The Breast of Times, the Worst of Times

Taking care of one baby is no problem, but I'll tell you what is a huge problem for me: breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding is one thing about motherhood that I imagined would be easy -- baby comes out, roots around, latches on, and soon you're whipping out your boob in line at Starbucks with your baby slung around your body.

Not for me. In my story, the babies come out, get whisked to the NICU and have a feeding tube stuck down their throats.

For three weeks, nurses painstakingly taught August and Fin to be able to eat tiny amounts of expressed breast milk from tiny bottles. While the babies were there, I did work on breastfeeding. I met with a lactation consultant and learned how to position the babies, how to squeeze milk into their mouths and watch their suck swallow reflex. I breastfed both babies a handful of times in the hospital.

Once I got home, though, it all fell apart. The exhaustion and the frequency of their meals beat me down so that somehow pumping and feeding milk to them in bottles seemed easier.

Then August and Finley's appetites quickly out-paced my breast milk production, so we introduced formula. Every day, I'd half-heartedly try to get one of them to breastfeed, but they would scream –- really scream –- and push me away like I was poisonous. It may sound silly, but I felt so totally hurt and rejected by my sons. The breastfeeding sessions usually ended with all of us in tears -– and a bottle in the baby's mouth.

I've been ashamed to admit it, but I'm a breastfeeding failure.

Then, I turned a corner, sort of. I met a nurse while Finley was at the hospital last week. She asked me why he wasn't breastfeeding. (Don't even get me started on how people look down on non-breastfeeding moms.) I told her about the NICU and the screaming babies and my feelings of rejection. She stared at me with steely look -– not pity or judgment –- and said, "It's not too late."

The nurse told me that if, for one day, I made August or Fin try the breast at every single feeding, if I pushed through our mutual frustration, by the next day the baby would know how to breastfeed. So, I spent one horribly exhausting day with August yelling, crying, throwing his head back, and pushing his little fists into me at every feeding –- and then he did it. He learned to breastfeed. I tried it with Finley, too, and got him to take partial feedings from me.

It's still not easy. I'm never going to be that laid back earth mama with two babies breastfeeding at once. Both boys still often take a bottle with a mixture of breast milk and formula. I still pump about a million times a day. And I can only get Finley to take one boob -- it's a work in progress -- but I finally, finally, finally can breastfeed my boys.