD, MTHFR/PA1 4G/4G. Suddenly, there were identifiable problems and doctors stopped telling me to relax and started addressing the situation as if they had believed me all along when I said, “something just doesn’t seem right.”

Which made me realize that breastfeeding consultants are a lot like pilates instructors. They have a focused agenda. Pilates instructors are going to push a pilates routine with exercise being of utmost importance. They believe that almost everyone can do pilates as long as you really want to do it and you commit yourself to the exercises. If you’re going to take a half-assed approach, you’re going to get half-assed results. But if you make the commitment to doing pilates every single day and doing the exercises correctly, you are going to succeed and feel good and be aligned and whatever else you gain from pilates. Pilates instructors are never going to nod their head in agreement and say, “sedentary living and forgoing exercise to drink a latte and read a book is just as good as pilates.”

Therefore, I cannot blame breastfeeding consultants when they have an agenda. Breastfeeding consultants do not believe that formula is just as good as breastmilk, therefore, I can hardly blame them when I went to them for instruction and had them berate me for giving my children formula (we had a breastfeeding consultant tell us we made a terrible choice by taking our children off IVs and giving them formula through an ng tube. She told us that this proved that we weren’t committed to breastfeeding). I can blame them for telling me continuously that my lack of breastmilk was my own doing and that all women can breastfeed if they wish. Turns out, if you don’t produce any prolactin, you can’t. But no one told me to have blood work taken. Instead, it was something I had to push for with my OB at my 6 week appointment. And with the results, there was no apology at pushing my body and self-esteem through hell. There was simply a shrugging of the shoulders and a comment that this “sometimes happens to women who use Follistim during fertility treatments.”

Which is a long rambling to get to why I’ve been waiting for a book like Andi Silverman’s Mama Knows Breast for a while. One evening while the kids were still in the NICU, we went down to a local bookstore and sat down with every breastfeeding book, searching for answers. And the answers I found were the same blameist ideology that fuels unsuccessful conception until infertility is diagnosed–if it isn’t working, it must be your fault. There must be something you’re not doing or that you are doing that is getting in the way of conception. If you’d just lose weight/gain weight/relax/exercise it would happen.

Which is why Andi Silverman’s breastfeeding book is different. It is written not by a breastfeeding consultant or a La Leche League spokesperson, but by a mother who wanted to pass on whatever knowledge she gleaned from her own experience to other mothers who might be struggling with breastfeeding. She doesn’t have that La Leche League agenda and even–gasp!–talks about formula and throws it out there as an option. As she states on page 36, “You’re the only one who has to feed your baby, and you’ll choose what works best for you.” Thank you, Andi.

The book is a breastfeeding book so it goes through breastfeeding instructions as well as ways to troubleshoot. But the difference between this book and others is that I didn’t walk away feeling like shit about myself. She found the perfect tone. Even in her long list of true-and-false questions about breastfeeding, she leaves open the possibility that breastfeeding may not work for everyone and the overriding message is “give it a try” instead of “breast is best and you are a terrible mother if you’re giving your child sub-par nutrition” (an actual message I received from an actual person).

Why do I care about a breastfeeding book? Because if I ever get pregnant again, in the third trimester, I was told that they could try to replace the missing prolactin (is this true? Who knows since that OB also told me that he could get me pregnant without treatments this time around). And yes, if it’s possible, I want to try breastfeeding again. I’ll admit this here–I don’t even think it’s for that baby. I think it’s for me–for conquering something in regards to conception, delivery, and feeding. I want to succeed at breastfeeding.

And this is the book I’m going to use. Because if it isn’t working, I want a friend to be on the page, giving a sympathetic smile and saying, “at least you tried.” Not a lactation consultant who will tsk tsk me and say, “no prolactin? Not a problem.” Which is not to say that every breastfeeding consultant is like this and I’m sure this post will cause a slew of people writing to tell me all about how breast is best and how they’re sorry I h
ad a bad experience but they know a great consultant or resource I can use next time.

And this post is not meant to freak you out if you are currently pregnant after treatments, but it should be a heads up to start with blood work to check that all is kosher if your milk doesn’t come in. This was my experience with breastfeeding and it wrecked havoc with my self-esteem. So next time, I’m sticking with Andi Silverman’s book and tossing out the other agenda-laden breastfeeding guides. Boobs, beware! I’ve conquered my ovaries and I’ve conquered my uterus. I’m coming for you next. I mean…after I get knocked up…

For the First Happiness Challenge, I chose to read for a half hour between 10:30 and 11 p.m. One of three things happened each night. (1) I would forget entirely. (2) I would start reading at 9 p.m. and continue reading past the designated point, so it wasn’t a conscious decision to take a half hour for myself. (3) I would sit down to read and then remember something I forgot to do. So I would pop up and take care of that thing and then sit down again. After reading one page, I would decide I want a cup of ice cream and I would have to bother Josh for 5 minutes on my way to make the ice cream. Finally, I would sit back down and read another page, but my mind would wander so I’d have to read it again. Then I’d have to jump up and write myself a note so I wouldn’t forget something. Finally, the buzzer would go off and I’d announce, “I am definitely happier.”

Ben-Shahar warned me that starting a new ritual would be hard to do. And I didn’t believe him. I am a damn fool.

I think part of my problem was choosing something that felt like one more thing I had to do in my day rather than feeling like a break. I wanted to choose something that I could do for free and could do easily. Reading is a lot of fun when it isn’t a task you need to cross off of a to-do list. It’s sort of like baking bread. When we need bread, baking bread is a chore. When I just decide to spontaneously throw together a pouliche and make a baguette, it’s relaxation.

I am going to go another month with this first challenge and switch over to Calliope’s ritual to take herself out for coffee once a week. That will make me feel special and happy. At least, I think it will. And if it makes getting coffee out feel like a chore, all the better for my wallet to have that ritual taken away.

Which brings us to the Second Happiness Challenge: meditation. This one is a little bit easier to schedule into your day. In order to participate, you need to commit to meditating for at least ten minutes a day, everyday. Close the door to your office, stretch out on the floor and deep breathe. Or get home from work, lie down on the sofa, and take ten minutes not to think. Try to pick the same place and time each day. You can do it at any point in the day: right when you wake up, during lunch, or before you go to bed (though it’s sort of cheating if you just call the ten minutes before you go to sleep your “meditation time”).

If you already meditate, keep doing what you do. If you want to begin, the Wikipedia–that amalgamation of all knowledge–has a decent article. What may work best is to picture a happy space or to allow your mind to go completely blank. According to Tal Ben-Shahar (the author of Happier) the point is not only the immediate stress-relief of meditation. It is also the idea of training your mind so you can use this stress reliever during stressful situations. For instance, the next time I’m over the Bay Bridge, I will go to my happy place (while driving?) and use that meditation muscle to relax even though it technically isn’t my meditation time. Does that make sense?

If you want to participate, leave a comment below or email me at thetowncrier@gmail.com and I’ll add you to the meditation list. The challenge runs from October 3 until November 1 (30 days) and you need to commit to trying this for all 30 days. Keep notes on your progress over the month and on November 1, post about your experience with the Second Happiness Challenge.

Click below to see more tales of happiness from the First Happiness Challenge:

1. Stirrup Queens (Melissa)
2. Clumsy Kisses (Rebecca)
3. Flutter of Hope (Dianne)
4. Looking for 2 Lines (Lindsay)
5. BagMomma (Shelli)
6. My Journey to Mommyhood (Courtney)
7. Diagnosis Unexplained (Jenna Sais Quoi)
8. Sticky Feet (Jamie)
9. Motherhood (Grad3)
10. Road Blocks and Rollercoasters (Me)
11. Sticky Bean (Kirsten)
12. Southern Infertility (Samantha)
13. Miss E’s Musings (Ellen)
14. Vacant Womb (A B)
15. My Many Blessings (Tina)
16. All Things Deb (Deb)
17. Waiting… (Sandra)
18. Creating Motherhood (Calliope)
19. A Someday Mom (Kim)
20. Reproductive Jeans (JJ)
21. Serenity Now (Serenity)
22. A Sibling for Celia (Shelby)
23. Are We There Yet (Kami)
24. Dead Baby Jokes (Niobe)
25. Are We There Yet (Teamwinks)
26. Fortune Cookie Follies and Cats in the Cradle (Beagle)
27. The Idle Mind of Beth (Beth)
28. The Other Shoe (Joy Suzanne)
29. Taking the Statistical Bullet (Katie)
30. TTC with DH… (Trying2007)
31. Baby Step (Baby Step)
32. Baby Steps to Baby Shoes (BStBS)

Sometimes, you need a sad movie or television show just to open the sluice gate and bring on the cry. When you’re feeling like shit, it can feel good to let out the tears and have a cathartic moment. Sometimes, it’s the whole movie (like Schindler’s List) or a scene (think Sally Field in Steel Magnolias) This list has been compiled by bloggers in the IF/pg loss blogosphere. Feel free to add to the list via the comments section. In time, I will move comments onto the list.

It was a sad week in the blogosphere. And strangely, last year, I was leaving for Chincoteague when Cancer Baby died. And this year, I was also leaving for Chincoteague when I read that Lisa had succumbed to cancer. If you never read More Than My Share or conversed with Lisa off-blog, you missed out. I have been sitting in front of the computer for quite some time now, trying to pull out words. And in the last 45 minutes, the only way I can describe this loss is that in the middle of this bright, buzzing blogosphere, there is a small corner of emptiness where a light just burned out. And I’m so sad that there’s no way to relight it again. There was only one Lisa P.

I don’t have the heart to take her name off of the peer counselor list. She was the person who gave me the questions to ask the hematologist and she is the person who told me to push for the Folgard that I take every night. And I can’t stand the thought of not having her name there. So I removed the link to her email address and left up her name. Because she was here and she was in our community. And she will be missed.

It is really hard to write anything after writing that. It is probably very hard to read anything after reading that. There is no pause long enough.

Two weeks ago, I asked for songs that made you feel good. That made you feel like rolling down the car windows or marching into the RE’s office and grabbing the dildo cam like a microphone (wait…what? Mel never said anything about grabbing the dildo cam. I don’t even do karaoke…).

This week, switching gears. Because sometimes you need a good cry. This list is the absolute best movies to bring on a cry. A loud, cathartic, entire-box-of-tissues cry. I will kick it off with Steel Magnolias. Say what you want about Dolly Parton and Julia Roberts and big hair, but that scene after the funeral? I still cannot watch Sally Field in anything else without thinking about that scene. Brokeback Mountain almost killed me (especially when he visited the parents). Late Summer Blues (and I’ve seen it 3000 times so I always know what’s coming). Contact (when she sees her dad). Run with it: what do you watch when you need to have a good cry and get it all out? Put down as many as you can think up before you hit “post” on your comment.

It feels very strange to take two days off from doing Lost and Found. It almost feels like there needs to be a weekend edition when I’m back to unguarded Internet access.

Lori has yet another cool idea that will reveal the interconnectedness of our blogs. Click here to read more.

So…we’re almost at that time…the 30th…and the end of the First Happiness Challenge. I’m going to be frank; I really sucked at this. Next month, I’m stealing Calliope’s idea and taking myself out for coffee once a week. But if you are participating, starting looking through any notes you took over the course of the month and post about the Challenge starting on the 30th (Sunday). Here are the original directions from the post:

Keep a running post about your ritual that you will publish on September 30th. Keep it in your draft folder, but add to it over time to talk about your ritual–how it makes you feel, whether or not it is bringing you happiness, whether you had to change your ritual mid-challenge, whether you’ll keep at it indefinitely. If you don’t have a blog, keep your thoughts on a Word document that you can send to me right before September 30th and I’ll post it for you.

Hope you have had more luck that I have in keeping to the Challenge. Next month’s challenge is maybe a little easier? Harder? Easier? I’m not sure. More about that next week.

Do you know what would make me happy? To win this. You should enter too. There’s still time. A warning before you click over, the blog is called 5 Minutes for Mom. But the ladies there are very very cool.

Now, the blogs…

I was absolutely transfixed by Kami’s recounting at Are We There Yet? of her egg donor’s retrieval. Not the actual procedure since that was pretty textbook, but the emotions behind a known egg donor cycle. It was so moving, the friendship that has grown between these three people, and so honest, raw, emotional. She writes: “Sometimes it is hard to take in – the things you have been willing to do, the unwished for events that you learned to embrace, the next best option you decided was no longer on the “will not do” list – all in a quest to have a child. A quest others achieve by simply falling into each others arms in a moment of passion. It boggles the mind.” Even more moving is the end of the post where Kami and her husband repeat a ritual they have done for every IVF cycle: “That night, Brad and I drove to our clinic so we could wave at our embryos from the parking lot. It has been a ritual to visit our embryos every day between retrieval and transfer since our first IVF. I don’t think that they can sense our warm thoughts and expressions of love from five stories below, but maybe they can. Either way, it helps us feel more connected to them. Last night was no exception, but it was different…[but] those embryos know us. They know Brad because it was his body that grew the sperm. They know me because the eggs felt the love and support I had for Belinda while they were growing. They already know our energy and now they are waiting to come home.” And if that doesn’t make a cry catch in your throat, you have no heart. Go over and read the whole piece. It is long, but well worth it.

Also on the egg donor front is Bylthe’s post on Over Hard about choosing an egg donor. Or, as she states, her replacement. She goes through numerous traits and why they are important to her, adding, “Again – my understudy should be as close to the original cast as possible, no?” It was an entirely new way of looking at donor eggs that I hadn’t considered yet. The idea of finding a “you” out there in the ether. At the end of the post, she is on the brink of hitting send. It really is a moment of holding one’s breath, the possibilities of finding yourself out there.

GirlH at More Than a Tata has a post I like this week that promises to be continued once life settles down over in Tata
ville. It is about the friendships that don’t make it through infertility and loss. You should read this post now so when GirlH updates soon, you’ll know what she’s talking about. You will probably spend at least part of the post nodding your head in agreement.

Jenn at Adventures In-Fertility had a great post about the hurry-up-and-wait nature of infertility as well as the idea of time moving too fast to slow down or too slow to speed up. The waiting waiting waiting is well-known in infertility. But Jenn writes about the waiting that takes place even after the long-awaited baby arrives: “And yet, somewhere along the way, we want that baby to reach its ‘milestones’ as quickly as possible. So we hurry up and wait. And while we were hurried, and while we were waiting, we find that the baby is only five weeks away from her first birthday. And I am typing through tears as I realize that her whole life is going to be lived in fast forward from this point forward. I cannot slow it down. I wish I could ‘freeze frame’, slow-mo, whatever you call it. I want her to reach those milestones, I am so excited for every single one of them. And yet, with each one that she reaches I realize she is that much closer to her independence. One day she will be completely grown, and I will have to hurry up and wait for grandchildren to start the cycle all over again.” She really captures the bittersweet nature of watching a child grow, the sense of life moving on fast forward.

Lastly, this post at The Maybe Baby cracked me up. I think it was the graphic. But still, that dream…

Wait…I said, wait…give me your sad movies. Your clutching-an-entire-wad-of-
tissues-while-sobbing sad movie. The one that made you feel like you had been cleaned out from the inside by the time the closing credits rolled. Anything that brings on the cry.

Pictures from Chincoteague (including deer that were five feet away from my camera–yes, mum, I walked that close to tick-infested deer while on vacation) coming soon. Including another ode to why I love this crazy island and how Josh has scared the SHIT out of me by quoting An Inconvenient Truth since we arrived, reminding me with every breath about island erosion.

As I was crossing the 4.3 miles of the Bay Bridge, doing my deep breathing exercises and trying to unclench my hands from time to time to keep them from becoming permanently gripped to the steering wheel (thank you, adrenaline-induced strength), I learned a little bit about myself. Something along the lines of an After School Special on understanding and overcoming fear. Making my trip from Rehoboth back to D.C. one to grow on.

I operate best with an escape route.

While I enjoy the idea of carpools, I’m not really into participating unless I am the driver. I like knowing that I could leave at any point–that it’s firmly in my control. Back in graduate school, as I was sulking one night in my dorm room (why oh why did I agree to the graduate dorms that first year?), my friends talked me into going out to the usual Thursday night bar extravaganza at the local VFW. The promise was that the moment I wanted to go home, they would drive me back.

One drink and a game of pool later and I was ready to leave, but they continued their conversations and held me off with “just another minute, Mel” and “we just got here!” Being car-less and stuck in Northampton made me feel a bit like a wild animal. I ended up slipping out of the bar and walking several blocks to catch one of three buses that took me close enough to the dorms. An hour and a half later, I was back in my dorm room, only a few miles from the VFW, but finally breathing easily. I hate being stuck.

My fears of flying, my fears of bridges, my fears of tight-confined spaces, they’re all fears shared by many other people. And the commonality between all of these fears is not only the relinquishment of control (wait…how do you relinquish control with a bridge? Or a tight-space? Can you just run with me and not look too closely at the argument?), but the lack of an easy escape.

Once that plane is in the air, a passenger can’t really call out, “I’ve changed my mind. This is freaking me out. I really want to get off.” I mean, I have called this out before, but it doesn’t do anything. You’re at the mercy of the flight time. Once you’re on the bridge, you can’t stop the car and get out of your vehicle until you’re on the other side. And while people rarely think about this as they’re passing over a wimpy span like the Delaware Memorial Bridge, you have a lot of time to think about the fact that you’re stuck hundreds of feet above the water when you’re on the Bay Bridge for five minutes minimum sans traffic. Being tied down, being held down, being confined–these are all things I avoid because they tie into that same base fear, the lack of an easy escape route. I am also not a fan of roller coasters (again, I can’t stop the ride and get off). And not just for the drops, loops, and general queasiness-inducing motions of a roller coaster. I like control. And not just control. I like having my own personal stop button.

Sometimes, when people are talking about a next step with treatments or paths to parenthood, they feel the need to qualify it with “but this doesn’t mean that I don’t have hope for X working.” You must have a smidgen of hope–if not, why would you put yourself through it? But I think it’s sensible to have an escape plan. An escape plan is not just a stop button; it’s a segue into the next step, the next path, the next action. It’s stopping doing X and starting doing Y. Having an escape plan doesn’t mean that you don’t like where you are or what you’re doing. You just need to know the location of the door so you could leave at any time, therefore making it more enticing to stay. Does that make any sense?

I don’t think I would freak out so badly on the Bay Bridge if there was a button I could push and teleport off the bridge if the panic became unbearable. Just knowing there was something I could do would ensure that I felt comfortable.

Which brings us back to infertility and not just the idea of an escape plan for a current treatment (knowing which protocol you’re trying next, for example. Or knowing you’re doing another FET cycle immediately afterwards if this one doesn’t work), but an escape from trying in general.

I don’t currently have an escape plan.

I am meandering. I am trying things and thinking through possibilities and I have a general sketch of what will happen here or there. But Josh asked me a few weeks ago, “what will you do if we never have a third child?” and I didn’t have an answer. I just cried. And on the Bay Bridge, I realized that my discomfort in general is the lack of an escape route. What if there isn’t a third child? What if at the end of all of this, treatments don’t work again? Do we walk towards donor egg or adoption? Or close the door on trying for a third at all?

There’s a danger in setting up walls because those are meant to keep you in. Limits cause more panic–the internal promise, for example, that this is the final IVF attempt. But escape routes are small windows towards someplace better. Where limits bring about second-guessing, escape routes bring about relief. The relief may be mixed with other emotions–guilt, sadness, longing–but it is relief nonetheless.

And here is the difference. Walls have limits and negatives built into the phrasing: “I will never…” or “we will stop…” or “we can’t do…” whereas escape routes follow an if/then formation. “If the RE thinks I have a low chance of conceiving with my eggs, then I will start with donor eggs.” The only problem is setting up escape routes that seem unappealing. The other problem is that things sometimes don’t look appealing until you’ve been forced to look at them from a different angle.

At this point, I haven’t really put up walls–I mean, I have general limits for myself that are conducive to our financial situation or emotional capital–but I also haven’t set up an escape route. And not knowing how I can get off this ride is like traveling over the Bay Bridge, the water lapping below and my hands fearfully gripping the wheel.

Do you have walls or escape routes? If you have an escape route, when did it occur to you and how did you plan it?