Birth Story

My 12-year-old daughter Maeve was a full day old before I met her.

I had suffered an amniotic fluid embolism before she was born by emergency Caesarean section, and spent the night of her birth, and the following day, in the intensive-care unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

My obstetrician promised me Jello if I would walk across the skybridge back to Prentice Women's Hospital, the NMH facility where Maeve was born. The real incentive, though, was the chance to see Maeve and hold her. She was quite a little beauty, with bounteous dark hair.

I don't remember much of our early experience of breast-feeding but it progressed slowly. Maeve, who was just shy of seven pounds at birth, had had several bottles of formula before we met, and the formula kept coming, along with breast-feeding.

No one told me this at the time, but the fact that I had hemorrhaged during Maeve's birth raised the question of whether I would be able to breast-feed at all. Severe blood loss can cause a condition called Sheehan's Syndrome, in which the pituitary gland, starved for oxygen, is damaged to the point where it cannot produce the hormones necessary for lactation. The damage can be partial or total, and can cause other problems as well.

Before Maeve and I went home five days after her birth, a couple of her pediatricians went through the drill with me: Every two hours, around the clock, I was to breast-feed, and then "top her off" with formula.

Now, remember, I had nearly died. I had undergone two emergency surgeries, a Caesarean section and a hysterectomy. I had lost a colossal amount of blood and had been pumped so full of fluid that I weighed thirty pounds more walking out of the hospital with a baby in my arms than I had walking in with her in my belly. I had several oozing sores from a reaction to the tape that had held in the needles attached to various drips. I was a wreck.

At home, we had a major learning curve to address. I had been planning to breast-feed Maeve exclusively, as I had done with her sister, Nora, and we knew nothing about bottle-feeding a newborn. My husband, Ben, who had taken several weeks off work, had to buy some bottles. We had to learn on the fly how to sterilize them. (No one in the hospital had addressed the need to sterilize bottles. Maybe they thought everybody owned a dishwasher. We didn't.) In the short-term, we bought prepared formula.

Then there was the every-two-hour feeding protocol. As if. It worked to a degree during the day, when Ben could help me, but our exhausted family slept through most nights, and Maeve regularly went for eight hours without food. She lost a full pound in her first month of life — a dangerous trend for a developing baby.

We had no help. I don't recall anyone from the hospital calling to see how things were going. We were so depleted that we stumbled from task to task, day to day, though we were in contact with Maeve's pediatrician. But I did persist with breast-feeding, and with time, my milk came in. By the time I went in for my six-week check-up, Maeve was gaining weight and thriving.

Perhaps because it was so hard in the beginning, I cherished breast-feeding Maeve. For the two of us, who had shared a near-death experience, it was a daily chance to refresh our bond. We continued on for three years, encountering more and more raised eyebrows as the months passed. One of my doctors in particular, a specialist I saw a couple of times a year, began to grow shrill after a year about the psychological damage I was doing Maeve by tethering her to me by the breast. I ignored him because breast-feeding had made him nervous from the get-go.

I finally stopped because Maeve was in pre-school and the principal, a woman I liked and trusted, told me I was holding back Maeve's social development by continuing to breast-feed her, by that time usually only at bedtime. I think now that the principal was wrong, but we did have to stop some time. I guess.

At a baby shower before my older daughter, Nora, was born, I held up each newly unwrapped garment and device for the shower guests to admire  with a big, stiff smile, because I had no idea what to do with any of it. I was the youngest of four children, and while I babysat as a teen-ager, I was never the girl people were clamoring to have watch their infants. In any case, baby technology had moved along quite a bit since then.

The theme for my first few months as a mother was discovery  — oh, yes, indeed, many, many discoveries, made usually in a panic, in the middle of the night. Breast-feeding, like everything else, was uncharted terrain for me. My mom had tried to breast-feed a couple of my older sisters but told us she was too "nervous" to succeed. As a baby, I was premature and colicky, and wound up thriving on soy formula.

I don't think either of my sisters who had children breast-fed. (They are both deceased, or I would ask them. Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be smokers.)

By the late 1980s, though, breast-feeding was common but still spottily supported. Interviewing pediatricians a few months before my due date, I remember my delight when I found a male (!) doctor I liked a lot who supported my plan to breast-feed exclusively for several months. (His wife had breast-fed their four children, which can dispose a male doctor to be more supportive of breast-feeding than he might be otherwise.) He left the practice about a week before Nora was born. So much for planning.

At the time, my employer offered an unpaid 12-month maternity leave. Even though my husband was then serving an apprenticeship as a reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, pulling down $11,000 a year, we had saved prodigiously and agreed I should take the full 12 months. So I was free to breast-feed without the constraints of a job.

It went well — not perfectly, but well. I vividly remember the early days, holding the newborn Nora on my forearm, her head against the crook of my elbow, her tush cradled in my hand.

At one point, though, I had a bout of mastitis, which was terrifying while in progress, as my breast hardened, heated up and turned red. I managed to find a lactation specialist who advised me over the phone — they seemed to be scarce and far-flung at the time. My best source was a calm old book, Nursing Your Baby by Karen Pryor, which a friend had recommended. It never failed me.

I breast-fed Nora almost exclusively for about five months. (She did get the odd bottle, including one her first night of life, in the hospital — not my idea.) I thought breast-feeding was beyond easy — always available, always satisfying, and so blissful for both of us. However, I did feel like a combination of Cinderella, always scampering home from the ball in time for that next feeding, and Bossy the Cow.

Nora had eight teeth by the time she was eight months old, when she hit on a delightful (for her) new game. She bit me, hard, at the end of every feeding. She never broke the skin, but she hurt me. She would laugh heartily while I jumped and howled, and then she would hop down and crawl off. Every feeding.

I spent two weeks soliciting advice, reading books, trying all kinds of things to get her to stop. Nothing worked. It seemed to me that giving me that good painful chomp was the best part of breast-feeding for Nora now, while I dreaded every session. She was eating all kinds of food and drinking from a cup. Most women I knew breast-fed for several months — seldom more than a year — and the recommendations hadn't yet come down that advise staying the course for at least a year.

So I weaned Nora. It took two weeks. She was nine months old when we finished. She was a bright and busy girl, and she barely noticed. At first, I wept, then I was sad for a long time.

But I had a life again. I was still Nora's mom, I still wasn't back at work, but I could move freely out in the world. My mind began to re-focus on activities and issues that went beyond parenting. At the time, I felt relief weighing against the regret. I still think it was not a bad thing for that child, at that time, or for me.

My children are 10 years apart in age, and one thing that has struck me since Maeve's birth almost 13 years ago is how much more complicated the world grows as they get older.

When children are small, you can see clearly how their perfect lives will roll out. You can see them graduating from Harvard — or perhaps Yale; you devote serious time to considering which would be better — going into law or medicine, gliding along until they finish up as President of the United States. Along the way, of course, there will be sports trophies, prom dresses, all the trimmings.

Reality sets in gradually. It turns out the kids have learning disabilities, or strange hair, or no interest in sports — whatever, and likely in multiples. Ten years or so after spinning all those perfect dreams, you might find yourself praying they'll finish high school. Or even, please, God, let them stay alive through high school.

When Maeve was in preschool, I remember sitting in a group listening to moms in the Harvard vs. Yale stage, while my mind was on the then-exotic sensation some teen-aged boys in Nora's vast social network had created by sending nude pictures of girls they had probably known since kindergarten out across the Internet. I remember thinking that perhaps I had seen some of those boys, and those girls, on swings in the park or at a library reading hour when they too were small.

What I mean to say is that many of the things that seem critical when children are little get put firmly in perspective as they grow.

Poking around Lisa Belkin's Motherlode blog on the New York Times website this week, I landed on a post called "A Breast-Feeding Guru Who Uses Formula," which attracted me because I have been writing about breast-feeding. Through Belkin, I discovered Katie Allison Granju and her mamapundit blog. (I know, where have I been?)

Granju is a writer and digital-media expert who has become an authority on breast-feeding. Nevertheless, she found with her fifth child, Georgia, now seven weeks old, that she was unable to breast-feed. "I did have colostrum for the first week or two, but I never got the full enchilada," she writes in a post on Babble.com.

She tried "pumping, herbs, supplemental nursing system, plenty of skin to skin with baby, nursing on demand, nipple shields," all to no avail.

She is "resigned" now to the fact that Georgia is a bottle-fed baby, and she does what she can to inject warmth and meaning into an experience she never expected a child of hers to have.

But Granju believes that a horrific recent event in her life has contributed to her inability to breast-feed.

"I suspect that the biggest factor in my inability to produce milk at the moment is that my oldest child died in my arms only a few weeks before G was born. God only knows what the shock of that experience did to my body and its normal functioning," she wrote.

The death of Granju's son Henry from a drug overdose is about as terrible as this world gets. We dream for our children but they live the lives we give them. My heart goes out to the Granjus.

Often, the annual meeting of a medical group produces a flurry of scientific papers, but the meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists seems more like, say, a bunch of writers  getting together. (I attended the 2009 meeting in Chicago.) As a cohort, OB-GYNs seem to want to find out about the newest approaches, tools and techniques they might put to use in their practices, and perhaps exchange some stories from the trenches as well.

But here's something new for consumers from ACOG, which held its annual meeting in San Francisco this week. The fifth edition of Your Pregnancy and Childbirth: Month to Month was unveiled, along with a new companion website,  www.yourpregnancyandchildbirth.com.

While there are many pregnancy books, this one is "unique in the extent of the medical detail that it covers about all aspects of pregnancy, yet it is designed as an easy-to-read, helpful reference for all of those questions that inevitably pop up," said Hal Lawrence, MD, The College's vice president of practice activities in a press release on the ACOG website.

The latest edition of the book has a new chapter that addresses obesity and eating disorders, another devoted to diabetes during pregnancy, and a third covering other chronic diseases like hypertension, heart disease, celiac disease, lupus, and physical and mental disabilities.

"The majority of women do not experience severe complications, but we felt it was important to give a thorough overview so women will know if something's wrong and when to call a doctor," Dr. Lawrence said.

Another new chapter covers feeding the baby, and includes advice on both breastfeeding and the use of formula.