The night Ben and I went home from the hospital, one of our friends was working a 24-hour shift. He helped us move all of our things to the car, which was no small feat. This included a newborn in a car seat, our large suitcase, a Moses basket and stand, a baby gym, and other items. It seemed that we had moved in during our 5-day hospital stay. Now we would be taking it all home by car with Alaya. I was glad we had someone to help us get everything in the vehicle, and I was worried about what we would do on the other end. But my primary concern at the time was that Alaya would awaken during the drive home and cry.
When we got picked up at 8:45pm (we had arranged for 9pm, hoping that the later time would cut down on traffic and our ride home), I was surprised to find that our driver was female. I don’t see many female drivers in China, or the US for that matter. She had a nice SUV that fit all of our things easily. She was so excited about the baby, going on about how she hadn’t seen such a small baby in a long time. Over and over she repeated this excitedly. I was secretly happy that our driver was female and that she seemed to like babies. If Alaya did cry on the journey home, I hoped that this would make her more understanding. She also thanked us for leaving a bit earlier so that she could get home sooner too.
Fortunately, Alaya slept the entire ride home. My new concern though was making sure to get all of our stuff to our place and feed Alaya before three hours had passed. As such, I hoped to be in the house by 11pm. Likely due to the drugs from the induction and epidural, Alaya slept a lot, and the recommendation was to wake her up every three hours at the latest to feed if she didn’t wake up herself. The longer it took to get her fed, the more irritable she was during the feeding process, making what was already a very difficult task for me even harder.
Because we had so many items, Ben decided to ask the driver to take us into our complex from the parking garage. One of the benefits of our complex was that cars were not allowed on the ground floor of the complex, where people walked their dogs and children played. Instead, cars had to drive directly into the underground parking garage. The downside of this though is that there’s not much walking access to our building that doesn’t involve steps, which makes carrying all of our items in by hand much more difficult. The only catch with taking the underground parking garage is that our building is quite difficult to find. We had done this once before in a taxi when we first moved in. It was hard then, but we eventually found our building. Honestly, I wouldn’t have taken that route again just because of our difficulty the first time, but I didn’t realize that this was what Ben was doing until too late.
Last time, we managed to luck up on our building. This time we didn’t. At this point, it’s around 10:30pm at night. It was getting close to three hours since we’d fed Alaya, who was thankfully asleep. I was irritated with the driver because I asked her to drive in the direction I thought was our building, and she said, “It’s not down there,” as if she knew. I couldn’t make her drive in that direction, and she turned around to look elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the building wasn’t elsewhere. After about 5 minutes of searching, the woman proclaimed that she had another person to pick up the next morning, and she needed to get home and go to bed. She went on that she wasn’t going to drive us around all night. So, Ben and I had to get out of the vehicle with all of our stuff and 3-day-old baby and walk around the parking garage in search of our building.
I cannot tell you the extent of my anger. The funny thing was that I had gotten my stuff and started walking away as Ben paid when Ben had to call me back because his phone had no signal. So, I had to pay the woman, who then wished us an ecstatic good night, as though she had just helped us take our things to the door instead of abandoning us with a newborn in the middle of a large underground parking lot. I ignored her and reminded myself why I never wanted to learn how to curse in Mandarin.
This level of selfishness I just do not understand. I cannot imagine leaving someone in a situation like that, when I have the means to just put my foot on the gas for a few more minutes to figure out where the building is. This seemed especially selfish after we had left the hospital earlier than planned because she asked us to. I couldn’t help but ask myself why I kept expecting kindness and compassion from strangers. Why did I expect it from middle-aged women who fussed over your baby and were likely mothers themselves? I’m not sure, but I needed to remove this stereotype from my head. After all, from my own teaching, I’d learned that even “positive” stereotypes are problematic.
As Ben and I walked around, pushing the stroller and carrying too many things in the August heat (despite it being nighttime), we ran into an elderly man on a bicycle who showed us the way to our building. I am grateful to that man, and whenever I see him around the complex, I wave and smile. If the baby is with me, I point to her to show him how much she has grown.
By the time we reached our apartment door, we were past the three hour mark, and Ben couldn’t find the keys.
My anger, irritation, annoyance, and everything was now bubbling over. I lashed out at him about his decision to take the underground parking garage and how it ended up causing us much more trouble than just walking in ourselves would have been. I then called our friend on the phone, as he has a spare set of our house keys, to tell him that we needed his help on our first night home with the baby. To me, this was immensely humiliating. We hadn’t even managed the basics of bringing her home, and we were now past the latest time we should be feeding her. However, as I wrapped up the call, Ben found the keys in the first place he had looked for them. I think he was just so stressed at the time, and he knew that his plan to take the underground parking had gone terribly wrong. So, he didn’t see the key when he first looked.
I was relieved he found it because we really needed to feed Alaya. By the time we sat on the couch, got her undressed, and ready to latch, it was almost midnight. She had last eaten around 8pm. I was so stressed and upset, and Ben was sweating profusely, in a way I had never seen before. He got in position to help me latch, and I stopped him. I apologized for lashing out at him, and he apologized for everything that happened upon reaching our complex. We both took a moment to come back to ourselves before trying to feed Alaya. I felt awful for striking at Ben in my anger. He had done nothing wrong. He had hoped to save us some trouble, but he didn’t anticipate the difficulty in finding our building the second time or the unkind way our driver left us to fend for ourselves with a newborn. These kinds of situations cannot be planned for. It was a rough start to our first night, but we would survive it.
As with all the nights in the week prior, we wouldn’t get much sleep that night. Each feeding was a challenge of trying to keep Alaya awake long enough to get a good latch and make sure she got enough milk before falling back asleep. At some point in those early days, we decided we would just breastfeed her on one breast at each feeding instead of switching in the middle after 15 or 20 minutes. During the switching process, sometimes Alaya would be too tired to latch again, and since she was no longer starving, she’d not put much effort into suckling. For a newborn, this is their first time having to work so hard to get food. They’re accustomed to a placenta giving them everything they need. Also, for a baby so small, suckling is a lot of work. It takes up so much energy; she is primed to fall back asleep the minute she gets a break.
That first day home, a friend wrote to check in on how we were doing. I wrote. “Everyone is alive. Ben has threatened divorce. Changed enough diapers to assume the baby is reasonably nourished. Started supplementing with VitD. And Ben’s parents are here, so I also had a nourishing couple of meals today.” I then had to correct that “Ben has not threatened divorce.” She responded, “Well…the first couple of weeks are really hard…so I wouldn’t be surprised either way…”
Those first few weeks were really hard for many reasons. I’ll discuss the primary reason in this post. The next post will focus on the secondary reason.
Breastfeeding.
Anyone who has breastfed before or tried it knows that it doesn’t come naturally. Mom and baby are both figuring out how to do it, even if Mom isn’t breastfeeding for the first time. As my long-time best friend and mother of four told me, “Believe me, I’m still learning with #4.” There’s so much to know about breastfeeding, and what people think are the primary issues are often wrong. For instance, it was common for me to hear, “Everything will be fine once your milk comes in.” What no one tells you is that this could cause problems. When my milk came in, I became painfully engorged. My body, unsure whether I’d had one baby or six, made enough milk to accommodate much more than my 5 ½ lb baby would need. My sleepy baby did not have the hunger nor strength to keep up with the amount of milk I was producing, which meant that my breasts began to feel like lead weighing down my body, especially if it had been more than an hour since her last feeding. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night because of the weight of my breasts pushing down on my chest. Having always been small chested, I was not accustomed to this weight and pressure. I didn’t like it. More importantly, it came with the concern of plugged ducts and mastitis.
Two days after we went home, we needed to take Alaya back to the hospital for a checkup. During this checkup, I was able to arrange another meeting with the lactation consultant who had worked with us before we were discharged from the hospital. I told her I was concerned that I had plugged ducts, and she massaged my hard, bullet-like breasts to help soften them and keep the milk flowing. She recommended I use a warm compress to help the milk flow right before I fed Alaya. After a feeding, I would then use a cold compress to help with the discomfort of the engorgement. Besides hot and cold compresses and oppressively hot showers in the August heat, I also had acupuncture done to help with the swelling. I would also hand-express some milk down the sink when my breasts felt tight enough to crack. The engorgement would go on for two concerning weeks, concerning because the internet would suggest engorgement only lasts 24 – 48 hours, and up to 5 days if more severe. For me, it felt never-ending. What little sleep I got between feeding Alaya and changing her diaper was disrupted whenever I would have a “let down” of milk, which would harden my breasts and often also cause leaking.
The other difficulty with breastfeeding was how often I had to do it. Some mothers can get away with feeding their babies once every three hours, while other mothers may have to do so every 90 minutes. This has to do with storage capacity (not to be confused with breast size). For reasons I’m unaware of, women will have different breastmilk storage capacities. This can change in the same woman from pregnancy to pregnancy. If you have a small storage capacity, you can’t hold as much milk before needing to remove that milk. It’s like some moms have breast-bottles that can hold 8 oz of milk, and other moms have breast-bottles that can only store 4 oz of milk. Both moms can feed their baby, but one mom just has to feed her baby more often. Besides differences in breast storage capacity, how much your baby feeds will depend on whether or not she’s going through a growth spurt or developmental leaps. During these times, babies will nurse a lot more often to account for all the growing and learning they are doing. This can lead to what is called cluster feeding.
I had never heard of cluster feeding until it started happening. It used to strike fear in my heart. It most often occurred in the evening, and it sometimes stressed me to the point of panic. I would be on the couch feeding the baby for hours at a time, with only a few minutes break in between. Sometimes I would just have to endure the sounds of her crying in order to make a quick bathroom break.
As if that weren’t enough, babies nurse often because breastfeeding is not just about food. Babies feed when they are hungry, thirsty, tired, scared, in need of an immunity boost, wanting comfort, and so much more. The way I would express it is that the breast became an external placenta. Alaya would cry for it whenever she had a need. Those first two weeks, as I also dealt with the baby blues, sleep deprivation, and the unfairness of how much nature expected of the mother in comparison to the father, I would oscillate between hope and despair. I wasn’t even sure yet if I loved my daughter. I would sometimes feel like, “I’ve got this!” Other times, I was confident that I or Alaya were going to get sick any minute now.
So, this is what breastfeeding was like those first few weeks. Let’s say it’s 8am. I would warmup my breast compress ring and put it on for 2 – 3 minutes. I would then sit on the couch, and Ben and I would help Alaya latch onto the breast for a drink. While she was drinking, we would tickle her ear and wipe her down to help keep her awake. Ben would also be actively massaging my breasts while Alaya fed to help the milk flow, and frankly offer me some relief from the engorgement. However, the kind of pressure that he needed to apply was in no way soothing. I would liken it to the pressure one would use when doing CPR. It was painful, and it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to cry throughout the process. When we had done all we could to keep her awake and feeding, then I would go express some milk from the other breast to keep it bearable and get the cold compress from the freezer and put it on. Each feeding lasted somewhere between 30 – 45 minutes because of all the prep and work after feeding and because Alaya at that point was not very efficient at drinking. So, the whole feeding session could last 45 minutes, sometimes longer, and I would then have to feed her again around 9:30am, 10:00 am the latest. At some point in the short break between 8:45am and 9:30am, if I didn’t need to change her diaper or look up the answer to some question I had, I was supposed to rest. My entire day, my entire being, started revolve around breastfeeding Alaya.
Other reasons I needed to breastfeed so often was to keep the milk moving and avoid plugged ducts. Another is that babies, especially those less than two weeks old, do not know time. In order to establish a good breastfeeding relationship and regulate one’s supply, it’s recommended to feed the baby “on demand.” There are cues that the baby’s hungry, of which crying is a late sign of hunger. I tried to feed Alaya before she was starving, mostly because most human beings prefer that and because it made the whole feeding process better. If she was too hungry, she wouldn’t latch well, and she’d be more frustrated with the feeding. Also, babies grow a lot those first few weeks, so Alaya needed the fuel. I was happy to see that just two days after being discharged, Alaya had pretty much regained her birth weight (2.66 kg at birth; 2.60 kg at the check-up), after losing 7% of it while still in the hospital. This was the best sign I could have that she was in fact getting enough. She would continue to grow well, moving from the 10 – 15 percentile at birth, to the 25 percentile in weight and height by her one-month checkup.
It was great news that she was getting enough milk, but with as much milk as I had, she could get enough even with a bad latch. In our case, it took almost eight weeks for Alaya’s latch to finally feel pain-free. This was why cluster feeding would strike fear into my heart. Feeding her for hours on end was not comfortable. I spent the first month working on getting a better latch by talking to lactation consultants, including the one I saw at the hospital after giving birth to Alaya. I also talked to a consultant online because I didn’t know of any in Kunshan, and it wasn’t easy to get out with a newborn. I also watched videos online when the VPN and internet were fast enough to make YouTube videos accessible. I practiced as much as I could to get a good latch. I tried different nursing positions and different latching techniques. Sometimes I’d get a latch that felt pretty close to pain-free, but the next time we would be back to discomfort. Or sometimes I could get a pain free latch on one breast but not the other. I also noticed a pattern that Alaya didn’t latch as well at nighttime.
One lactation consultant I saw in Shanghai at Ferguson Women’s Health assessed her for a tongue tie. This could make latching painful and even lead to speech problems later if she had one. She did have one, but it was mild enough that the consultant suggested she would be fine without surgery to fix it. I was happy to hear this. The other thing that I was happy to hear during that visit was that I was doing a good job. I felt like this consultation, 16 days after Alaya was born was a turning point. Someone who listened and understood assuaged my fears about plugged ducts, mastitis, and feeding her enough. They looked at what I had accomplished as a new mother, which was the one thing I most wanted to accomplish. I was exclusively breastfeeding Alaya, and as a new mother, it was the best thing I could do for her.
That morning, I also happened to get on a scale, which showed that I had returned to my pre-pregnancy weight.
So, in those first two weeks, I learned how to breastfeed, though it didn’t get truly enjoyable until Alaya was around two months old. I also managed to lose all my birth weight. No crazy diet. No exercise. It just happened that way. I want to tell women that the person who managed to lose all her baby weight in a week because of some diet or exercise regime may have lost it all in spite of that. There’s no way to prove that the diet and exercise regime was what caused the weight loss. So, save your money, and don’t stress about the weight. It took you 9 months to gain it all, I’d say give yourself at least that much time to lose it. And if you don’t, love your new body. It made a human being. That’s amazing.
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