Welcome to Women of Sustenance.
There's a place I like to sit when I'm nursing where I can look out at the Jemez Mountains in the distance. In the near foreground is a deciduous tree some hundred feet away that hovers above the piñons and juniper shrubs; the more likely survivors in this dry, desert climate. While nursing our second daughter who was born in late May of 2017, I watched as the leaves on the tree turned a bright green in the spring despite the limited rainfalls, how their color became deeper from the monsoon season in July and August, and as they turned the magnificent colors of fall before drifting to the ground.
In 2014, my husband and I met, fell in love and were married, all in under a year and a half. Because I was nearly forty, we moved quickly in building our family. After seeing a heartbeat eight weeks into our first pregnancy, our next visit to the doctor revealed that we'd had a miscarriage. Like many who've experienced them, we learned they are far more common than we thought, but at the time we were stunned and heartbroken. Fortunately, I became pregnant with our first daughter shortly afterwards, and five months after she was born, I became pregnant with our second daughter. We now have a third baby on the way, and just recently celebrated our third wedding anniversary. I've never had more respect for mothers, parents, partners and the strength and dedication it takes to build and sustain a family. It's the most joyous time I've ever experienced, and in other ways, the most emotionally and physically complex.
After our first daughter was born, I had some signs of postpartum depression and anxiety, although at the time and even now, I consider many of those feelings to be the honest feelings that one who has just given birth might have. I worried about leaving her somewhere, about someone breaking into our apartment and taking her, and at my lowest, about getting up and walking out the door. When my husband left for work or the gym and I was sitting on our green couch in our Brooklyn basement apartment nursing, I felt like I was still sitting in the same spot, nursing, when he came back. I worked through emotions of resentment and anger at what felt like a loss of my independence, and my fear at having those emotions, all the while thinking how I was the lucky one who got to experience motherhood. It was a conflation of highs and lows that can still be hard to weed through, not only for personal reasons, but also within the framework of societal standards placed on women through the process of pregnancy, birth and postpartum.
When people ask me what it's like to have children so close together, I always say that it's busier, but not harder. My most difficult transition was becoming a mother in the first place. Two years later, it has gotten much, much easier, mainly because I've gotten used to it, and many times more joyful, because it really is an indescribable pleasure to watch them grow.
In the first stages, from the moment they're born, babies need to be fed. If you're nursing or pumping, it's an incredible yet overwhelming feeling to know that your body is responsible for sustaining them. If you're formula feeding, which I began when both of our daughters were between six and eight months old, there can be guilt and judgement associated with doing so. Our first daughter was in NICU for nine days. I pumped every few hours to bring the nurses my milk to supplement with their formula while recovering from a forty hour labor that resulted in an emergency c-section. Before we took her home, a nurse told me to try and stay on their schedule of changing and feeding her every two hours. Fortunately, our daughter took to the breast right away, but I wasn't understanding how she sometimes seemed hungry a half hour or less after I had just fed her. Someone else had told me that a "good" feeding should last twenty minutes. I timed them on my phone and got antsy if the feeding lasted more than twenty minutes, and frustrated if she only latched for five. When we took her to a specialist for a reason unrelated to her NICU stay, she was crying and the doctor asked me if she was hungry. I replied that I had just fed her before we arrived and she wasn't due for a feeding for another hour. "It's not an exact science," he said. I was annoyed, admittedly partly because he was male and what firsthand experience did he have, but also because I was tired of being told what to do when none of the advice seemed exactly right.
Now, after nursing two babies, I've realized that the best thing for me is to pay close attention to their cues, non-verbal and otherwise. In other words, I've became a better listener than I already thought I was. I began to better recognize their needs, and would sometimes nurse every five minutes for a half hour, while other times three hours would go by without any fussiness or signs of hunger. There are moments of frustration when going out to dinner and all your baby wants to do is nurse when you're just hoping for a peaceful meal with your shirt and bra in place, only to get home and she seems totally contented. Maybe it's that she's comforted by home and the noise in the restaurant made her want to be comforted by you, or maybe she really was just hungry. There was a lot of speculation in those early months. Babies are more of a mystery to me than I had imagined, and sometimes it seems that way even to the doctors.
With a six month old and another baby on the way with no family nearby, I wondered how other new mothers and parents handled this stage. I was craving community and support, something I didn't think I initially needed. I had spent the last two decades living on my own, working, and taking care of myself through many ups and down. I thought, "I can do this," which technically, I could, but what I was needing was someone to tell me not exactly what to do, but mainly to share their experiences, and through that, to understand that short of a real emergency, most everything would be fine. So I thought of starting this website as a way to connect with other new mothers to hear their stories, and to connect in one of the best ways we can keep ourselves and others sustained: through food.
Our third baby is due in early November, and should he or she take to nursing, I imagine I'll sit in the same spot looking out at the mountains and watching the changes to the leaves that I watched with our second daughter. Except this time, the last leaves of the season will be falling before winter settles in, followed by months of empty branches that at times will be covered in snow. And in the spring, I'll watch as the new leaves sprout again.
Ginger Cofield Lakhani, August 2018