My kids were bottle-fed and lived to tell about it

I read a blog post today called "You're not a bad mom." The author used her little corner of the internet to call a truce between the breast- and bottle-feeding moms and to tell her own story. While my "babies" are 17, 14 and 11, I was instantly transported back to the newborn days when I, too, felt betrayed by my own breasts. The short story is that I breastfed every one of my babies until they were good and dehydrated.

Of course I planned to breastfeed my firstborn baby. That's what all good Mommies do. And breastfeed I did, until she was well under her 10 lb. 4 oz. birthweight at her one-month check up. Well, that just wouldn't do. I rallied my troops, determined to sit around my home unclothed from the waist up and hook myself up to a milk machine to encourage more flow.

This happened to occur about the time we were due to take Annie on her first roadtrip, so I dutifully packed up the breast pump and headed to Ohio. I don't remember exactly where it all fell apart, but I think it was shortly after that weekend trip to Ohio that I abandoned breastfeeding all together, feeling at once relieved and humiliated that my baby seemed only to be satiated after a bottle full of formula.

Round 2. That came when Charlie was born. I was ready this time. This boy would be a breast man. I'd had such a beautiful, New Age-y birth experience (even if you do count the 40 hours that led up to the actual birth), a beautiful breastfeeding experience was sure to follow. Then he turned dangerously jaundiced just a day or so after we arrived home, which earned him a 5-day stay in the NICU, where breastfeeding was forbidden because it was (allegedly) contributing to the extraordinarily high levels of bilirubin in his blood.

When he was discharged from the NICU, I rented an industrial-strength behemoth of a breast pump. This was not the rinky dink one-horned pump I'd used when I was trying to make Annie a breast-fed baby. This was a Cadillac of a lactation machine. Unfortunately, it did not come 100% guaranteed.

He was sleepy, too tired to care to eat. So I stripped him naked, hoping the breeze would keep him awak to eat. I held him to my breast and then the other and back to the first for what seemed like ages. And still he wailed. And lost weight. But I was not going to wave the white flag that easily. I called the lactation consultant from the NICU. She was so nice, so encouraging. She was pretty sure a supplemental nursing system (SNS) was the cure to this ailing situation.

To paraphrase Ouiser Boudreaux from Steel Magnolias, the SNS is a boil on the boob of humanity. You hang a flask of formula or breastmilk from your neck. A tube leads over to one of your breasts, where you tape it down. When you try to get the baby to latch, you shove the tube in his mouth at the same time. Just typing this is giving me PTBFS -- post-traumatic breastfeeding syndrome. One night, after Charlie and I sat up watching 6 back-to-back episodes of the Brady Bunch on Nick at Night, trying to get him to take 2 ounces of liquid gold from the plastic flask, I had had enough. I just couldn't keep up.

So I called the lactation consultant and told her as much. That's ok, she said. She had a bottle that would do the trick. It would train his suck and we'd be in breastfeeding euphoria in no time. "Great," I said. "Leave the bottle at the desk and I'll swing by to pick it up."

That's when she told me she'd have to teach me how to use this bottle. Now, I don't claim to be brilliant, but I am a college-educated woman. The idea of having to be taught how to use some new-fangled bottle was more than I could manage. As it was, I was beginning to resent my baby every time he cried out of hunger. I feared "mealtime" and was ready to call it quits. So I abandoned the "breast is best" dream and dove headlong in to postpartum depression, only in part because I considered myself a failed mother.

Ever the optimist and suitably medicated, when Robbie came along, I was all set to give it another college try. I had the lactation consultant on speed dial. I had the mammoth breast pump rented and all set up. I had laid in a large supply of Mother's Milk Tea and fenugreek and some prescription whose name escapes me now.

We brought Robbie home on a snowy Sunday. On Monday, Charlie was singing into one horn of the breast pump.

"Charlie!" Annie, all of 6 years old, yelled. "THAT is not a microphone! THAT is a BOOB sucker!"

By Thursday, I was on the phone with the lactation consultant. Fussy baby. No real feelings of let-down. Not a whole lot of wet diapers.  "How long should I pump on each side?" I asked.

"Well, until you feel empty," she said. "Probably 4-5 minutes per side."

"I just pumped 20 minutes on one side and got 1/2 an ounce." To which she replied, "I'll bring some samples of formula today." We decided that I am one of those women who truly is incapable of breastfeeding. It seemed like such a crisis of identity then. Now, it's just a story I tell on a blog I share.

I'm not really interested in a historic review of where I went wrong. I tell the story because it was such a guilt-laden experience that I call still recall it with so little nudging. And I tell it because I have 3 terrific, healthy children. Three kids who today, still don't care if I feed them from a pizza box or from a casserole made in my very own oven.

Happy pills

I think my first encounter with depression happened when I was a junior in high school. No one called it "depression" then, but that's what it was. I don't recall all the details, but I do remember a succession of disappointments -- cut from the soccer team, not being selected for yearbook -- had something to do with the overwhelming sadness I felt. My parents sent me to the school counselor and I got through it.

I don't recall being especially depressed during college, though the self-medication I did at weekend fraternity parties during my freshman and senior years might have been an indication of something going on. Or that could have just been my own personal "girls gone not-quite-wild" endeavor.

My first major depression as an adult came in the form of post-partum depression after Charlie was born. It wasn't depression in the long crying jags, sort of way. It was post-partum OCD, which was characterized by what they call "intrusive thoughts" and is really not something I'm ready to write about in detail yet (yes, 15 years later), but suffice it to say, those 15 months were the darkest of my days, ever.

It was during that time that the most-wonderful-woman-in-the-world-who-quite-honestly-saved-my-life encouraged me to look at depression as a disease like diabetes. There is treatment available and it improves health and quality of life, so use it. And mostly I do.

Sometimes, though, I think "I've been doing so well, maybe I'm 'over' it." So I stop taking the antidpressant I've been on for years. And usually, I do ok...for a little while. And then my view of the world begins to change. Sometimes I get sad. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that all I want to do is stay in my bed, or once out get back in it. Mostly, I get very irritable and the world is full of idiots who don't know what they are doing.

So duh, just take the meds, right? Well, it's not actually that easy.

When I don't take the antidepressant for several weeks, or a month or longer, I feel things I don't usually feel when the drugs are managing the chemicals in my brain. I cry at situations where normal human beings would cry, when, medicated, I find tears hard to come by. I'm a little more spontaneous and free to be silly with my kids. I actually have a sex drive. (TMI?) Is it any wonder that many of the most famous artists and thinkers in history have also been classified as a little crazy?

That's where I am right now. I didn't make a conscious decision to stop taking my antidepressant. I thought it was on auto-fill at the pharmacy and I just didn't pay attention to the fact that I'd run out and hadn't gotten a call that a new prescription was ready. A week or two went by and I thought, "Hey, I'm doing pretty well. Maybe I can handle this." Then another week or two went by and people around me kept getting more and more irritating. I could hear myself being unnecessarily snappy. Mike commented that I seemed to be on edge. I do find myself tearing up with greater ease. But I am kind of enjoying the thought of being "free." I'm not paralyzed by sadness. I'm not feeling a magnetic pull to my bed. I'm not having any crazy thoughts.

So I'm here, trying to decide where to move from here. Go back to the antidepressant which has served me well and which resolves the world of so much of its idiocy (as I perceive it to be) and takes the biting edge off my anger? Or stay drug-free? If I choose Plan B, I know I'll need to employ some other techniques for dealing with it -- things like exercise, meditation, etc. (For the record, Mike is all for Plan A.)

I'm not sure why I felt compelled to write about this. Maybe that's part of the unmedicated inhibition that I'm experiencing? Maybe because I suspect others know where I'm coming from. Who knows? I guess you can just call me crazy.

Awake and unmedicated

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions and commiserations regarding my insomniac ways. Several of you suggested pharmaceutical intervention, which reminded me of the one and only time I've ever taken drugs to help me sleep. It seemed like a good story to share here.

The year was 1999. Annie was a little over 2-1/2 years old. Charlie was a baby, about 2 months old. I had wicked and severe postpartum depression. Postpartum OCD, to be exact. It was, without exaggeration, the worst time of my life.

My ob-gyn had referred me to a post-partum depression counselor, a woman named Birdie to whom I will forever be indebted. Anyway, Birdie and the ob-gyn decided that I should see a psychiatrist who could prescribe me some medication. He turned out to be the worst psychiatrist ever to be given a license. I asked him what kind of experience he had working with postpartum depression. His answer? His wife had given birth to 4 kids. Jerk.

Then he tried to tell me that everything I was experiencing was just a fabrication because I'm a writer and so I was just concocting these scenarios in my head. A-hole. Fine. Whatever buddy, just give me the prescriptions and I'll be on my pitiful way.

He prescribed me an antidepressant and Ambien, a drug that would help me sleep. I had been barely surviving on about 1 to 2 hours of sleep each night (even though Charlie was sleeping in 5 or 6 hours stretches at that point) and he felt, and Birdie agreed, that getting more sleep would go a long way in helping my psyche.

That same day, we went to my in-laws for the weekend. We hadn't told them anything about the struggles I was having, but planned to let them know I wasn't feeling well and would be spending most of the weekend resting. That evening, I took out the bottle of Ambien. The instructions said "take one tablet one hour before bedtime." Perfect. I could take one, read Annie a story, say prayers and tuck her into bed and get in bed myself while I waited for the Ambien to kick in.

Well it would have been perfect. Except that within five minutes of taking the Ambien, I was slurring my words and stumbling in the hallway. Mike freaked out, thinking that I had overdosed. He called Birdie, convinced that I was trying to off myself with Ambien. Apparently -- because I don't remember anything after the hallway -- I got on the phone with Birdie and assured her that I had only taken one Ambien and I wasn't trying to kill myself.

And that, my friends, is the first and last time I've ever taken drugs to help me sleep.